Tipsheet

Is the Newly-Revealed FBI Document About an Alleged Biden Bribery Scheme Legitimate?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  July 21, 2023 10:55 AM

The short answer is: I don't know. What I do know is that this is the document over which Republicans have been wrangling with the FBI for months, including subpoenas and contempt threats. The Bureau played coy about its existence, then resisted handing it over, before eventually granting some redacted access to certain members of Congress. You'll recall that House Republicans have alleged a multi-million-dollar scheme involving payments into bank accounts associated with at least nine members of the Biden family, from various overseas entities, including companies tied to China's regime. Relatedly, there was a rumor about an allegation surrounding a $5 million bribery payment to Joe Biden himself, which is what the fuss over this particular 'FD-1023' document was all about. Now that Sen. Chuck Grassley has obtained and released it, it's clear why it's potentially explosive:


Here is how former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy and Jack Crowe summarize the FBI document, writing at National Review:

According to an unidentified informant businessman, the founder of Burisma recounted being pressured by then-Vice President Joe Biden to put Biden’s son Hunter on the Ukrainian energy company’s board, and for $10 million in bribes — $5 million each to Joe and Hunter Biden — in order to use Biden’s political influence to force the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma...The prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was fired by the Ukrainian government a few months after Vice President Biden, in late 2015, threatened then-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that the Obama administration would withhold $1 billion in congressionally approved U.S. funding unless Kyiv fired Shokin. Biden later bragged about the threat in a 2018 interview at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biden did in fact make that exact boast, in public, in 2018:


According to Margot Cleveland at The Federalist, Joe Biden had previously asserted that he brought said pressure -- including the threat to withhold massive foreign aid -- against the Ukrainian government if it didn't fire a 'corrupt' prosecutor for reasons that cut directly against Burisma's (and therefore Hunter's) interests. But was that true?

Among the [confidential FBI sources’s] conversations with Burisma’s owner Mykola Zlochevsky, one took place shortly after Joe Biden made his first public statement about Shokin “being corrupt.” At the time, according to the CHS, Shokin was investigating Burisma, and Zlochevsky told the CHS that “Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad.” Then, following Trump’s election in 2016, the CHS spoke again with Zlochevsky, who expressed dissatisfaction with Trump’s victory but noted that “Shokin had already been fired, and no investigation was currently going on…” Zlochevsky’s statement proves significant because Joe Biden had long claimed he pushed for Shokin’s firing because Shokin was not investigating Burisma — which is the exact opposite of the details summarized in the FD-1023.

McCarthy and Crowe go on:

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During the meeting, Burisma CFO Vadim Pojarskii listed the company’s board of directors, which included the former president and prime minister of Poland as well as Hunter Biden who, he said, was brought on “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems” ... It has previously been reported that Hunter Biden’s laptop stored emails from Pojarskii (sometimes spelled Pozharskyi) explicitly discussing the understanding that Hunter would “use your influence” to assist Burisma, including in arranging for U.S. government officials to help Zlochevsky’s company fend off Ukrainian government pressure. The CHS told the bureau that Zlochevsky claimed to have a total of 17 recordings implicating the Bidens in the bribery scheme, two of which involved Joe directly...While President Biden has repeatedly claimed to have no involvement in his son’s business dealings, he did meet with Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer in 2014, around the time they both joined the Burisma board, according to Obama White House visitor logs. The elder Biden also met with Pojarskii, the Burisma CFO, at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., in 2015, the New York Post reported.

Remember, Joe Biden repeatedly and categorically denied any knowledge of, or having conducted any conversations about, his son's overseas business dealings. But close Biden family associate Tony Bobulisnki has refuted that claim, on the record, multiple times, based on his own personal experience and personal knowledge on the matter. As the excerpt above also points out, Joe Biden met with his son's business partners in person on several occasions.  Biden's denials very much look like lies. Indeed, in yesterday's IRS whistleblower testimony, a House Democrat accidentally helped prove the point that the elder Biden did discuss foreign business with Hunter, something the now-president outright denied on multiple occasions:


More details and context from the NRO piece:

The CHS also recalled a 2019 phone call in which he mentioned that Zlochevsky might have difficulty explaining suspicious wire transfers that could prove illicit payments to the Bidens. Zlochevsky, he said, responded that he did not send funds directly to “the big guy” (a reference to Joe Biden), and that the payments to the Bidens had been routed through so many companies and bank accounts that it would take investigators ten years to trace the payments to Joe Biden.

This comes back to the accusations from House Oversight Republicans, who have described a complex series of payments to various Bidens through numerous shell companies and accounts. They have bank records, which at least partially corroborate what this anonymous confidential FBI source says Burisma officials told him they were doing (and perhaps foreign nationals in other countries did the same thing, given the Chinese, Romanian, etc. sources of other cash that flowed into Biden coffers).  Cleveland also wonders if the IRS whistleblowers hinted at additional corroboration in their sworn Congressional testimony this week.  Let's return to the question posed in the headline: Are these allegations legit?  We don't know who the FBI source is, and we don't know how many (if any) of the allegations he apparently leveled about the Biden family and Burisma executives are verifiable.   We also don't know if the 17 recordings really exist, a few of which supposedly involve Joe Biden directly. 

It does seem relevant that Hunter Biden reportedly had emails from the Burisma CFO on his laptop (which the FBI apparently knew was authentic, by the way, even as the Biden campaign and their 'intelligence community' colluders were spinning the 'Russian disinformation' story).  I'd also like to know if the FBI aggressively and thoroughly pursued the leads laid out in the form 1023 memo, which are extremely serious in nature, if confirmed.  If they did, and determined the claims were wholly without merit, we need to know that (and why they reached that conclusion).  If they explored it, but didn't follow-up or reach conclusions -- or if didn't really look into it much, or at all -- we need to know that.  And especially why.  I'm not prepared to reach any definitive judgments about the alleged bribery scheme yet, but I smell more smoke than I did previously, and we need some substantive answers.  The FBI hiding behind 'national security' excuses isn't going to cut it, especially given the agency's (and DOJ's) recent track record.  I'll leave you with my briefly summarized thoughts on the panel last night: