Comer To Speak With FBI Director Regarding Alleged Biden ‘Bribery Scheme’ as He Focuses on a $5 Million Payment

Comer is threatening to hold FBI Director Wray in contempt of Congress unless he produces a document purported to lay out this bribery plot.

AP/Alex Brandon
Representative James Comer during a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, April 19, 2023. AP/Alex Brandon

The chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, Congressman James Comer, is set to finally speak on Wednesday with the FBI director, Christopher Wray, regarding a document Mr. Comer is demanding Mr. Wray release that’s said to detail alleged corruption by President Biden when he was serving as vice president.

Mr. Comer has been threatening to hold Mr. Wray in contempt of Congress if he won’t cough up the document, which the chairman claims details a $5 million bribery scheme involving Mr. Biden. This scheme could involve the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Mr. Biden’s troubled son Hunter while his father occupied the Naval Observatory.

Mr. Comer and his colleagues have launched an extensive investigation into Hunter Biden’s business practices, which stretched between Eastern Europe and Communist China. Recently, the committee released a memorandum showing millions of dollars being paid to the Biden family. 

The new disclosure details an alleged $5 million payment that a whistleblower says went to the future president in 2020. The whistleblower came forward on June 30 that year in a letter sent to Senator Grassley, who shortly thereafter launched his own investigation into the first son and his business practices. 

The alleged bribe could be part of the younger Mr. Biden’s involvement with Burisma, which paid him to serve on its board for five years, despite having no experience in the energy sector. Just 17 days before that disclosure was made to Mr. Grassley, Ukrainian officials held a press conference at Kyiv to report that someone attempted to pay $5 million in a bribe to end an investigation into the company’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky. 

Speaking with Fox News on Thursday, Mr. Comer said that the whistleblower report detailing the alleged bribe is part of a pattern with the president’s family. “The reason that I think it’s very credible is this claim was made years before anyone knew about these different shell companies and knew exactly what the Biden family did in counties like Romania and China to get money,” he said. 

Mr. Comer originally requested that the FBI turn over the whistleblower report on May 3. The subpoena asked the FBI to release an unclassified version of the report that “allegedly details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions.”

“The information provided by a whistleblower raises concerns that then-Vice President Biden allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national,” Mr. Comer wrote in a statement at the time. “The American people need to know if President Biden sold out the United States of America to make money for himself.”

When the FBI failed to turn over the information by the deadline — May 10 — Mr. Comer sought a meeting with the agency’s director. Mr. Wray would not meet with him, though, and briefings given to the oversight committee staff have left Mr. Comer wanting. 

It was announced Friday that Mr. Comer would have a phone call with the FBI director on Wednesday to discuss the unclassified whistleblower report.

“If FBI Director Wray fails to produce the requested record by May 30, I will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” Mr. Comer wrote in a statement on Wednesday before the phone call had been scheduled. 

“The FBI’s refusal to produce this single document is obstructionist,” Mr. Comer wrote to Mr. Wray on Wednesday before his threat to hold him in contempt. “Public corruption, influence peddling, federal ethics/financial disclosure regulations, and national security matters are directly within the purview of the Committee’s oversight authorities.”

Should Mr. Wray be held in contempt of Congress, it is likely that nothing will come of it. Following such resolutions, the Department of Justice is authorized to pursue criminal charges against those individuals. President Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has been convicted of defying a subpoena, for which he was held in contempt. 

Mr. Grassley has previously investigated the nature of Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals, which allegedly involved the president’s younger brother, James. In October 2022, Mr. Grassley’s Senate office sought information related to the Biden family’s involvement with business entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party. “The Justice Department’s and FBI’s continued silence on these matters is deafening and further erodes their credibility,” Mr. Grassley wrote at the time. 

“Simply put, enough is enough — the Justice Department and FBI must come clean to Congress and the American people with respect to the steps they have taken, or failed to take, relating to the Hunter Biden investigation,” he added.

Before that, Mr. Grassley had been conducting his own investigations into Hunter Biden while serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, though it was not an official committee investigation. Before the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Grassley’s office sent a number of financial records to the United States attorney for the district of Delaware, David Weiss, who is still looking into the younger Mr. Biden’s business and tax records. 

While congressional Republicans have long focused on Hunter Biden as the nexus of possible payment schemes to the family, the whistleblower report being sought by Messrs. Comer and Grassley could be the first instance of a whistleblower directly tying the sitting president to foreign entities.


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