An investigation must be conducted to discover why the FBI didn't investigate claims that President Joe Biden, while he was vice president, was involved in an alleged bribery scheme with a foreign national, former FBI special agent-turned-whistleblower Stephen Friend said Tuesday on Newsmax.
"If they didn't do anything, that's a major problem," Friend said on Newsmax's "National Report." "If they didn't close it out because of political reasons, then there needs to be some sort of accountability here."
Friend's comments involve an FBI's unclassified FD-1023 document concerning an informant's claims alleging that Biden was involved in a $5 million bribery incident. The FBI has refused to turn over the document to Capitol Hill for review by House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., and ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
"An FD-1023 is a source reporting document," said Friend. "It's essentially a written memorialization of a meeting or an encounter with an FBI agent and their confidential human source, their snitch, their informant."
He said that as far as he's learned, the information was brought to the FBI in June 2020, alleging that while Biden was vice president under former President Barack Obama, he was involved in "some sort of pay-for-play scheme."
"The FBI then took that information and documented it," said Friend. "The question now remains is did they do any follow-up to see if it was substantiated? Did they open up an assessment or preliminary or full investigation, or did they just write in the source report, file it away, and hope it never came to light because, at the time of that, it was a summer of a presidential election?"
Typically, if someone came forward with a similar document, it would have been filed and there would have been an assessment, Friend added.
In the case of this particular document, the informant was "credible" and had been working with the FBI for several years, being "paid in excess of six figures," Friend said.
"Obviously this information should be taken very seriously" and examined, Friend continued. "If it was legitimate, then what was the fallout? Why wasn't there an investigation brought about?"
Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., posted on Twitter on Monday that the FBI fears that its informant on the business dealings with Biden's family will be killed if he or she is revealed. Friend said he believes Luna was speaking about the safety of the confidential source behind the Biden document, not the whistleblower who has exposed it.
"These are two different individuals," said Friend, adding that the whistleblower is "most likely the agent who was handling [this] and didn't see anything come with that information and was concerned about it. And kudos to them."
The safety of the confidential human source is the issue at hand, Friend continued, adding that it's important to know that the FBI can't promise or guarantee anonymity for an informant.
"There is a very specific admonition that you give to them when you read them in, if you will, and so the FBI has to do its best to protect them, but it can't guarantee it," said Friend.
But still, "Congress has oversight authority of the FBI," he added. "If the FBI wants to hide behind an ongoing investigation or have to keep secret our methods and our sources, that's just not good enough. They must by the letter of the law respond to Congress."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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