BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND
JULY 24, 2023
FBI agents told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office they had already corroborated multiple details in the FD-1023, a source told The Federalist.
When the Pittsburgh FBI office briefed the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office on evidence implicating Hunter and Joe Biden in a bribery scheme, the agents also told the Delaware team they had already corroborated several aspects of the confidential human source’s claims, an individual familiar with the briefing told The Federalist.
On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released the FD-1023 summary of a confidential human source’s reporting that the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes so the then-Vice President would “protect” Burisma “from all kinds of problems.” Those bribes were in addition to the more than $4 million in total paid to Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer for sitting on Burisma’s board of directors.
The Federalist has now learned that the Pittsburgh FBI office had corroborated several details contained in the FD-1023 as part of the intake process that former Attorney General William Barr established before the election under the leadership of the Western District of Pennsylvania’s then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady. Significantly, in briefing the Delaware U.S. attorney on the results of their office’s screening of evidence related to Ukraine, the Pittsburgh FBI agents told the Delaware office they had corroborated multiple facts included in the FD-1023, an individual with knowledge of the briefing told The Federalist.
Following the late June 2020 interview with the CHS, the Pittsburgh FBI office obtained travel records for the CHS, and those records confirmed the CHS had traveled to the locales detailed in the FD-1023 during the relevant time period. The trips included a late 2015 or early 2016 visit to Kiev, Ukraine; a trip a couple of months later to Vienna, Austria; and travel to London in 2019.
As The Federalist previously reported, during their briefing of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, the Pittsburgh FBI agents said the FD-1023 bore indicia of credibility and that it merited further investigation. The person familiar with that briefing now confirms the agents also informed the Delaware office that the Pittsburgh FBI had corroborated the CHS’s presence in the various cities at the times claimed.
The Federalist has also learned that the CHS’s handler corroborated the CHS’s claim that he had met with Oleksandr Ostapenko. According to the source with knowledge of the matter, the CHS’s handler told Pittsburgh’s FBI agents that the CHS told his handler he had an upcoming meeting with Ostapenko. The CHS’s contemporaneous claim of the planned rendezvous with Ostapenko tracked the timing of one of the visits the CHS claimed in the FD-1023 to have had with Ostapenko.
Significantly, the Pittsburgh office briefed the Delaware office on that piece of corroborating evidence that came from the CHS’s handler.
Open-source reporting of Burisma’s purchase of an interest in a North American oil and gas company likewise lined up with the discussions the CHS relayed to the FBI, as summarized in the FD-1023, the individual familiar with the briefing told The Federalist.
That the Pittsburgh FBI office not only provided the Delaware office with a summary of the damning FD-1023 and its conclusion that it bore indicia of credibility but also identified several pieces of corroborating evidence is huge because, to date, it appears the Delaware office did nothing to investigate the allegations contained in the FD-1023.
As Barr previously made clear, the role of the Pittsburgh office was limited to providing a “clearing-house function” for information related to Ukraine to weed out “any potential disinformation.” The purpose of the intake process, Barr stressed, was to “check[] out the source and credibility of evidence before assigning it to one of the ongoing investigations already pending in the Department,” such as the Delaware investigation into Hunter Biden.
As such, the Pittsburgh office lacked the authority to subpoena witnesses or records or to use grand jury proceedings to further corroborate the FD-1023. That responsibility fell with the Delaware office.
But not only did the Delaware office apparently ignore the allegations contained in the FD-1023, as well as the corroborating evidence already allegedly accumulated by the Pittsburgh FBI office, but U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s office allegedly secreted the very existence of the FD-1023 from the whistleblowers. Both IRS whistleblowers testified last week that they did not even learn of the existence of the FD-1023 until Barr publicly confirmed he had sent the information to Delaware for further investigation.
Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf also excluded the IRS agents working the Hunter Biden investigation from the meeting at which the Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the office on the FD-1023 and the corroborating evidence they had already uncovered. The IRS whistleblowers further testified that portions of Hunter Biden’s laptop were withheld from them and they were explicitly prohibited from taking any investigative steps connected to Joe Biden — or questioning anyone by using Joe Biden’s name, “Dad,” or “the Big Guy.”
Under these circumstances, even if the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office comes forward now to say it did investigate the FD-1023, its belated claim would be meaningless because the individuals with the knowledge and skill necessary to investigate a complex, international money laundering, bribery, and tax fraud scheme were cut out of the process and barred from interviewing the necessary witnesses.
The Delaware office remains mum, however, not even pretending to have investigated the FD-1023’s allegations. That failure is even more scandalous now that we know Pittsburgh had already corroborated several aspects of the CHS’s reporting and briefed Weiss’s office on the corroborating evidence.
Yet the Biden White House continues to falsely claim the FD-1023 charges “have been debunked for years.” On the contrary, the only thing debunked to date has been the lies of Biden’s Democrat apologists, such as Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Jamie Raskin, who doubled down on his claim that Barr had found the FD-1023 not credible and not meriting further investigation.
Americans now know not only that Raskin and his Democrat colleagues lied, but that President Joe Biden lied — both when he said he knew nothing of his son’s business ventures and in claiming now that the FD-1023 has been debunked.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist's senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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