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…as new whistleblower emerges
In a stunning development, the House Oversight Committee issued a subpoena Wednesday for an FBI file that a whistleblower said links President Biden to a “criminal scheme” involving “money for policy decisions” during his vice presidency.
The tip is a potential breakthrough for GOP investigators looking into Joe Biden’s role in his family’s business dealings in countries such as China, Mexico, Russia and Ukraine.
Republicans say the file pertains to potential wrongdoing by Joe Biden — rather than possible criminal activity by first son Hunter Biden or another relative that indirectly implicates the president.
The alleged corruption is believed to involve a country other than China, The New York Post reported.
The document subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee was “created or modified in June 2020″ — months before Biden won the presidency— and must be supplied at a meeting on May 10, the subpoena says.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said that the new whistleblower tip “raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.”
“The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself,” Comer said.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Comer and Senate Budget Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote, “We have received legally protected and highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures.”
“Based on those disclosures,” the Republicans wrote, “it has come to our attention that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”
The letter, sent alongside the subpoena, adds, “It has been alleged that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose. Based on the alleged specificity within the document, it would appear that the DOJ and the FBI have enough information to determine the truth and accuracy of the information contained within it. However, it remains unclear what steps, if any, were taken to investigate the matter.”
White House spokesman Ian Sams sought to downplay the news.
“For going on five years now, Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the President and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests,” Sams said.
“That’s because they prefer floating anonymous innuendo, amplified by the megaphone of their allies in rightwing media, to get attention and try to distract and deflect from their own unpopular ideas and lack of solutions to the issues the American people actually care about.”
Grassley said in a Wednesday afternoon appearance on Fox News that “this comes from credible and unclassified whistleblower disclosures, this possible criminal activity when Biden was vice president, and we want this information.”
“The Justice Department, the FBI needs to come clean to the American people [about] what they did with the document, because we know the document exists,” Grassley said.