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An informant linked to allegations that President Joe Biden was involved in a quid-pro-quo bribery scheme has gone missing, according to House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.).
When asked by Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on May 14 about those accusations, Comer said, “Unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant—we’re hopeful that the informant is still there.”
Comer made the statement while referencing an FBI informant’s report, called an FD-1023, that the FBI allegedly has in its possession, according to a whistleblower who shared the report’s existence with Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) office.
“The whistleblower knows the informant,” Comer said. “The whistleblower is very credible, and all we’re asking the FBI with respect to the form 1023 is, ‘What did you do to investigate this allegation?’
“And they send us back a very patronizing letter basically saying, ‘Just trust us. Don’t worry about it.’”
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at an event at the White House in the Rose Garden in Washington on May 11, 2023. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)In a statement emailed to The Epoch Times, a GOP Oversight spokesperson clarified that the missing individual Comer was referring to was not the whistleblower who spoke with Congress, but “another whistleblower.”
The spokesperson did not confirm that the missing “informant” is the same individual connected to the 1023 report.
But Comer, during his “Sunday Futures” interview, told Bartiromo that reaching witnesses had been a common roadblock for the Oversight Committee given the serious nature of the allegations.
“Nine of the 10 people that we’ve identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens, they’re one of the three things, Maria: They’re either currently in court, they’re currently in jail, or they’re currently missing,” he said.
“So, it’s of the utmost importance that the FBI work with us to be able to try to identify what research they’ve done, what investigations they’ve done, because we have people that want to come forward, but honestly, Maria, they fear for their lives.”
Comer also charged that whistleblowers were being intimidated and discredited by Biden’s lawyers, the White House, and the media.
He added that he knew who specifically at the White House was engaging in that intimidation but was saving revealing that information for “a later time.”
In an effort to obtain the report detailing alleged Biden’s crimes, Comer subpoenaed the FBI on May 3 for all FD-1023s containing the word “Biden” that were created or modified in June 2020 and asked for an explanation of whether the allegations had been investigated.
The agency failed to comply.
Instead of providing the required documents, Christopher Dunham, acting assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs, sent Comer a letter on May 10 explaining the bureau’s “particularly strong interests in protecting the integrity and confidentiality of such law enforcement sensitive information.”
In the letter, Dunham emphasized the personal safety risks undertaken by confidential human sources and the FBI’s policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of ongoing investigations.
“The integrity of our work often requires us to preserve a separation between legislative investigations and law enforcement investigations, as ‘the Executive cannot effectively investigate if Congress is, in a sense, a partner in the investigation,’” Dunham wrote.
“It also would not be appropriate for Congress, in seeking to secure information necessary to legislate, to usurp the investigative functions of law enforcement.”
Dunham did note that the FBI would be moving forward with accommodating the committee’s request.
Comer, on May 14, said the FBI’s lack of cooperation was just part of a larger pattern of behavior by the bureau suggesting there had been a “cover-up for many years” of the Biden family’s “influence-peddling.”
“This is a very serious accusation,” he noted. “All the FBI has to do is say, ‘Yeah, we looked into it, and it wasn’t a credible informant.’ But they won’t answer our questions.”
The congressman added that the whistleblower who came forward to Congress about the informant’s report is “very credible” and knows who the informant is.
Prior to receiving Dunham’s letter on May 10, Comer announced new developments in the Oversight Committee’s Biden family probe.
Most startling among the committee’s findings was the revelation that the president’s family members had altogether received more than $10 million from foreign entities, including while he was serving as vice president.
The payments were not made directly but were funneled through 20 shell companies before being deposited into the bank accounts of at least nine members of the Biden family, including one of the president’s grandchildren.
While none of the transactions identified by the committee directly involved the president, Comer stressed that many of them appeared to coincide with his diplomatic work as vice president.
“We believe the president has been involved in this from the beginning, obviously,” the congressman said at a press conference.
“We’re going to continue to look … and we can tell you from the people that we’re meeting with that were involved with many of the schemes that we’re pretty confident that the president was very knowledgeable about what his family was doing,” he alleged.
Not everyone on the Oversight Committee has been on board with the investigation into the president and his family members.
As the committee’s Republican leadership unveiled their findings last week, the committee’s top Democrat criticized the probe as a partisan attack on Biden.
“Unable to implicate the president directly, committee Republicans have resorted to using cherry-picked bank records, misrepresentations about confidential and unverified bank reports known as SARs [Suspicious Activity Reports], and baseless conspiracy theories to attack the president’s family, including his grandchildren,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement.
“As Republicans use their oversight powers to advance this tiresome and aging smear campaign, they refuse to honor their public commitment to investigate former President Trump and former senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, their hundreds of LLCs, and the billions of dollars they collected directly from autocratic and corrupt foreign governments,” he added.
“If they’re in search of presidential corruption by foreign powers, the undisputed champion is their own guy.”
Meanwhile, in his May 14 interview, Comer had his own criticism for Raskin and the other Democrats on the committee, accusing them of obstructing the committee’s investigation.
“My biggest problem with the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee is they’re acting as a criminal defense attorney for the Biden family,” he charged.
“Not only are they not working with us, they’re obstructing every step of the way.
“So, the hurdles that our committee is having to overcome with the Democrats on the committee, with the Biden big-dollar criminal defense attorneys, with the power of the White House, with the Department of Justice, with the FBI—there are a lot of obstacles.”
As for next steps in the investigation, Comer said that if the FBI fails to provide the subpoenaed document, the committee will not hesitate to pursue legal recourse.
“We’re going to end up in court, and I think we have a very compelling case in court to be able to win.
“It’s just very frustrating, very disappointing that we’re going to have to spend taxpayer dollars in court to get information that we shouldn’t have any trouble in the world getting from our government.”
