Byron York
Washington Examiner, July 11, 2023
“Of course, Republicans suspect the FBI did nothing to investigate and instead buried the allegation. And now they are focusing on who in the Justice Department might have stymied any investigation.”
WHEN INVESTIGATORS WON’T INVESTIGATE JOE BIDEN. One of the murkier aspects of congressional Republicans’ investigation of President Joe Biden’s financial history concerns an allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, accepted a $5 million bribe from the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The alleged scheme also involved Biden’s son Hunter. Burisma, of course, was the company that for a time paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year to do mostly nothing.
At issue is something called a form FD-1023, an FBI document that is said to “memorialize a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden,” in the words of Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of The House Oversight and Reform Committee. That FBI confidential human source, Comer continued, was no fly-by-night character. Instead, he was a “trusted” source who has worked with the FBI “for over 10 years” and was paid “over $200,000” for his work during that time. “This is one of our highest-paid, most trusted, most respected, most effective FBI informants in the whole bureau,” Comer told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on June 15.
In other words, it was a serious allegation from a serious source. Yet the FBI, Comer said, “never did one single thing to investigate this.” In a June 28 press release, Comer added, “The FBI has been sitting on allegations for years that Joe Biden solicited and received a bribe while he was Vice President of the United States. We have no confidence that the FBI did anything to verify the allegations contained within this record and may have intentionally withheld it during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax evasion.”
Here’s the way investigators look at this. Is the bribery allegation true? Who knows? It might be false. It might be a misunderstanding. It might be a political hit job. Or it might be true. In any event, the only way its truth or falsity can be established is by investigation. If you don’t investigate, you’ll never know.
That is why top lawmakers, including Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), are pressing the FBI to tell them what the bureau did to investigate the source’s story. That has been the one key question they have asked the FBI and Justice Department all along: Did you investigate this? And that is what the FBI and Justice Department have refused to answer. … [To read the full article, click here]