Ok, so the story is that Chuck Grassley claims that a foreign national connected to Burisma has 17 recordings of Joe and Hunter Biden involved in a $5 Million (each) Bribery scandal. This is connected to the mysterious FD10-23 form that we haven’t seen yet and the mysterious whistleblower who disappeared and we haven’t seen yet who apparently overheard the Burisma guy making this claim.
In Fux Snuz World this is “Serious Business.”
Then again, it could largely be bullshit.
CNN and MSNBC are not taking any of this seriously at all. But I think — weak though the arguments are — it should be looked at, if only to debunk the shit out of it.
One of the problems seems to be that the “Burisma” source is actually someone loyal to Putin. In fact, it could be Andriy Derkach who fed the original allegations about Biden getting corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired were previously made.
The New York Times reported that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the 2020 election, including by funneling misleading information through Rudy Giuliani. At the time, Giuliani was President Trump's personal attorney. One of the Ukrainian officials under investigation is Andrii Derkach, who was described as an active Russian agent by officials in both the Trump and Biden administrations. Derkach and his contacts with Giuliani are the subject of a new article by my guest Simon Shuster, a Time magazine investigative correspondent who worked out of Moscow for many years and has reported extensively on Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and connections between those oligarchs and Trump allies.
So, if this guy is the source who claims to have “17 tapes” then everything is up in the air.
All they have at this point is the FD10-23 form. Kinda. They don’t have the Whistleblower, they don’t have the original source, they don’t have the recordings and they don’t have any bank records that confirm the payment of the bribe even happened.
Neither Chuck Grassley nor James Comey can confirm that the information is legitimate. The FBI had a chance to previously examine this claim, and they dropped the case like a hot potato. This was the BILL BARR DOJ, this happened during the time of Trump’s first Impeachment.
If there was a viable defense against Trump’s Impeachment that could have been made — arguing that Trump wanted Biden investigated because there were truly credible allegations against him would have been — pretty useful.
If this had come forward then and the FBI was able to confirm things, Trump probably wouldn’t have been Impeached the first time at all.
But he was.
Please remember that Hillary/Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussman went the FBI with an allegation about a Russian server strangely pinging a Trump server and what he got for that was prosecuted by John Durham for lying to the FBI. He was ultimately acquitted because the allegation was true even if basically weird, but you get my point.
Then you had EmptyG admitting that she copied the information down from the FD10-23 from inside the SCIF.
Marge claims this information was “unclassified” but the problem is that the FBI holds information secret — particularly if it comes from a Grand Jury — even though it may not be technically “CONFIDENTIAL” or “SECRET” on the national security scale.
If this was Grand Jury information — what Marge did was a crime. If there was a Grand Jury then the FBI did investigate the claim, and if they declined to issue an indictment, the information isn’t credible. Part of the reason Grand Jury information is held in secret is in order to prevent unfounded allegations about someone from leaking out — in case they happen to be innocent.
So never mind that possibility, eh? The GOP has bigger fish to fry than being worried about smearing an innocent man, AMIRIGHT?
All they need is a little more time.
Any minute now - we're all going to see. Any minute now - Biden will finally be exposed. Just like in 2019 when Trump was trying to strong-arm Zelensky into announcing an investigation of Biden, and he fired the Ukraining Ambassador because she thought the allegations against Biden were bogus, and he was telling Bill Barr to do an investigation of Biden.
This is not a new song. It's been sung before, so pardon me if I have some skepticism. But who knows, maybe there's a kernel of something there. We'll just have to wait - and wait -- and wait.
Never mind the pictures of the government documents in boxes in the Bathroom and on the Stage at Mar-A-Lago. Never mind the audio recordings of Trump's own voice claiming he doesn't have the power to declassify a document anymore. Never mind the notes from his lawyer showing he tried to hide the documents and even threatened to destroy them. Never mind all the evidence against Trump we already have in hand -- the real scandal is JOE BIDEN did something with somebody somewhere.
Update: We have a report from HuffPo that Ron Johnson has admitted that the audio tapes may not even exist.
WASHINGTON — Several Republicans said this week that they don’t know if there really are tapes of Joe Biden talking about taking a bribe.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed Monday that a tip the FBI received in 2020 said a foreign national who allegedly paid Biden $5 million has recordings of himself talking to Biden when he was vice president.
Speaking about the recordings on Newsmax Tuesday, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said lawmakers “don’t know if they’re legit or not, but we know that the foreign national claims he has them.”
Comer pressured the FBI into showing his committee a redacted copy of the form during a private briefing last week. He said the June 2020 document, an FBI worksheet for recording tips from confidential human sources, indicates someone claimed to have paid Biden and his son Hunter $5 million in bribes several years prior.
The FBI has resisted handing over a copy of the form for public consumption, maintaining that such documents contain uncorroborated information and that releasing them can endanger sources.
The allegation that Biden was caught on tape has seemingly forced Republicans to remind an eager conservative media that the allegations might be untrue.
“We don’t know for sure if these tapes exist,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on “The Chris Salcedo Show” Wednesday when asked if Republicans would consider impeaching the president.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) suggested on a program called “The Conservative Circus” that not only might the tapes not exist, but also that the foreign national who spoke to the FBI informant might lack credibility. (Some Republicans on the Oversight Committee have said the source is former Burisma executive Mykola Zlochevksy, a fugitive Ukrainian oligarch.)
“We don’t know really if the tapes exist, we just don’t know that, whether this was just a bluff on the part of, whoever the executive was, I think it was Mykola Zlochevsky, the CEO of the... the corrupt oligarch,” Johnson said.
Hmph. Do tell.