Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., along with 18 other House Republicans, sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray this week demanding answers from the FBI regarding a report that it has been in possession of a laptop that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden.
Emails obtained from the laptop’s hard drive revealed that current Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was vice president at the time, met with a Burisma executive weeks before he pushed Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the corrupt energy company.
The FBI reportedly had access to these emails back in December 2019, according to Biggs, yet none of this information was disclosed to legislators, who were investigating Hunter Biden’s financial dealings overseas at the time.
As Biggs pointed out, the evidence contained in the hard drive could have been used to bolster President Donald Trump’s defense when the House voted to impeach him.
A “large portion of the president’s legal defense case revolved around strong evidence that former Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter, was peddling his influence to his father to land lucrative jobs overseas that he might not have otherwise been qualified for,” the letter said.
“If the FBI was, in fact, in possession of this evidence and failed to alert the White House to its existence that would have given even more weight to the President’s legal defense, this was a gross error in judgement and a severe violation of trust,” the letter to Wray said.
The letter concluded with four questions:
- Was the FBI in possession of the laptop and hard drive back in 2019?
- Did the agency authenticate that it was, in fact, Hunter Biden’s laptop?
- Did the FBI brief the Department of Justice or White House about the laptop’s contents?
- And if so, why was the New York Post the first to break the story?
Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former White House adviser Steve Bannon were the first to bring the laptop to the Post‘s attention.
Giuliani, who had been prominently involved in fact-finding missions to Ukraine prior to the impeachment debacle, said he was contacted by the computer technician only after the man had reached out to the FBI and members of Congress.
The FBI first made a copy of the hard drive for forensic analysis and later returned to confiscate the original, Giuliani said in recent media interviews, including one with the Daily Caller.
In addition to the pressure from GOP members of the House Freedom Caucus, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee also announced that it planned to investigate the newly released emails.
Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee planned to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for the platform’s attempt to suppress coverage of the bombshell report.
Joe Biden’s campaign has flatly denied the New York Post report, claiming that the former vice president never met with the Burisma executive, despite an email from Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi thanking Hunter Biden for providing access to his father.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together,” Pozharskyi wrote in the email. “It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”
Separate emails obtained by Fox News host Tucker Carlson purported to outline an official White House conference call with Burisma’s US-based public-relations firm, Blue Star, in which the firm outlined the agenda for Joe Biden’s December 2015 state visit to Kyiv.
During the visit, Biden delivered an ultimatum to Ukrainian officials that if they did not fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma’s corruption the US would withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee to the cash-strapped nation, which was engaged in an ongoing border war with Russia following a 2014 populist revolution.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
