The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force used a mock assessment opened by FBI headquarters to collect confidential human source (CHS) reports across the country related to the Biden family and then falsely grade the intelligence as “foreign disinformation,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R. – Iowa, revealed Wednesday.
Wednesday’s explosive news suggests that the DOJ and FBI’s Biden family protection program included many more players than previously known. But it is the involvement of the Foreign Influence Task Force that demands an immediate response from the House, namely the launch of an impeachment inquiry into FBI Director Christopher Wray, under whose watch this group of work abused his power and interfered in a presidential election.
On Wednesday afternoon, Grassley released a seven-page letter that, while addressed to Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, spoke to the American public, detailing evidence of “significant political bias that infects the decision-making not only of the Attorney General and FBI Director, but also of line agents and prosecutors.”
Grassley’s letter summarized the evidence he has gathered over the past two years, with the assistance of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and several whistleblowers. There are several significant takeaways from the Iowa senator’s latest missive, but none more important than the details he revealed about the open assessment by the intelligence oversight analyst at the headquarters of the ‘FBI, Brian Auten.
In July of last year, Grassley went public with a whistleblower’s “allegations that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden-related and criminal financial activity, but ultimately shut it down from of false claims that he was subject to foreign disinformation.” According to Grassley’s source, “the basis for closing the investigative activity was an August 2020 assessment created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten,” which a team from FBI headquarters used “to improperly discredit Hunter Biden’s negative information as misinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
In his Wednesday letter to Garland and Wray, Grassley expanded on the whistleblower’s claims, writing: “In August 2020, and possibly earlier, Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened the aforementioned assessment, which was used by the Foreign Influence Task Force to seek out CHS. holdings in FBI field offices across the country related to the Biden family and falsely discredit them as foreign disinformation.”
The timing of Auten’s opening of this assessment is highly significant because it followed a month, or perhaps less, after the June 30, 2020 FBI interview of “highly believableCHS who reported that the owner of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had claimed that he paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes. The June 30, 2020 interview, which was chronicled in the infamous FD-1023 Grassley released earlier this year, only occurred because the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania had he asked the FBI to search its records for documents potentially relevant to obtaining information related to Ukraine.
At the time, the office’s Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney, Scott Brady, was acting as a clearinghouse for Ukraine-related evidence and claims of corruption by the Biden family. According to Grassley’s letter, during Brady’s evaluation, FBI officials located an earlier FD-1023 dated March 1, 2017, related to an investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma. This FD-1023 included a reference to Hunter Biden who was on Burisma’s board of directors, prompting Brady to request that the FBI reinterview the CHS to investigate any relevant information related to the Bidens. The FBI reportedly fought this request for a month before conducting the June 30, 2020 CHS interview.
It can be no coincidence that a month later Auten released an assessment that the Foreign Influence Task Force used “to seek out CHS holdings in FBI field offices across the country related to the Biden family and discredit them falsely as foreign disinformation.” After all, if a US attorney’s office conducting a serious evaluation of alleged corruption by the Biden family would consider asking the FBI to search its database for potentially relevant CHS reports , other offices or other researchers could also do this. And who knows, then, what derogatory information might be uncovered, which is precisely what FBI headquarters was looking for when it searched the field offices, namely “derogatory information about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.”
It is not clear how many confidential human sources, or how many of their reports, were categorized as disinformation by the Foreign Influence Task Force, but the whistleblower told Grassley that the FBI’s inappropriate labeling of the information as “disinformation” caused investigative activity to cease.” .”
We also know from Grassley’s letter that Brady reviewed the FD-1023, corroborated some details of the CHS reports, and coordinated with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York to assess whether it might be Russian disinformation. : US attorneys “have found no hits on known sources of Russian disinformation.”
However, 11 days after Brady officially closed the evaluation, after it had concluded its verification of the FD-1023 and other relevant evidence, and before the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney’s office could even and while informing Delaware about FD-1023 and the need for further investigation. , the Foreign Influence Task Force on September 14, 2020, contacted the CHS managing agent. According to the whistleblower, “the Foreign Influence Task Force attempted to shut down” the CHS report “by falsely saying it was subject to foreign disinformation.”
“It should be emphasized that the basis for trying to shut down the Biden family 1023 has been described to my office as highly suspect and contradicts other documents that I have been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, the office of Seattle FBI Field, The FBI Field Office in Baltimore and FBI Headquarters properties,” Grassley emphasized.
While it does not appear that the Foreign Influence Task Force succeeded in closing the CHS behind FD-1023, the task force’s inability to sink FD-1023 proved irrelevant. That’s because, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, Delaware Assistant Attorney General Lesley Wolf, who was overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation, had already brushed off any evidence coming out of Pittsburgh as disinformation.
However, the Foreign Influence Task Force succeeded in clearing other confidential human sources, including one opened by the Washington field office. These CHS reports were related to the Hunter Biden investigation, so the DC field office provided the CHS report to the Delaware field office.
Timothy Thibault, the former FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, disclosed this fact during this transcribed interview before the House Judiciary Committee about two weeks ago. In his testimony, which The Federalist has reviewed, Thibault described how he received an unexpected call from the head of the Public Corruption Unit at FBI headquarters to discuss the CHS. According to Thibault’s testimony, FBI headquarters arranged for Thibault to meet with the Foreign Influence Task Force to discuss their concerns about the CHS, which Thibault later shut down.
It is unknown how many other confidential human sources were shut down or falsely labeled disinformation by FBI headquarters or the Foreign Influence Task Force. But Grassley stressed in his Wednesday letter that “at one point, the FBI maintained more than 40 confidential human sources who provided criminal information related to Joe Biden, James Biden and Hunter Biden.”
Did the FBI investigate the evidence provided by these sources, Grassley asked? Or were these sources closed incorrectly?
To find out the answers to these and other questions, Grassley notes that he has a list of about 25 DOJ and FBI personnel to be interviewed. We hope the House will listen.
But the House must do more than question the staff Grassley identified in his letter. The House must first open an impeachment inquiry into FBI Director Wray, as the latest revelation of the Foreign Influence Task Force’s interference in the Biden investigation establishes that the director cannot control his creatures of the swamp
Margot Cleveland is an investigative reporter and legal analyst and serves as the senior legal correspondent for The Federalist. Margot’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, The New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on national radio shows and on Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax. Cleveland is an attorney and graduated from Notre Dame Law School, where she won the Hoynes Prive, the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Cleveland is a former full-time college professor and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also an advisor to the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments: her beloved husband and beloved son. The opinions expressed here are those of Cleveland in a private capacity.
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