It took the threat of contempt of Congress charges for FBI Director Christopher Wray to allow House Oversight Committee members to view the unclassified June 30, 2020 FD-1023 in which a confidential human informant alleged President Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from a foreign national in exchange for policy decisions. But not before redacting 10% of the text.
Frustrated by the fact that an unclassified document should be redacted at all, Sen. Chuck Grassley addressed his Senate colleagues on Monday afternoon. Scott reported on his extraordinary remarks here.
The Iowa Republican first reminded his colleagues that he has seen the unredacted version and then proceeded to enighten them with some of the missing material.
Grassley revealed that “the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings.”
He continued:
According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses fifteen audio recordings of phone calls between him and Hunter Biden. According to the 1023, the foreign national possesses two audio recordings of phone calls between him and then-Vice President Joe Biden. These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden.
If Grassley is correct, and I can’t imagine he would make these claims publicly if he were not, this is just breathtaking.
Last weekend, reports began to trickle out about the identity of the “foreign national.” Most notably, sources told the Washington Examiner that “an FBI record reveals” the Burisma executive who spoke to the CHS was Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the company’s owner. Zlochevsky provided Hunter Biden with a highly paid seat on Burisma’s board of directors in April 2014 while his father was serving as President Barack Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, RedState reported that, according to a “national security source” who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Zlochevsky “is believed to be an asset of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) by the United States intelligence community.”
The source told RedState that the intelligence community has “a high degree of confidence in their assessment of Zlochevsky as SVR.” Moreover, the source said this “is not a new assessment” and “the intelligence community under Obama knew this, and Obama was briefed on it.”
This all makes perfect sense. In March 2016, Burisma and Zlochevsky were under investigation by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. In a clip we’ve probably all seen at least a hundred times by now, Biden boasted at a January 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event, that in the spring of 2016, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine unless then-President Petro Poroshenko fired Shokin in the next six hours.
“I said, ‘you’re not getting the billion’ … I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a b****, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
There was no evidence that Shokin was corrupt. There were, however, plenty of reasons why Burisma and Zlochevsky would want him fired.
The Examiner also reported that Zlochevsky referred to Joe Biden in his conversation with the informant by a familiar nickname: “the big guy.”
Assuming these claims are true, it remains to be seen if Zlochevsky would be willing to turn the recordings over to the Republicans in Congress.
But there are many ways to skin a cat. HOC Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has already pieced together the money trails from Chinese and Romanian nationals to nine members of the Biden family, including a grandchild. As Comer explained in a formal press conference last month, the funds were transferred via a network of up to 20 shell corporations set up by Hunter Biden and his associates.
Last Thursday, Fox News published startling new details about the FD-1023 they’d learned from multiple sources who had viewed the document. No one was surprised to learn the money was not paid directly to Joe Biden. Money is rarely paid directly to the individual whose influence is being leveraged in pay-to-play schemes.
According to Fox, the Burisma executive (now believed to be Zlochevsky) told the CHS he paid the Bidens “‘through so many different bank accounts’ that investigators would not be able to ‘unravel this for at least 10 years.’”
Comer has said that, so far, his committee has only investigated the money flows from one bank. He indicated they have yet to examine the records from ten or eleven more banks. As I see it, it’s only a matter of time before Comer’s team pieces together the payments originating from Ukrainian banks.
Stay tuned.
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