A top Senate Republican who has been investigating issues related to the foreign business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, is pressing FBI Director Christopher Wray for details related to emails purportedly from the younger Biden’s laptop and whether the bureau is investigating the saga after the FBI has declined to provide answers.
Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Wray on Saturday, noting that a “whistleblower” had reached out to his committee on Sept. 24, the day after the release of a report by Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s joint report titled Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption, and had “informed my staff that he had possession of a laptop left in his business by Hunter Biden.”
The New York Post released a number of stories this week based on the emails, with Twitter spending two days blocking the stories from being shared before relenting.
The alleged whistleblower, revealed to be computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, “also informed us that he provided its contents to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in response to a December 9, 2019 grand jury subpoena.” The Wisconsin Republican said the FBI had an obligation to provide basic answers to the Senate about the emails related to the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings (especially amid unverified Democratic claims that the story is a Russian disinformation operation) but said the FBI had failed to provide any details.
“As the first step in our due diligence, committee staff contacted FBI officials and asked for confirmation of certain facts in an attempt to validate the whistleblower’s claims and assertions. Unfortunately, several days later, the FBI responded that it would not confirm or deny any information identified by the committee even though several of our questions were not related to the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation,” Johnson told Wray on Saturday.
He continued: “I have a responsibility to validate and verify the contents of any information produced to my committee. The committee must know if it receives information that could be fraudulent or not accurate. As my staff explained to FBI officials, this information is crucial for several reasons. For example, if any information offered to the committee was linked to a foreign adversary’s attempt to interfere in the election, I would expect the FBI to ensure the committee is protected and receives a defensive briefing. Similarly, knowingly providing false information to Congress is a crime, and I would expect the FBI to have informed me if, after having been given notice of what we received, this may have occurred. That is precisely why my staff reached out to the FBI. For these reasons, the committee must know whether the FBI has assessed the validity of materials the whistleblower has provided, and what, if any, actions the FBI has taken since obtaining this information.”…
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