It’s a mouth-watering story that has the ability to take down a president of the United States — if it’s true and if it can be proven.
The Burisma bribery story involving Joe Biden is not news. The allegation dates to a second-hand, single-source FBI report from 2020 that Trump’s attorney general had in his possession but didn’t find actionable.
The source for the allegation may have been Rudy Giuliani, but Barr says no, the allegation came from the FBI. This may be a matter of semantics, since Giuliani may have told the FBI what he learned while poking around in the dark, corrupt places of Ukraine, looking for dirt on Biden for Trump.
How the information came to the attention of the FBI is an entirely different matter than the bribery charge itself. But it goes to the credibility of the bombshell information that a Burisma executive has got Joe Biden on tape agreeing to a $5 million bribe to force the Ukrainian government to call off an investigation into Viktor Shokin, a state prosecutor. Biden later called out Shokin for not prosecuting corruption, which sort of cuts the legs out from under the entire reason for the “bribe.” There was no investigation of Burisma at the time, which leaves the Republicans investigating the matter grasping at straws.
The FBI spoke with a confidential source in June 2020, generating an internal report that Republicans in Congress were intent on getting. It came back heavily redacted, which led to more demands for clarity. Finally, Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. James Comer managed to get an unredacted copy of the report. The unredacted report added little to the body of knowledge about Burisma and any possible bribe given to Joe and Hunter Biden.
But then there’s that tantalizing nugget of information — that a Burisma executive has audio tapes of Joe Biden agreeing to a bribe. The report doesn’t claim that the recordings are of Biden accepting a bribe, but that doesn’t matter. Even if there wasn’t a specific reason for the bribe, if Biden took it, he’s toast.
So if he or Hunter took it, where’s the money?
There are other problems with the story, too. The House Oversight Committee has been breathlessly dissecting Hunter Biden’s finances in an effort to build out a story about the corruption of “the Biden family.” (There’s no evidence of payments to Joe Biden, hence the blurred allegation against the family broadly.) The committee has detailed how payments from Chinese actors, for example, appear to have been divvied up between people linked to Hunter Biden or his uncle.
Yet there is apparently no evidence of a $5 million payment to Hunter Biden. That Comer has spent the month fighting with the FBI about releasing an unredacted version of the interview form instead of, say, finding the $5 million in the voluminous financial documents his committee possesses is telling.
Democrats on the Oversight Committee issued a statement in which they made the point that a Republican attorney general refused to investigate the matter in 2020 and “informed the Committee, in no uncertain terms, that this assessment was closed in August 2020 after it failed to identify sufficient evidence to justify further investigation.”
What else would you expect? The FBI has shown over the last few years that it has a strange idea about what exactly it’s willing to investigate.
Related: Biden Took $5 Million to Have Ukrainian Prosecutor Fired; MTG Claims She Has the Receipts
Grassley is trying to get the focus back on the hard evidence — the possible tapes of Biden accepting a bribe. “According to the 1023 [form], the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden,” he said from the floor of the Senate. “According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
“What, if anything, has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?” Grassley added.
The FD-1023 is used by agents “to record unverified reporting from a confidential human source” when that confidential human source information is “highly sensitive.” The 1023 in question has been in the hands of the Justice Department since June 2020. If what Grassley is saying is true, didn’t anyone in the FBI or Justice Department get curious enough to wonder what might be on those audio recordings involving a then-presidential candidate and former vice president of the United States?
Delving into this story piqued my curiosity, but I can see why it hasn’t grown legs — yet. Much of the story is regurgitated from 2020 and unless and until those recordings are produced, it will be just another “right-wing conspiracy theory.”
