If House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s sleuthing turns out to be right, the FBI harbored a deep, dark secret through the first Trump impeachment, the Hunter Biden laptop saga and the 2020 election fury. The secret: that a validated and well-paid informant raised concerns all the way back in 2017 that Joe Biden was involved in a $5 million bribery scheme involving Ukraine.
Comer made the bombshell revelation Tuesday night in an interview with Just the News, just a day after reviewing an FBI FD-1023 form that memorialized the informant’s allegations, and two days before he plans to hold a vote in Congress to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt for failing to provide a copy to his committee as demanded by a subpoena.
He said the version of the informant report he was allowed to review by Wray had about 10% of information redacted and made clear the allegations were first reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigations back in 2017 as Donald Trump was beginning his term as president.
“Yes, it is Ukraine,” Comer told the Just the News, No Noise television show when asked what country the alleged bribery involved. “This form 1023 involves a business person from Ukraine, who allegedly sent a bribe, a substantial bribe to then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Asked whether the allegation involved the Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, whose Burisma Holdings energy firm first hired Hunter Biden into a lucrative board and consulting job in 2014 when father Joe Biden was vice president, Comer carefully demurred.
“I probably better punt on that question. The name was redacted,” the powerful House committee chairman answered.
But Comer said markings on the document he was shown – including footnotes – made clear the informant first provided the bribery allegations to the FBI in 2017, then again one more time before he raised them a third time in the June 2020 informant report
Comer’s disclosures came the same day that his colleague in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, revealed the FBI informant who provided the intelligence was deemed so credible and valuable that he was paid $200,000 by the bureau over several years. The comments by the two GOP lawmakers pushed back on Democrat claims that the allegations were old, disproven or tied to an effort by attorney Rudy Giuliani to investigate the Bidens’ Ukraine ties that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
“Today, I can say that based upon unclassified and legally protected whistleblower disclosures the FBI source in the 1023 has been paid at least $200,000 by the FBI since the source was opened and operational,” he also said. “High dollar payments obviously mean the FBI believes the source to be credible and reputable.”
Obey
Article URL : https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/wedfbi-harbored-biden-allegations-2017-through