WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Grassley argued Tuesday his decision last year to make public bribery allegations leveled against President Biden and his son Hunter by a confidential FBI source led to the man’s February indictment on charges of lying to his handler.
“Except for my listening to the Department of Justice and FBI whistleblowers, that ‘highly credible’ liar would still be on the FBI payroll, continuing to lie to the FBI, and maybe continuing to get people convicted that shouldn’t be convicted,” the 90-year-old Grassley (R-Iowa) told a symposium on the “weaponization of media, lawfare, and the Hunter Biden investigation” at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the nation’s capital.
The informant, Alexander Smirnov, was charged by special counsel David Weiss Feb. 15 in Los Angeles with one count of making a false statement to a government official and one count of creating a false and fictitious record.
Grassley, who did not mention Smirnov by name, noted that the “highly credible” source had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the FBI since 2010, his information had been “used in criminal investigations and prosecutions” and he had been “given authority to even commit illegal acts” in some cases.
“So credible was this source, the FBI used the credibility as a basis to withhold the [FD-]1023 document from Congress,” said the senator, referring to the informant report in which Smirnov alleged the owner of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings told him he’d paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million apiece to stop an investigation into his company.
Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have since “obtained the names of these FBI agents involved in the 1023 document” and “we want to hear from them and their side of the story.”
The senator said he “suspected political bias in what the FBI was up to” when they evaded his requests for further details about the file — leading him in July 2023 to “make the document public to force an explanation” about whether any of the claims in it had been investigated.
FBI agents interviewed Smirnov in September and “the last time he gave the FBI information was December 2023,“ Grassley noted, before charging him over his “fabrications” and outing him in the indictment brought by Weiss — who has also charged Hunter Biden with tax fraud and gun crimes.
“After 13 years on the FBI’s payroll, the Biden administration considered him a liar and then indicted him,” Grassley said. “The FBI exposed their own source by name to the world, after telling Congress that he’s too credible.
“I’ve never made any accusations in this investigation of President Biden being guilty of anything,” the Iowan added, “but I am in this to make sure that the FBI does its job of law enforcement.”
The White House and congressional Democrats seized on the indictment of Smirnov to call for the end of House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into the president, wrongly referring to him as the GOP’s “star witness.”
“You know, all the Democrats have is Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. Our investigation has actually proven that the Bidens took $3.5 million from a Russian oligarch for no known reason,” House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said on “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday morning.
“We never knew who the FBI informant was. We had whistleblowers bring forward a 1023 that alleged the Bidens were involved in a bribery scheme,” he added. “It was one part that we investigated. But the Democrats and the intelligence community are colluding with the media to try to say that that was a key part of the investigation, and therefore, the investigation needs to end.”
The House Oversight, Ways and Means and Judiciary committees have also produced bank records and witness testimonies from ex-business partners corroborating that accounts linked to Hunter and first brother James Biden received millions from foreign entities in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and China.
Patrick Ho, one of their benefactors and an executive at a Chinese energy conglomerate that netted the pair more than $5 million, was convicted in 2019 on federal charges of bribery and money laundering.
Ho was released the following year and returned to Hong Kong, but the first son had previously referred to him as the “spy chief of China,” according to a voicemail obtained from his abandoned laptop, and House Republicans have since requested documents related to his case from the DOJ.
“The Bidens took nearly $30 million from our enemies around the world,” Comer told Fox News Tuesday, adding that the president has repeatedly lied about interacting with Hunter’s associates. “They can’t say what they did to receive the money.”
