WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday released the now-infamous FBI form that contains a witness’s account of President Joe Biden allegedly partaking in a bribery scheme when he was vice president.
Grassley published in full the lightly redacted FD-1023 form, which several congressional Republicans have already seen but that the public did not have access to until Thursday.
The Iowa Republican accused the FBI in an accompanying statement of seeking to “obfuscate and redact” the form before the bureau ultimately cooperated with congressional Republicans to show it to them.
“The American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers,” said Grassley, who acquired the document via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers.
The FBI uses FD-1023 forms to record “raw, unverified” information from confidential human sources.
Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) revealed the existence of the form in question in May and subpoenaed the FBI for a copy of it. The FBI at first resisted cooperating with the committee, expressing concern about the “sensitive” nature of the document, despite it being unclassified.
Facing the prospect of Congress holding FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt, the FBI relented in June and allowed members to view a heavily redacted version of the form that Grassley said had blacked out, among a number of items, the claim that a foreign national who had allegedly bribed the Bidens was in possession of 17 audio recordings of phone calls with the Bidens.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate defended the redactions in a Senate hearing that month, saying they were in place to “protect the source.”
“We often redact documents to protect sources and methods,” Abbate said.
The form released Thursday confirmed the existence of the claim about audio recordings. It stated that the FBI’s confidential human source said Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, said he had “’17 recordings’ involving the Bidens; two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining 15 recordings only included Hunter Biden.”
The FBI’s source “reiterated that, per Zlochevsky, these recordings evidence Zlochevsky was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired,” the form stated.
The form also confirmed the existence of the FBI source’s broader allegation that Zlochevsky paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million so that then-vice president Joe Biden would use his authority to fire Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, with which the younger Biden held a lucrative board position…
