WASHINGTON — Because the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former President Donald Trump, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced Monday that he had no choice but to publicize unconfirmed dirt about President Joe Biden.
Grassley then revealed during a speech from the Senate floor that a foreign national claimed in 2020 to have audio recordings of himself discussing a $5 million bribe with Biden and his son Hunter when Biden was vice president.
“It is clear that the Justice Department and FBI will use every resource to investigate candidate Trump, President Trump, and former President Trump,” Grassley said. “Based on the facts known to the Congress and the public, it is clear that the Justice Department and the FBI haven’t nearly had the same laser focus on the Biden family.”
The unverified Biden bribe allegation has emerged as a top Republican talking point in response to questions about the charges against Trump, whom the Justice Department has accused of refusing to hand over sensitive government documents after he left the White House and of obstructing an FBI investigation.
The indictment contains transcripts of audio recordings of the president directing employees to hide material sought by the FBI, as well as talking about refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
Republicans have sought to portray the Biden bribe allegation as equally damning, though they’ve provided no evidence to support it so far.
“Justice is not being carried out equally,” Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the No. 2 House Republican, said Tuesday in response to a question about Trump’s indictment. “Look at what happened on the Senate floor yesterday. This has got to be covered and talked about.”
The claim of audio recordings involving Biden is a new detail from an FBI form that Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) first publicized at the beginning of May. An FBI agent created the document in June 2020 to record a tip from a career informant reflecting a claim from a foreign national — apparently an executive with a Ukrainian energy firm — that he paid Joe Biden a bribe in exchange for an unspecified policy favor during Biden’s vice presidency.
Grassley’s remarks indicate that a trusted FBI source told an agent that someone else told him about the recordings. It’s not clear if the FBI has the recordings or has even confirmed their existence.
The allegation seems similar to the dirt Trump sought against Biden in 2019. Trump tried to condition military assistance for Ukraine on an announcement by Ukrainian officials that Biden was under investigation for pushing out a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating an energy company with Hunter Biden on its board. The allegation was not true, and Trump wound up getting impeached for hijacking U.S. foreign policy to suit his political needs.
In response to Comer’s demand that the FBI hand over the document, the Justice Department has said that it has a policy against handing over such investigative forms because doing so could compromise its confidential human sources and also its investigations. And officials have stressed that the form itself lacks context, such as information about whether the source’s claims had been corroborated.
Using bank records, Comer claims he has documented a web of shell companies that funneled money from foreign sources to Hunter Biden and other family members, but not to the president himself. Comer considers the bribe allegation to be the missing evidence that links his investigation to Joe Biden.
Though the FBI wouldn’t allow the lawmakers to have their own copy of the bureau’s confidential tip form, officials brought the document to the Capitol last week so that lawmakers could review it in person and also provided a briefing about the bureau’s assessment of the material.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, has said the FBI officials told him during the briefing that agents assessed the information and determined that the evidence fell short of FBI standards for opening an investigation.
“So now they’re going back and plucking out different details or tips that they think are contained in the underlying investigation,” Raskin told HuffPost. “But that’s why there was an investigative process and it ended right at the assessment period.”
Comer has insisted the case remains open because William Barr, the attorney general at the time, has said officials provided a briefing on the material to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware, where prosecutors are reportedly weighing tax-related charges against Hunter Biden.
But both Comer and Grassley have acknowledged that they don’t know if the bribery allegation is true. Grassley has said his priority is battling bias within the FBI rather than getting to the bottom of the bribe rumor.
And when he was asked Tuesday during a Newsmax interview about the recordings mentioned in the document, Comer said, “We don’t know if they’re legit or not.”