A pair of top Republican lawmakers blasted the FBI on Wednesday for ignoring congressional oversight requests based on blockbuster claims from a whistleblower.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and Kentucky Rep. James Comer ripped the agency’s noncompliance with requests over whistleblower allegations that President Joe Biden engaged in a bribery scheme during the Obama administration. The lawmakers sent a joint subpoena to the FBI last week demanding law enforcement officials turn over a document central to the whistleblower’s accusations.
“It’s clear from the FBI’s response that the unclassified record the Oversight Committee subpoenaed exists, but they are refusing to provide it to the Committee,” said Comer, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight. “We’ve asked the FBI to not only provide this record, but to also inform us what it did to investigate these allegations. The FBI has failed to do both.”
The FBI had until close of business Wednesday to comply with the congressional subpoena. Comer held a press conference hours earlier detailing new evidence of wide-ranging Biden family corruption. According to House Republicans who reviewed suspicious activity reports housed with the Department of the Treasury, the Bidens evidently divided transactions involving foreign nationals among a dozen different banks.
“These complicated and seemingly unnecessary financial transactions appear to be a concerted effort to conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies,” read a memo from Comer.
The FBI dismissed the Comer and Grassley deadline for related oversight compliance the same day.
“While the FBI has failed to produce the specific document by the subpoena deadline, their offer to provide an accommodation process in response to our legitimate request indicates the document is real,” Grassley said in a statement. “The question remains, what did the FBI do to investigate very serious allegations from an apparent trusted FBI source implicating then-Vice President Biden?”
Grassley called on the FBI to bring forward the relevant document during a floor speech last week.
“The allegations my office has received are very precise, very direct, and very consistent. Accordingly, they’re highly credible,” Grassley said on May 4. “Not once — let me emphasize that again — not once has the Justice Department or FBI substantively disputed the whistleblower allegations that I’ve made public.”
