Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Newsmax on Tuesday he knew a year ago about the unclassified FBI FD-1023 document that contains allegations of a bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, but the FBI made it difficult for him and other Republican lawmakers to get their hands on it.
"It shouldn't take a year to get an unclassified document out," Grassley told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "But that's the way the FBI works. … "When you're dealing with the FBI, they don't want you to know what they know."
Grassley, 89, said he was alerted to the document and its contents by FBI whistleblowers, and he released a lightly redacted version to the public on July 20. In between, he had to make sure the identities of the FBI whistleblowers were protected, and then he had to team with Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, to force the FBI's hand in turning over the document.
"I had a chance to read the document a couple of months before I was able to get it made public because we had whistleblowers that informed us of some of this information that the public ought to know as much as Chuck Grassley knows," Grassley said. "We had to be very careful that we didn't let the FBI or the Department justice know where these whistleblowers were in the bowels of bureaucracy. In order to satisfy the whistleblowers to be adequately protected, and I'm known for protecting whistleblowers, we had to take about three months to get it out."
Grassley said he went to Comer to issue a subpoena for the document because the FBI continued to stonewall his request. In complying, the FBI gave the committee a heavily redacted version. Grassley said key facts redacted included a claim that Mykola Zlochevsky, founder of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma Holdings Limited, had 15 audio recordings of phone calls with himself and Hunter Biden and two with Joe Biden as insurance. Zlochevsky allegedly paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, a Burisma board member, $5 million each to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, investigating Burisma for corruption, was fired in 2016.
"I knew what those sentences said about those phone calls, but the FBI wanted to keep it from the House Oversight Committee," Grassley said. "Why did they want to do it? That's what I want the FBI to tell me. It looks to me like they wanted to cover up the fact that the vice president was having conversations with somebody that was recorded in Ukraine. That's something you ought to know, and I want to know. The 330 million people in the United States, if they want to read the document, ought to be able to read it. Now, they can that I made it public."
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