Chuck Grassley Swears He's Not Trying To Frame Hunter Biden. He's Trying To Frame The FBI.
Chuck Grassley Swears He's Not Trying To Frame Hunter Biden. He's Trying To Frame The FBI.
They will never stop fornicating with that Ukraine chicken.
The good news is that we’ve finally managed to escape from 2016. For a good five years, it felt like the we’d be litigating that election on loop for all eternity.
The bad news is that now we’re stuck in 2020, with Republicans hell bent on relitigating their loss of the White House on the theory that they would have won if only the public knew the truth about Hunter Biden’s drug problem. Or his business dealings. Or his giant cock.
The issue for Republicans is that President Joe Biden is really, really boring. He likes ice cream, and bike rides, and sneakers, and his grandchildren, and … ZZZZZZZZ. So Republicans have been reduced to trying to get to him through his fuckup son, who scraped by as an addict by resorting to the world’s second oldest profession: trading on his family name.
How does this relate to Joe Biden, beyond the fact that he has the temerity to keep on loving his child?
It doesn’t. And you can be sure of that, because Republicans spent the past four years trying and failing to establish some kind of a connection between Hunter Biden’s desperate scrabbling for cash and Joe Biden’s bank accounts. So now the very same people who screamed that the Steele Dossier was criminal election interference have been reduced to hyping debunked misinformation as proof of their claims. And if they have to get FBI sources killed in the process, they do not give a shit.
Hence Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Jamie Comer, that hayseed nitwit heading the House Oversight Committee, releasing the lightly redacted FBI FD-1023 form documenting a June 26, 2020 conversation with the confidential informant who claimed to have spoken to Burisma head Mykola Zlochevsky about paying $10 million in bribes to Hunter and Joe Biden. Yeah, they’re recycling the same bullshit Rudy Giuliani was selling that got Trump impeached the first time. This is the same stupid claim that Vice President Biden got paid off to protect Burisma, which employed his son, by forcing Ukraine to fire public prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
None of this makes any more sense than it did in 2019. It was the international consensus that Shokin was wildly corrupt and had to go as a condition of Ukraine receiving further foreign aid. Shokin had let the investigation of Burisma go dormant, which is one of the reasons Ukrainians themselves demanded his firing. Efforts to oust him were underway long before Vice President Biden publicly demanded it. (Excellent Twitter thread on this here.)
Literally the only thing different is that this time Republicans are framing their disinformation campaign as part of their broader effort to undermine the FBI. They’re not hyping uncorroborated allegations. They’re conducting legitimate government oversight to determine why the FBI didn’t LOCK HER UP Hunter and Joe Biden based on these uncorroborated allegations. See the difference?
For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme. While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers. What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long? The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out.
How does publishing a report, which is not only uncorroborated but flatly contradicted by a cursory glance at the timeline, help determine whether the FBI conducted an appropriate investigation? Well, it doesn’t. But these jackasses have been busily touting a Chinese spy flogging an obviously fake text message as their smoking gun witness, so it’s basically par for the course at this point.
Here on Planet Earth, US Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump appointee in Pittsburgh tapped by Bill Barr to investigate Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian Bigfoot sightings, investigated this tip and determined it was bullshit. Just like David Weiss, the US Attorney in Delaware tapped to find something, anything to pin on Hunter Biden, rejected the Gal Luft allegations as wholly lacking in credibility. Which just goes to show you how deep the Deep State runs!
And if the FBI warns you that putting this out there could get its sources killed and deter anyone from making confidential disclosures to US law enforcement agencies by demonstrating that members of Congress will simply publish them if they think it’ll redound to their political advantage, well, doesn’t that just prove the point even more?
In summary and in conclusion, Chuck Grassley will save the FBI from itself, if he has to burn down the entire Justice Department to do it.
[Emptywheel / ABC]
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Banana republicans sure are acting like they expect to lose the next election.
If Chuck Grassley exists only to prove that Joe Biden is too old to be President for four more years, consider it “mission accomplished”.