FBI Gives Laughable Statement After Sen. Grassley Releases FD-1023 Biden Bribery Form
As we’ve reported, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released the unclassified and mostly-unredacted FBI FD-1023 form that Congress subpoenaed back in May. We learned quite a bit of new information in the form, which provided approximate dates and places of meetings a Confidential Human Source (CHS) had with Burisma executives between 2015 and 2019, notes that the CHS had previously reported the most explosive portions of their interactions with corrupt Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky back in 2017, and shows that Zlochevsky claimed he didn’t want to pay the Bidens or have “dumber than my dog” Hunter Biden on the Burisma board.
Although the form has always been unclassified, once the FBI admitted that the form existed they’ve maintained that they could not release it because doing so could jeopardize the CHS’s safety and reveal sources and methods. Members of Congress who were briefed were shown a heavily-redacted version of the form, which Bonchie pointed out was really a shocking effort to protect the Bidens and obfuscate what was really happening instead of protecting the CHS or sources and methods.
The FBI has responded to the Sen. Grassley’s release of the form, giving a statement to Alex Salvi of Newsmax (emphasis mine):
Throughout the FBI’s engagements with Congress, we have been guided by our obligation to protect the physical safety of confidential human sources and the integrity of sensitive investigations. We have repeatedly explained to Congress … how critical it is to keep source information confidential … The FBI negotiated a resolution with Comer to provide the info requested in a manner that protects the safety of confidential sources and integrity of investigations. The safeguards the FBI placed on the production of this information are necessary to protect the safety of confidential sources and the integrity of sensitive investigations. Today’s release of the 1023—at a minimum—unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source.
So, the same FBI that leaks like a sieve when it comes to investigations into conservatives and journalists was so concerned about the integrity of this sensitive investigation? As far as we know, they weren’t doing any investigating. Sure, Wray and Weiss used boilerplate “I can’t comment on that form due to ongoing investigations” language to avoid being asked about it by Congress, but we have no evidence that any investigation ever took place. In fact, the information that we have tends to show that no serious investigation was occurring, given that the IRS criminal investigators – who had already determined that Hunter Biden had millions of dollars in unreported income from Burisma – weren’t ever told about this information, despite the fact that they likely had corroborating evidence.
Notably, the last part of the FBI’s statement simply states that the release of the 1023 “unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source.” Nothing about an ongoing investigation. However, from everything we already knew about the redacted 1023, it’s almost guaranteed that Mykola Zlochevsky, Burisma CFO Vadim Pojarskii, and Oleksandr Ostapenko had already figured out who the CHS was.
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