Grassley escalates accusations over alleged Biden bribery scheme despite 2020 probe finding no evidence

Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said Monday a document alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden references alleged audio recordings of conversations, including between a foreign national and Biden.

Grassley made the comments Monday on the Senate floor.

The document — an FD-1023 form used by the FBI to log unverified accounts from confidential human sources — was shared with some members of Congress last week after Republicans threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress if he did not turn over the form.

Grassley has called for the document to be made public and accused the FBI of political bias.

According to other members of Congress who viewed the document, it alleges that Mykola Zlochevsky, president of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, paid $5 million to both Hunter and Joe Biden to avoid a corruption investigation.

The claim was investigated by former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice in 2020 and found to be lacking evidence, according to a statement from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.

Members of the House Oversight Committee viewed a redacted form of the document June 8 after the committee’s chair, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., subpoenaed the FBI to provide the document. On Monday, Grassley said he had viewed an unredacted version of the document, which included the claims about the alleged recordings of conversations with President Biden and Hunter Biden.

Grassley said the FBI document says the foreign national, which others have identified as Zlochevsky, has 15 recordings of conversations with Hunter Biden and two recordings of conversations with then-Vice President Joe Biden.

“These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot,” Grassley said.

Grassley has said before he does not know whether the accusations in the document are true.

“We aren’t interested in whether the allegations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not,” Grassley said in an appearance on Fox News this month. “We’re responsible for making sure the FBI does its job, and that’s what we want to know.”

Grassley pushed the FBI to release the full, unredacted document to the public. An FBI official said in May that releasing the document could jeopardize other FBI investigations and the trust of confidential human sources.

“Getting a full and complete 1023 is critical for the American people to know and understand the true nature of the document and to hold the Justice Department and FBI accountable,” Grassley said Monday.

The allegations contained in the document were investigated by the Department of Justice under Trump's former Attorney General William Barr, Raskin said, as part of an investigation into allegations of bribery brought by Trump’s then-personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. The Justice Department found no supporting evidence of the claim and closed the investigation in August 2020, Raskin’s statement said.

Biden said June 8 the allegations were “a bunch of malarkey.”

“This is yet another fact-free stunt staged by Chairman Comer not to conduct legitimate oversight, but to spread thin innuendo to try to damage the president politically and get himself media attention," White House spokesperson Ian Sams said. "As Senator Grassley admitted, they aren’t ‘interested in whether or not the accusations are accurate,’ which rings even truer now that it’s been publicly reported that the Trump administration’s Justice Department looked into this claim three years ago and found nothing credible."