Former Attorney General Bill Barr has again disputed repeated claims by House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin that the Justice Department “closed down” an investigation into an alleged $5 million bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden.
“Mr. Raskin seems confused about the limited scope of Mr. [Scott] Brady’s review,” Barr told The Post Thursday, referring to the former US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
“The Pittsburgh office was simply adding evidence to ensure that it was not disinformation before passing it on to one of the already existing investigations underway in the department,” Barr added.
“He [Brady] was not authorized to open his own investigation. In other words, he was assessing the credibility of the evidence, not investigating its ultimate merits,” the former AG added, noting that the information gathered by Brady was sent along to Delaware US Attorney David Weiss.
“That’s why the evidence was passed on to Delaware,” Barr concluded. “Nothing was closed.”
A spokeswoman for Raskin (D-Md.) directed The Post to the ranking member’s past statements when reached for comment.
Raskin insisted Wednesday that he stood by his past statements and “that the Department of Justice team of prosecutors and FBI agents under US Attorney Scott Brady determined that there were no grounds to escalate their probe from an initial assessment of the allegations surfaced by Rudy Giuliani to a preliminary or full-blown investigation and that it was therefore closed down.”
A source familiar with the investigation told The Post that Giuliani was not the origin of the allegation regarding the $5 million payment in exchange for policy decisions from Biden during the Obama administration.
Barr tapped Brady in January 2020 to look into the bribery claim, in addition to other allegations from Giuliani. The Pittsburgh US Attorney’s Office found that they were “credible” and not “disinformation,” according to the source.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has said the information came from a “highly credible informant” who revealed knowledge of the alleged bribe in an FBI FD-1023 form, which Comer and Raskin both read and were briefed on earlier this week. Other members of the committee got access to the informant file beginning Thursday.
Two other documents mentioned in the informant file will also be made available to Comer and Raskin alone
The FBI’s confidential source has been paid a “substantial amount of money” by the bureau for their work over the years, according to Comer.
While the FBI ended its assessment of the matter in August 2020, Brady’s office went on to share its findings with the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware.
On Monday, Raskin said the bribery allegation was not “part of any ongoing investigation” and was based on “secondhand hearsay.”
In a statement two days later, he added that “much of this information was the same as information Mr. Giuliani had previously provided.”
Comer has described the FD-1023 form as showing a bribery inquiry involving “shell companies” benefiting the Biden family.
“The claims made in the document are consistent with what we found and disclosed to you all in Romania. It suggests a pattern of bribery where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” he said.
Weiss is reportedly nearing a decision on whether to also charge Hunter Biden with tax fraud and a potential gun crime following a meeting between the first son’s lawyers and Justice Department prosecutors last month.
The Delaware US Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
