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Grassley, Johnson Blast Democrats Over Attempts Derail Biden Probe
Tristan Justice
:
The Federalist
Two top Republican senators spearheading an investigation into the Biden family’s conflicts of interest while serving at the upper echelons of government blasted Democrats Tuesday for attempting to derail the Senate probe with fewer than 100 days until a presidential election.
Congressional Democrats, desperate to shut the three-year investigation down over fears that it might damage their presidential nominee’s chance to capture the White House this fall, have launched a disinformation campaign by accusing Senate Republicans of accepting help from the Russian government, a favorite tactic.
Earlier this month, Democrat leadership demanded an FBI briefing over claims of Russian intelligence guiding the investigation run by Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. It’s a charge Republicans intimately familiar with the matter vehemently protest. Republicans involved with the probe told The Federalist all information in this case over the last three years has come from U.S. agencies, and current or former U.S. officials, with one exception: a records request from a former Ukrainian consultant named Andrii Telizhenko with Blue Star Strategies, a Biden-linked firm.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that your interest in understanding ‘the national security and counterintelligence implications of foreign election interference’ is one-sided and highly political,” the pair of Republican senators wrote in a letter addressed to Democratic Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Grassley and Johnson went on to note that no such briefings were requested over the course of Democrats’ farcical investigations alleging President Trump to be a Russian agent. Those relied on actual Kremlin disinformation paid for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, known as the Steele Dossier.
“The Steele Dossier is the very definition of election interference, yet we hear no objections from you,” the Republican senators noted.
The Biden campaign went one step further to shut down the Senate investigation that began in 2017, long before former Vice President Joe Biden launched a bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination in April of last year. Last week, the campaign released a memo charging Johnson of being a Russian asset “party to a foreign influence operation against the United States.”
“Biden’s campaign prefers to knowingly repeat false information so the liberal media will keep reporting on it,” Grassley and Johnson wrote. “Continuing to repeat false information, including apparently classified information, will not make the allegations true.”
For the first time, the two senators also addressed what happened during a March briefing that culminated in the cancellation of a subpoena vote requesting records from Telizhenko over discrepencies in staff notes, opting to subpoena the Democrat firm Blue Star Strategies instead. Still, the FBI gave the green light for the investigation to move forward.
“As you are fully aware, the FBI advised all of us during a March 2020 staff briefing that there was nothing to preclude the continuation of our investigation,” they wrote, blaming inaccuracies from Democrat staff notes for the discrepancies that led to the subpoena adjustment.
This is far from the first time Democrats have tried to delegitimize the GOP-led investigation. In February, Wyden oddly complained about government agencies complying with records requests that confirmed the presence of suspicious activity reports from the Treasury Department about Hunter Biden’s overseas businesses. At the time, Grassley and Johnson called it “strange that any senator would complain about Congress receiving responses to oversight requests in a timely manner.”
Read Tuesday’s full letter here.
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