Constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley, a George Washington law professor known for his liberal views, expressed his shock that the FBI hid an FD-1023 informant document corroborating investigators’ findings that Joe and Hunter Biden appear to have benefited from an international bribery scheme.
Turley appeared on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream and brilliantly laid out why the FBI’s reluctance to release the lightly redacted document to the public is so problematic.
Transcript follows below:
BREAM: The FD-1023 form that Senator Grassley released, the FBI was not happy about that. They said that it actually could create danger and safety issues for the human informant, the confidential source that came forward. It alleges a number of conversations with Burisma executives out of Ukraine, saying allegedly that they were forced to pay the binds a certain amount of money for help with various issues. These are unverified allegations, but we have seen people in Washington, the Steele dossier comes to mind, run with unverified allegations and that launching a number of investigations.
So this 1023 form, former Attorney General Barr, told me on this show a few weeks ago that it was sent to Delaware to the Weiss investigation that was already open. So I asked this latest whistleblower, Joseph Ziegler, if he ever saw that form as part of his investigation as the IRS agent on this case.
Here’s what he told me: “I had never seen that document before, so I had never seen that 1023. And the reason why that 1023 might have been important is that can further validate some other evidence that we are trying to prove in the case. And that’s why all information is necessary for especially the lead IRS case agent to have.”
BREAM: Jonathan, can you assess why that didn’t land in his desk during this investigation that took five years?
TURLEY: No. They also testified that they were denied the ability to be debriefed on what was coming out of the FBI on this issue. And Bill Barr said that he sent this issue originally to Pittsburgh and the US Attorney’s office, rather than the FBI, found additional information that the FBI did not. And then they sent it to Delaware.
And it increasingly it seems like the FBI is the place where evidence goes to die. I mean, people, you send evidence to the FBI, if it has the name Biden on it it dies of very rapid death. And so we have no idea why this was not shared.
The key about that 1023 is that it mirrors perfectly what the House committees have found. It describes how the Bidens preferred to use a labyrinth of accounts and banks to hide payments that no payments would go to what it refers to as ‘the big guy,’ a term we’ve seen on the laptop. And that this was all an effort to conceal these transactions.
That’s exactly what the committees have found in looking at the transactions from these banks. So there’s no reason why this would be withheld because it confirmed independent information that they had access to.
The FBI’s withholding of compelling evidence that the President of the United States may be compromised by foreign powers and stands plausibly accused of committing high crimes and misdemeanors that compromised U.S. national security is as inexplicable as it is indefensible.