President Joe Biden has been accused of taking a $5 million bribe from an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings, according to a Fox News report on Thursday. Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of the gas firm.
The accusation was described by a “confidential human source” in a June 2020 interview with the FBI, according to Fox, and comes from the contents of the FBI’s FD-1023 form. The document alleges that Joe Biden was paid by Burisma in a criminal bribery scheme to influence U.S. foreign policy in 2015 and 2016 when he was vice president.
The FBI source described how a Burisma executive bribed the Bidens to get access to U.S. oil while Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was investigating the company. The executive, according to the FBI source, wanted to pay Biden and his son $5 million each.
“$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden,” the executive said, according to the FBI source. The source believed these payments to both Bidens eventually occurred “through so many different bank accounts.”
Biden called the accusation a “bunch of malarky” when questioned by reporters.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee were given access to the FBI document on Thursday and said that the contents were “credible.”
According to the Fox News report, the FBI document was produced when committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., threatened FBI Director Christopher Wray with being held in contempt of Congress if he didn’t turn the document over. Several members of the committee have spoken about the allegations in the document.
“I’ve reviewed the material in the FBI’s FD-1023 form, and the content is jaw-dropping,” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said on Twitter. “The record gets us closer to bringing Joe Biden to justice.”
Several members of the committee spoke about the accusation in light of the indictment of former President Donald Trump by a federal court in Miami that also took place on Thursday.
“On the day members of Congress learn from an FBI document linking then-VP Joe Biden to receiving $5 million from Burisma in a pay-for-play scheme, Biden’s DOJ announces another phony indictment of the leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, Biden’s likely opponent, and the former POTUS,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said on Twitter.
“What Biden has done is impeachable,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said on Twitter.
Democrats on the committee cast doubt on the investigation.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement Wednesday, “The Department of Justice team of prosecutors and FBI agents under U.S. Attorney Scott Brady determined that there were no grounds to escalate their probe from an initial assessment of the allegations surfaced by Rudy Giuliani to a preliminary or full-blown investigation and that it was therefore closed down.”
Former Attorney General Bill Barr disputed Raskin’s claim.
“Mr. Raskin seems confused about the limited scope of Mr. [Scott] Brady’s review,” Barr said in an interview with the New York Post Wednesday. “The Pittsburgh office was simply adding evidence to ensure that it was not disinformation before passing it on to one of the already existing investigations underway in the department.”
Barr said that investigators were “assessing the credibility of the evidence, not investigating its ultimate merits.”
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