A Dirty Deep State Misdirection
When two Republican senators began probing Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign business dealings, intelligence services falsely called it “Russian disinformation.”
This week, we learned from the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee that Joe Biden took $40,000 in laundered money from an energy company linked to the Communist Chinese back in September 2017. The transfer came from his brother James, and, as the New York Post reports, it marks “the first proven instance of the commander-in-chief getting a piece of his family’s foreign income.”
It was big news, but it wasn’t the biggest news of the week.
Corrupt presidents come and go. They can be booted out every four years. But institutional corruption within the deep state is far tougher to root out since its perpetrators aren’t accountable to the American people, to the voters. And this brings us to the case of a so-called “defensive briefing” that two Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, received from the FBI on August 6, 2020.
Grassley and Johnson had begun investigating Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealings with Ukraine and other countries a year earlier, and they must’ve been over the target. Because the FBI dispatched then-Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Nikki Floris and then-Section Chief of the Foreign Influence Task Force Bradley Benavides to warn Grassley and Johnson that the dirt they were uncovering on Hunter Biden was “Russian disinformation.”
But it wasn’t Russian disinformation. In fact, the FBI’s defensive briefing itself was disinformation, meant purely to seed a false narrative among Congress and the mainstream media that Republican investigative efforts into the first son’s business dealings were tainted by Russian subterfuge.
More specifically, as the Washington Examiner reports, both Grassley and Johnson say the phony briefing “was designed to undermine their September 2020 report detailing financial connections between Hunter Biden and China and Ukraine.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who also chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, wants to get to the bottom of it. On Wednesday, he opened an investigation into the FBI’s alleged obstruction of the Grassley-Johnson investigation.
In a letter Jordan sent to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, he wrote: “Although the FBI claims that the briefing focused on Russia, the information that Floris and Benavides conveyed to the Senators ‘consisted primarily of information that [the Senators] already knew and information unconnected to [their] Biden investigation.’ The briefing, the existence of which was later leaked, hampered the Senators’ investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments and foreign nationals.”
Why would Jordan send a letter to Haines and the ODNI rather than the FBI? Because in an earlier transcribed interview he’d conducted with the FBI’s Floris, she said that while the briefing had been given delivered by the FBI, the intelligence information it contained “did not come from the FBI, but rather from ODNI.”
“Specifically,” Jordan wrote, “she testified that ‘ODNI owns this whole process … ODNI took the lead … in drafting the script’ used to brief Senators Grassley and Johnson. She further testified: ‘I would certainly defer you to ODNI as far as the specifics that were in the script. It wasn’t FBI collected information.’”
So the intelligence services are squirming, and they’re pointing fingers at each other. That seems to us like a sign of desperation.
Senators Grassley and Johnson smelled a rat long ago, and they wrote back to Floris and Benavides in August of last year, arguing that their “Russian disinformation” briefing consisted primarily of information that the two of them already knew and was unconnected to their investigation of Hunter Biden. That letter read, in part: “The unnecessary FBI briefing provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation. Although you stated that the FBI didn’t intend to ‘interfere’ in our investigation, the practical effect of such an unnecessary briefing and the subsequent leaks relating to it created interference, which frustrated and obstructed congressional oversight efforts.”
Jordan wants documentation into all this. He’s “requesting Haines and ODNI turn over ‘The script, including all drafts of the script, that ODNI prepared for the FBI to brief Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020,’” Fox News reports. “He is also requesting all documents and communications referring to the briefing; a list of intelligence community agencies that ‘nominated the intelligence that served as the basis’ for the briefing; and a list of individuals involved in the decision to provide the briefing.”
Whether Jordan’s investigation can get to the bottom of the phony “defensive briefing” and who ultimately ordered it is anyone’s guess. But it’s good to see House and Senate Republicans working together to flush out and call attention to the Democrat-controlled deep state.
