We’ve been reporting on the information being revealed by whistleblowers about the politicization of the FBI, that there were wider questions being raised beyond Hunter Biden, including cases allegedly being dropped or pursued based on politics, as well as the FBI pressuring agents to pad statistics when it came to the question of domestic extremism.
But there’s more when it comes to the question of Hunter Biden. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) explained, according to the whistleblowers, some in the FBI improperly trying to block the investigation. Both Congress and the FBI had been looking into Hunter Biden.
The whistleblowers, Grassley explained, had further claimed that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
Auten had previously been referred for disciplinary action in regard to the Trump-Russia probe, and here he was again involved when it came to Hunter Biden. Auten failed to identify the fact that Igor Danchenko had undermined the dossier when the FBI analyst circulated an intelligence memo on the dossier source in February 2017.
Even though the information was verifiable, a line of investigation into Hunter Biden was shut down.
One of the whistleblowers claimed the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Washington field office, Timothy Thibault, shut down a line of inquiry into Hunter Biden in October 2020 despite some of the details being known to be true at the time.
A whistleblower also said Thibault “ordered closed” an “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting,” according to Grassley, even though “all of the reporting was either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants.” The senator said Thibault “ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required” and that FBI officials “subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the disclosures.
The FBI gave a briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley “that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order to paint the investigation in a false light,” apparently saying the Hunter Biden info could be Russian disinformation. Johnson outlined to Fox Business on Tuesday how he thought this was an effort to obstruct and discredit the GOP investigation by the FBI which he found very concerning.
Johnson also said that the Democrats then accused them of spreading Russian disinformation. He also explained that the FBI covered up from them that the FBI already had the Hunter Biden laptop when Congress was offered it by John Paul Mac Isaac.
Johnson also discussed how the Biden Treasury team was blocking the requests from House Oversight Committee ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), to get the Suspicious Activity Reports regarding the Biden family, so Comer was going directly to Hunter Biden’s financial adviser to try to get the records.
This could be the “greatest episode of corruption” — executive branch against Congress– in U.S. history, Johnson declared.