Last month, Bill Barr got Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland to claim that Jamie Raskin was lying when he said that the lead from an informant claiming that Joe Biden had been bribed was assessed by Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady and then shut down.
It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
Then James Comer relied on that to claim that Raskin was wrong when he said that it was shut down as an assessment.
Bill Barr to Margot Cleveland to James Comer: At each new level, this Matryoshka doll of disinformation gets less and less credible.
So incredible, in fact, that even Chuck Grassley debunked them.
Unwittingly.
Like the proverbial blind squirrel finding a nut.
You see, Chuck is outraged that the IRS agents conducting the investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes were not included in a meeting at which Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the Delaware US Attorney’s office about the informant report. He has written Delaware US Attorney David Weiss a letter demanding an explanation of why.
The answer is clear from the timing of the briefing, which Senator Grassley reveals in his letter: October 23, 2020.
Based on information provided to my office from individuals aware of the meeting, on October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of your top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the FBI-generated FD1023 alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden; however, the meeting did not include any IRS agents. In addition, based on information provided to my office, potentially hundreds of Justice Department and FBI officials have had access to the FD-1023 at issue, which begs the question that I’ve been asking since the start of my oversight in this matter: what steps have the Justice Department and FBI taken to investigate the allegations?
This briefing was nine days after a NYPost story would have made clear that Rudy Giuliani had ties to the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” that the IRS agents had been relying on for investigative materials for the better part of a year.
It was one day after an October 22, 2020 meeting that the IRS agents did attend. As Gary Shapley confessed to the House Ways and Means Committee, the meeting was largely an effort to make sure that the government had used proper legal process before acquiring two devices that — it had only recently became clear — had become and may always have been part of a political hit job.
A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.
So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices. I thought one of the most important first parts was that on November 6 of 2019, the FBI case agent, Josh Wilson, called up the computer shop owner, John Paul, and basically got the device numbers from him.
If Shapley’s notes are at all reliable, prosecutors at the meeting instead discovered that the FBI broke the most basic rules of forensics when exploiting the laptop purportedly owned by the former Vice President’s dissolute son, and in the process may have destroyed evidence about who was really behind it. I’m still not convinced his notes are reliable, but if they are, then the meeting should have raised all sorts of alarms within DOJ.
As I laid out here, Shapley has instead pitched the meeting as one that served the primary purpose of giving Whistleblower X opportunity to complain that the US Attorney’s office had prevented the IRS agents from being tainted by dodgy materials on the laptop. Whistleblower X did complain, mind you, but those complaints mostly raise questions about the extent to which he had already been accessing materials from the laptop that Rudy Giuliani had been tampering with, thereby tainting the investigation.
Shapley’s propaganda has worked, because that’s what our blind squirrel from Iowa focuses his letter on.
But as Shapley described in his prepared statement, even before that meeting he had written to AUSA Lesley Wolf complaining about how the laptop was being referred to in the news.
On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We
need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations
about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the
IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also
executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is
informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the
laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can
be briefed on this issue.”
Shapley appears to have been concerned, in the weeks before the Presidential election, that people believed the laptop was being investigated by the FBI as an information operation targeting Joe Biden, when in his view, it remained the cornerstone of his investigation into Hunter Biden.
But if DOJ was not already investigating both topics by October 23, 2020 — both Hunter Biden’s tax crimes and a potential information operation targeting Joe Biden — if it has not spent years doing so, then the FBI has become even more captured than I already suspected.
Indeed, if the FBI hasn’t already significantly substantiated that Hunter Biden was hacked in early 2019, then I may renounce my citizenship. I know FBI’s cyber agents can be incompetent, but they can’t be that incompetent, can they?
Can they?
Chuck Grassley may not realize it because he is very old and he is staffed by a bunch of partisan cranks. But he’s basically complaining that DOJ might have learned their lesson after the Steele dossier — the lesson that Chuck Grassley spent years demanding they learn! — and decided, upon the revelation that a key piece of evidence they had been relying on for months had ties to a political hit job, they should figure out precisely what tie that key piece of evidence had to the political hit job.
Chuck Grassley may also not realize that the political cranks who staff him got him to sign a letter effectively complaining that the FBI thought it worthwhile to figure out if the information operation Russian spies had been bragging about for over a year at that point had actually succeeded. Chuck is bitching that the FBI decided to protect a presidential candidate.
Chuck Grassley also likely doesn’t realize his staffers got him to sign a letter bitching that David Weiss attempted to maintain the integrity of the tax investigation even while DOJ assessed whether they had been caught in another information operation. That’s why you don’t include the IRS agents in a meeting where Pittsburgh FBI agents explain to Delaware lawyers how sketchy was the information Rudy Giuliani was collecting from known Russian agents in Ukraine. If you include them, you risk blowing the otherwise meritorious tax investigation.
And Chuck Grassley definitely doesn’t realize that he has debunked Bill Barr.
You see, Bill Barr, who is a very adept liar, was sort of telling the truth to Faceplant Margot that the FD-1023 was referred to DE USAO for further investigation. It surely was. But Pittsburgh FBI agents shared it on October 23, 2020, because the US Attorney’s office was frantically trying to figure out whether the entire tax investigation had been blown, or only parts of it. The US Attorney’s office was undoubtedly trying to understand what kind of other garbage Rudy had produced that got shared with the FBI, in addition to any role he had with the “laptop” that had been used in the tax investigation.
Even Gary Shapley admitted that in the wake of the NYPost story, the Delaware US Attorney’s office did some quick CYA to figure out whether they had been using a tainted information operation for the better part of a year (they had!). The October 23 briefing would have had substantially the same purpose as the October 22 one: to figure out how tainted the investigation was.
And Bill Barr instead got even stupider people to believe that that an attempt to triage the damage done by Rudy’s political hit job amounts to an investigation for bribery.