***Looks like 89-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley had his oatmeal yesterday, while concerned with the bowels of the FBI.
Republican shenanigans have no bottom, apparently, as Chuck Grassley thought the public should see for themselves raw FBI documents that Republicans have repeatedly used to bolster investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden accepting bribes. The claims in the document known as a FD-1023 are from a confidential source and remain unverified.
“The American people can now read this document for themselves,” Grassley said, while top Republicans have acknowledged they do not know if the claims are true and have provided no evidence to prove the Bidens accepted bribes.
From the FD-1023:
- Ukrainian CEO Mykola Zlochevsky of Burisma boasted that he had bribed the Bidens, according to a confidential human source.
- The informant claimed that Zlochevsky was coerced into providing $10 million in bribes and that there were audio recordings to prove it.
The Republicans apparently have none of those recordings.
The FBI has never been able to corroborate the claims of the informant.
“This FBI document released by Republicans records the unverified, secondhand, years-old allegations relayed by a confidential human source who stated he could not provide ‘further opinion as to the veracity’ of these allegations. Even Senator Johnson recognized these allegation may have been fabricated out of thin air,” Raskin said in a statement on Thursday.
“Releasing this document in isolation from explanatory context is another transparently desperate attempt by Committee Republicans to revive the aging and debunked Giuliani-framed conspiracy theories and to distract from their continuing failure to produce any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the President—even at the cost of endangering the safety of FBI sources,” Raskin said.
In June, the FBI warned the Oversight Committee about releasing the document publicly as they did on Thursday.
“The safeguards the FBI placed on the production of this information are necessary to protect the safety of confidential sources and the integrity of sensitive investigations,” the bureau said in a statement. “Today’s release of the 1023 [form] – at a minimum – unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source.”
