Republicans on the House Oversight Committee launched a fishing expedition Wednesday, demanding the FBI turn over information it may have received about Joe Biden in June 2020, when an unnamed whistleblower claims the future president was involved in a corruption scandal. The whistleblower apparently claimed there was a major FBI cover-up of this report, and Republicans view this as the latest evidence of the Biden Crime Family in action!
If you dip a toe into the conservative cesspool in the next few days, you’ll likely hear about FBI form FD-1023, the FBI forms requested by the conspiracists on the committee which they claim proves the criminal scheme involving changing US policy to meet a foreign government’s demands. Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene claim they have an FD-1023 that “links directly to Joe Biden.” (We’ll insert the sound clip of a studio audience going “Oooohhhhh” here.)
The problem is, even if Joe Biden is personally named on the FBI formed as linked to a foreign national, as Marge claims, the fact that such an accusation exists doesn’t mean it’s based in reality. Form FD-1023 is the FBI’s investigative equivalent of an intake form. It documents information and conversations agents have with HCI, human confidential informants. Could an informant have made such a claim? Sure. I can believe there some confidential informant in the vast cache of federal informants who told an FBI agent a conspiracy theory about the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in the months before an election. The confidential FBI informant could have been the former foreign minister of Ukraine, or it could have been a disgruntled informant from Bozeman, Montana who favored Trump. We don’t know, and neither does Marge. But an agent would be obligated to report it on an FD-1023, which would then be sent up the investigative chain… where it would die because nothing backed it up.
That’s just meat for the conspiracists: “A-HA! The FBI covered it up!” The accusation of a cover-up doesn’t mean there was an actual cover-up, of course. Marge, Comer and their posse of Keystone Kops will use the very accusation as justification for smearing Biden, without mentioning that the Trump Administration took the report… and cleared it. That, they’ll claim, shows the inherent corruption in the FBI, “The Deep State”… which again was being run by a Trump appointee and overseen by Bill freakin’ Barr at the time.
“They’ll investigate the Steele dossier, but not the Biden accusation,” you can already hear Jim Jordan whining (and the GOP Judiciary Committee Twitter account will retweet). But rest assured this will in all probability end up in the pile of failed GOP performance art, like Jordan’s hearing in New York City. When you have no policies to run on, you’ve got to reach for something. Anything.