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WHAT DOES THE FBI HAVE ON HUNTER AND JOE BIDEN?
June 13 2023, 4:53 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/13/hunter-biden-fbi/
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., announced that a document in possession of the FBI that relates to Hunter and Joe Biden “has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation.” In the hands of conservative media and some leading Republicans, that double negative quickly transformed into affirmative proof of a criminal bribery scheme involving the Ukrainian natural gas company that had hired Hunter while his father was vice president
Yet if the FBI is telling Congress that it hasn’t disproved the allegation, it does raise serious questions: What exactly are the Bidens accused of doing? What is this document? And what has the FBI done to test the veracity of that evidence?
The charge is straightforward: If all the claims in the document are to be believed, a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, funneled $5 million to then-Vice President Joe Biden so that he would pressure Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma for corruption. Joe Biden did in fact successfully push the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor in March 2016, though as his defenders point out, getting the prosecutor fired was official U.S. policy.
The evidence in question is a so-called FD-1023, which the FBI produces to memorialize a tip or some other information provided to the agency by a confidential human source, or CHS. More or less anybody who walks into an FBI field office and provides information would have their claims documented in an FD-1023, which does not assess the credibility of the claim or otherwise couple it with analysis of existing information. In May, an FBI agent came forward to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, alleging the existence of a damning FD-1023 involving the Bidens. Grassley made the claim public, but the FBI was initially reluctant to confirm the existence of the document but relented.
June 13 2023, 4:53 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/13/hunter-biden-fbi/
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., announced that a document in possession of the FBI that relates to Hunter and Joe Biden “has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation.” In the hands of conservative media and some leading Republicans, that double negative quickly transformed into affirmative proof of a criminal bribery scheme involving the Ukrainian natural gas company that had hired Hunter while his father was vice president
Yet if the FBI is telling Congress that it hasn’t disproved the allegation, it does raise serious questions: What exactly are the Bidens accused of doing? What is this document? And what has the FBI done to test the veracity of that evidence?
The charge is straightforward: If all the claims in the document are to be believed, a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, funneled $5 million to then-Vice President Joe Biden so that he would pressure Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma for corruption. Joe Biden did in fact successfully push the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor in March 2016, though as his defenders point out, getting the prosecutor fired was official U.S. policy.
The evidence in question is a so-called FD-1023, which the FBI produces to memorialize a tip or some other information provided to the agency by a confidential human source, or CHS. More or less anybody who walks into an FBI field office and provides information would have their claims documented in an FD-1023, which does not assess the credibility of the claim or otherwise couple it with analysis of existing information. In May, an FBI agent came forward to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, alleging the existence of a damning FD-1023 involving the Bidens. Grassley made the claim public, but the FBI was initially reluctant to confirm the existence of the document but relented.
