FBI accused of covering up Biden family corruption

 Miranda Devine:

Closed-door testimony by former Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week is a chilling case study of how credible corruption allegations against President Biden and his family were covered up by the FBI and DOJ — before and after the 2020 election.

Brady’s testimony fits a pattern revealed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last week, in which over 40 confidential human sources gave information to the FBI, over several years, about potential criminal activity involving the president, his brother James and son Hunter.

In a blistering letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday, Grassley alleged ongoing efforts “among certain Justice Department and FBI officials to improperly delay and stop full and complete investigative activity into the Biden family.”

Few people know that better than Brady.

On Jan. 3, 2020, Brady was tasked by then-AG Bill Barr to vet allegations about Biden corruption that had been pouring into the FBI and US Attorney’s Offices around the country, including from then-President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Since it was an election year, Barr thought it prudent to treat such information skeptically, so Brady’s job was to weed out the credible from the garbage before it reached the existing Hunter Biden investigation being run by the Delaware US attorney David Weiss since 2018.

But Brady’s team kept hitting obstruction from the FBI, and from prosecutors in Delaware.

For instance, Brady testified that the FBI required 17 higher-ups to sign off on requests, “mostly at the headquarters level” where there was always a “choke point” that caused delays.

The FBI didn’t even open the assessment until March 2020, and the process had to be renewed every 30 days, via this unprecedented 17-person signoff.

FBI agents “had to go pens down sometimes for two or three weeks at a time before they could re-engage and take additional steps because they were still waiting on, again, someone within the 17-chain signoff to approve,” Brady said.

He was forced to go to the deputy attorney general’s office repeatedly to clear the logjams — at least five or six times in nine months.

FBI HQ also refused Brady’s request for a copy of their Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, so he could pinpoint the deviations from procedure, and he was forced to scrounge a redacted copy from a public website.

In Delaware, Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf resisted all cooperation. Brady’s team’s requests for a briefing of what they had found were refused multiple times.

According to congressional testimony by IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley, who was in charge of the Delaware probe, Wolf declared in a meeting that she would not cooperate with Brady’s office because “no information from that office could be credible [because] it all came from Rudy Giuliani,” which was untrue.

Wolf tipped off Hunter’s attorneys to a search warrant and barred investigators from following evidence that might lead to Joe, according to Shapley.

Brady had to keep phoning David Weiss — then the US attorney in Delaware and now a special counsel — to get him to intervene, but Weiss doesn’t appear to have been much help.

One time Brady called Weiss and said in “colorful language … can you please talk to your team, this is important.” But all that happened was Brady’s team was told to submit questions in writing, which was unprecedented in Brady’s experience.

The FBI also frequently was uncooperative. When The Post broke the story of Hunter’s laptop, Brady said he was “surprised” that he had never been told that the FBI had the laptop in its possession.

It took six months for Brady’s requests for searches of the FBI database to yield fruit: a mention of Hunter’s Ukraine dealings by a trusted, long-term, highly paid FBI confidential human source (CHS) in a so-called FD-1023 report buried in the files of the Washington Field Office since 2017.

Brady met resistance when he asked the FBI to reinterview the CHS in early June.

Finally, on June 30, 2020, the source was reinterviewed and delivered the bombshell allegation that he/she had been told by Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, that he had paid then-VP Joe Biden and Hunter bribes of $5 million apiece to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.

Brady’s team made inquiries, within the limit of their remit, to confirm that the as-yet-uncorroborated allegations were “credible,” were not Russian disinformation, and thus deserved further investigation by Weiss’ team in Delaware, which had grand jury powers.

Eventually, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue had to order Weiss to accept Brady’s briefing on Oct. 23, 2020.

Weiss did not bother attending, but Brady’s team briefed Wolf on the FD-1023 bribery allegations and stressed that they had nothing to do with Giuliani.

Brady told Weiss directly that “the 1023 was from a credible CHS that had a history with the FBI, and that it was not derived from any of the information from Mr. Giuliani. … The FBI Baltimore Field Office should have been aware of that as well.”

But the FD-1023 was concealed from the very people who should have investigated it — the IRS and FBI criminal investigators working the Hunter probe.

“As a result of the [FD-1023] being concealed by prosecutors,” Shapley testified, “we were unable to follow alleged criminal activity as would normally be completed.”

Incredibly, when Grassley and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) forced the FBI to release the FD-1023 in July this year, ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) blatantly lied that Brady’s team had terminated its investigation into the document because it was not credible.

Brady rebutted Raskin’s claims as “not true.”

Grassley’s letter to Garland shines a light on the shenanigans at FBI HQ that were running parallel to Brady’s efforts in Pittsburgh, unbeknownst to him.

Soon after June 30, 2020, when FBI leadership was briefed on the bombshell Biden bribery allegation made in the new FD-1023 by their trusted CHS, “an assessment [was] created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten [that was used in August 2020 by FBI HQ’s] Foreign Influence Task Force team … to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and [cause] investigative activity to cease,” wrote Grassley.
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In my experience, it is rare to have such institutional opposition to gathering the facts in an investigation.  It was also pretty blatant in this case.  It looked like there was a massive cover-up of the Biden family corruption.  Those responsible for that cover-up should also be investigated.  The GOP house should get to the bottom of what looks like obstruction of justice.