Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) issued a letter Thursday to House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) debunking the claim the Republican has spent the past six months making that President Joe Biden is linked to a Ukraine bribery scheme involving his son.
Raskin, who serves as the ranking member on the Oversight Committee, confirmed previous Raw Story reporting that Rudy Giuliani was likely the source of a tip given to the FBI that became a central focus of Comer's probe which attempted to link the Bidens to bribery payments made by Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian founder of oil and gas company Burisma holdings.
“Despite being interviewed as part of a campaign by Mr. Giuliani and his proxies in 2019 and 2020 to procure damaging information about the Biden family, Mr. Zlochevsky, explicitly and unequivocally, denied those allegations," Raskin said in the letter.
"Specifically, Mr. Zlochevsky denied (1) that anyone at Burisma had 'any contacts' with then former Vice President Biden or his representatives while Hunter Biden served on the Burisma board, and (2) that former Vice President Biden or his staff ‘in any way’ assisted Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma,” Raskin said in the letter.
There were two CEOs of Burisma, Zlochevsky and Mykola Lisin. As Raw Story pointed out, Lisin died in a car accident in 2011, long before President Joe Biden's son Hunter was named to the board of Burisma.
Giuliani claimed on Newsmax that his death was under "suspicious circumstances."
Comer and his Senate ally Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have been hammering for the release of the FD-1023, a form the FBI uses to record unverified tips, saying that the "tip" proves something untoward happened. The form alleges that there were 17 tapes that were being held by Burisma staff to use against the Bidens in the event they needed them for "protection."
Using Bill Barr's autobiography and Rudy Giuliani's own statements, Raw Story put together that Giuliani was the likely source of the "tip" to the FBI in early June..
Two weeks after Raw Story's first report, Giuliani himself appeared on Newsmax to claim that the owner of the alleged tapes was the wife of the former CEO, who died in 2011. He claimed that she was a financial staffer or auditor of some kind. He then claimed she was dead, also of "mysterious circumstances" and that she was the one who had "the tapes."
Rep. Raskin is now calling the GOP's bluff on the matter.
“For this reason, the full factual context surrounding the form — including Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements contradicting the reported information — is crucial to properly understanding these allegations. In this case, that context includes not just repeated and failed efforts in 2019 and 2020 by Mr. Giuliani, Senate Republicans, and Trump’s Justice Department to find support for these allegations, but also clear evidence that then-Vice President Biden’s actions carried out the policy of the United States, its allies, and its international partners to combat corruption in Ukraine,” wrote Raskin.
As both the FBI and Mr. Giuliani himself stated, the unverified, second-hand allegations in the June 2020 Form FD-1023 largely repeated allegations Mr. Giuliani shared previously with the FBI.
Mr. Zlochevsky’s statements are recorded in a written document that was produced by Mr. Giuliani’s associate, Lev Parnas, to the House Committees overseeing former President Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in January 2020, including the Oversight Committee, and was made available to both Democratic and Republican Members. The Department of Justice has been in possession of the document since the FBI seized Parnas’ phone with a warrant in 2019.
