The FBI is “working hard” to investigate records tied to long-standing bribery allegations involving former President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, Attorney General Pam Bondi told senators on Tuesday following years of Republican and whistleblower claims that the bureau ignored key evidence.
The comments came during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in response to questions from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who has led efforts to declassify FBI informant materials describing alleged foreign bribes to the Biden family through the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Grassley pressed Bondi on whether the bureau had located text messages, audio recordings, or financial records described in a confidential informant report known as an FD-1023.
“This matter ought to be put to rest,” Grassley said. “That document mentioned one text message, two audio recordings, and three financial records that allegedly proved a bribery scheme with the Biden family and foreign interests. I asked [FBI Director Kash] Patel if his predecessors made any effort to determine whether these records existed. He answered, ‘No.’ What steps has the department taken to determine whether these records exist?”
Bondi replied, “I know Director Patel is working hard on this with the members of the FBI.” When Grassley asked whether the records exist or if she was simply unable to comment publicly, Bondi said, “At this point, I don’t want to discuss any of that publicly.”
Her exchange marked the first public acknowledgment that Patel’s FBI is revisiting the Biden materials, though she did not elaborate on how it was doing so.
During a Sept. 16 hearing, Patel testified that “to my knowledge,” the FBI under former Director Chris Wray made no effort to determine whether those materials existed or to authenticate their contents.
The FD-1023 at the center of Grassley’s inquiry was written in 2019 and summarized interviews with FBI informants who alleged that Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, offered bribes to protect his company from Ukrainian corruption investigations.
The informants claimed that Biden, prior to his presidency, met with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “protect the interests” of his son, who earned millions of dollars from Burisma, according to two interviews from 2017 and 2019 released by Grassley on the same day as Patel’s testimony.
“In total, we now have three different FBI confidential human sources providing information about the Biden family and potential criminal conduct,” Grassley said at the time.
A separate informant, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty and was convicted in December of lying about a $10 million bribe to the Bidens.
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But the newly declassified files, Grassley said, involve multiple sources and deserve further scrutiny.
“We aren’t saying the allegations are true,” Grassley said last month. “We want to know what the FBI did to fully investigate their veracity or lack thereof, and what they concluded.”