House Republicans say they’re moving ahead with contempt proceedings against FBI Director Christopher Wray after he refused to simply hand over an internal document. The FBI allowed House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the committee, to view the document. It details an unverified bribery allegation against President Joe Biden, dating to when he was vice president.
“At the briefing, the FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody of the House Oversight Committee, and we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday,” Comer told reporters, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed him up. Comer’s identification of the document as unclassified is intentionally misleading—few law enforcement documents are classified, but that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to make public every unverified accusation law enforcement agencies receive. And make no mistake: Handing the document over to House Republicans would be the same thing as making it public. If they didn’t just release it openly, they’d be sure to leak it to right-wing media.
The document’s release could be dangerous, Raskin explained in a statement following his and Comer’s viewing. ”As the FBI explained at length during today’s briefing, and in previous conversations leading up to today’s accommodation, releasing this form publicly could place the Confidential Human Source in grave danger and undermine the integrity of FBI programs and investigations going forward,” he said. “Yet, rather than acknowledge these legitimate law enforcement concerns, Chairman Comer has declared his intent to hold Director Wray in contempt of Congress to further promote debunked Republican conspiracy theories.”
“The facts,” Raskin said, are these: “[T]he FD-1023 form, which we reviewed first-hand today, records what a Confidential Human Source told the FBI about conversations he had with individuals in Ukraine. The source, who has been described as highly credible by the FBI, told the FBI he could not provide any opinion on the underlying veracity of the information provided by these Ukrainian individuals.”
So, a credible source said he was told something by sources he couldn’t assert were truthful or credible. Not exactly something to go to the bank with, especially since as Raskin adds, the source and claims were brought to the FBI by Rudy Giuliani. That was back when Donald Trump had Giuliani scouring Ukraine for information, real or fake, to use against Biden in the 2020 election. Trump’s Justice Department under then-Attorney General William Barr had a whole operation led by U.S. Attorney Scott Brady to vet the allegations Giuliani kept bringing in, and, Raskin said, “In August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment, having found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Giuliani’s allegations.”
Comer, on the other hand, claimed that the document is being used in some kind of ongoing investigation, possibly in Delaware. This claim attempts to underline the allegation’s importance, but instead raises questions about why Comer would be interfering in an ongoing investigation—and why he is accusing the FBI of not having done its job with respect to the allegation if the book hasn’t been closed. He’s not the first House Republican to attempt to interfere in active law enforcement actions this year, of course. Comer was one of the three committee chairs trying to intimidate Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for daring to indict Trump.
Multiple publications have reports echoing Raskin’s claim that the Trump Justice Department concluded this allegation was baseless.
”The bribery allegation against Mr. Biden was never elevated to a preliminary investigation, according to people familiar with the inquiry, but Mr. Brady did forward some information from his work to other prosecutors,” The New York Times reports. “Richard P. Donoghue, then a top official in the Trump Justice Department, agreed with Mr. Brady that the matter did not need to be investigated further, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.”
Based on information from a senior law enforcement official, NBC News similarly reported that “The bribery allegation was not substantiated.”
But when it comes to trying to push false allegations against Biden and promote their war on the FBI, Republicans don’t require substantiation. As Sen. Chuck Grassley said last week, “We are not interested in whether the allegations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not.”
Most of their show trials and efforts to derail Biden’s presidency through attacks on his son have flopped, but instead of trying to govern, they’re doubling down. Since attacking Biden is really all they have figured out to do with their House majority, they’re going to move ahead with trying to hold an FBI director appointed by Trump in contempt of Congress for refusing to endanger a source in service of spreading what the Trump Justice Department concluded was a baseless allegation.
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