On Thursday, we finally got to see the document the FBI had been withholding from Congress about an alleged $10 million Ukraine bribery scheme involving Hunter Biden and then-Vice President Joe Biden, whom Burisma paid to get rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the energy firm.
The document is damning. If there wasn’t enough evidence for the GOP-controlled House to open impeachment proceedings against Biden before, there certainly is now. Recall that former President Donald Trump was impeached by Democrats just for asking the Ukrainian President about the Biden bribery scheme on a phone call in 2019.
Now we know there was good reason for Trump to be asking about it. We also know there’s far more evidence Biden engaged in impeachable (and possibly criminal) offenses than there ever was against Trump. When Democrats first impeached Trump at the end of 2019, they claimed he had solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election by asking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky about the Biden bribery scheme. His questions now appear to be well-founded. They’re questions the FBI and Justice Department should have been asking back in 2017 when the informant first told the FBI what he knew.
What we’ve now learned from the four-page document — an unclassified FD-1023 form, which is used by the FBI to record credible reports and information from trusted confidential sources — is that Burisma allegedly paid $10 million in bribes to the Biden family so that Joe Biden, who at the time was vice president, would make the company’s legal problems in Ukraine disappear. Biden later bragged about how he pressured Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, by threatening to withhold aid to the country. At the time, Biden claimed Shokin was “corrupt.”
But if what the FBI informant says is even partially true, it’s Biden who is corrupt — and on a grand scale. According to the document, a top Burisma executive said the only reason the firm hired Hunter Biden (for a mind-boggling $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems,” and that even though Hunter “was stupid,” they needed him “so everything will be okay.” What’s more, the firm was apparently told by both Hunter and Joe Biden that it needed to hire Hunter for this “protection.”
Keep in mind this isn’t some third-hand reporting, or some obviously fake dossier cooked up by the RNC and passed off to credulous journalists to smear Biden. This is what a trusted FBI informant says he was told directly by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder and CEO of Burisma.
After Trump won the 2016 election, the FBI informant asked Zlochevsky on a phone call if he was happy about the outcome. He was not. Asked if he was worried about the bribes he’d paid to the Bidens, Zlochevsky said he was “pushed to pay” them, and that he had many text messages and recordings, including two with Joe Biden himself, that show he was coerced into making the bribery payments. And anyway, Zlochevsky added, because then-VP Biden had personally gotten Shokin fired, “nobody would find out about his financial dealings with the Bidens.”
All of this and more is detailed in the FD-1023 form, which the FBI hid from Congress and investigators for years, and which Democrats lied about as recently as June, falsely claiming that Trump’s own Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr had closed down the investigation into the Biden bribery scheme. (Barr refuted that claim directly, telling The Federalist the FBI informant’s allegation “was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”)
But instead of following up on this credible informant’s claims and seeing where the investigation led, the FBI and DOJ buried the document and later defied a congressional subpoena demanding its release. They also barred investigators from questioning Biden family members, tipped off the Biden family about the investigation, and then offered Hunter Biden a ridiculous plea deal for minor tax offenses designed to shield him from future prosecution.
All that obstruction might not be enough to stop the truth from getting out. We’re probably going to learn much more in the days and weeks to come about the alleged Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine. As Margot Cleveland wrote in these pages yesterday, IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified before lawmakers Wednesday that they hadn’t yet seen the FD-1023 document but that it “could further corroborate other information that we might be having an issue corroborating because it could be regarding a foreign official. So if we have information regarding that in a document or a witness, we can further corroborate later evidence.”
“This testimony suggests that the IRS’s investigation likely uncovered evidence the FD-1023 corroborated,” writes Cleveland. “With that form now public, both Ziegler and Shapley can study it and assess what documentary material, such as wire transfer reports, they uncovered that is now corroborated.”
The corporate media will no doubt treat this as a non-story, but that doesn’t mean the rest of America should ignore it. As my colleague Sean Davis noted yesterday on Twitter, “This is the biggest corruption scandal in American history, and it’s not even close.”
If this is the biggest corruption scandal in American history (and it looks like it is), then it deserves a full and exhaustive investigation. And since we know a corrupt and compromised FBI and DOJ can’t be trusted to conduct an investigation into a bribery scheme they actively tried to cover up, Republicans in Congress will have to do it themselves.
At no time since the 1868 impeachment of President Andrew Johnson has an impeachment been more warranted, and never has it been as necessary as it is now.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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