Senator Chuck Grassley has again relayed uncertainty as to allegations he and fellow Republican, Representative James Comer have made against President Joe Biden.
The two lawmakers on Wednesday issued a joint statement Wednesday alleging "a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national," in turn requesting compliance from the FBI for the production of an unclassified record which they claim could provide insight into any purported illegality.
Comer, chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, pledged to investigate the Biden family since Republicans took control of the House this past January. That has included allegations that Biden's children and their companies received over $1.3 million through a family associate.
In a new interview with Newsmax's Greta Van Susteren, Grassley seemed to imply that proof behind the allegations made about Biden's past and any communications with foreign nationals remains lacking.
"The letter is electrifying because it talks about exchange of money for policy decisions," Van Susteren said to Grassley. "It's a very serious allegation against the then-vice president."
The senator replied, "It is a very serious allegation. I wish I could say that I knew it was true or untrue."
A portion of the interview was tweeted by Ian Sams, a White House spokesman for oversight and investigations, who previously told Newsweek that the new allegations are a continuation of five years of the GOP "lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the president and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests."
"That's because they prefer floating anonymous innuendo, amplified by the megaphone of their allies in right-wing media, to get attention and try to distract and deflect from their own unpopular ideas and lack of solutions to the issues the American people actually care about," Sams said.
He added that Biden "has offered an unprecedented level of transparency" over the past 25 years, mentioning his annual tax return releases.
Grassley had made similar comments about the uncertainty of the allegations after they initially went public. He reportedly told Chad Pergram, a senior congressional correspondent for Fox News, that he couldn't verify "whether or not it's really criminal activity."
The senator added having faith in whistleblowers that the requested FBI document known as FD-1023 does exist and that he and Comer "have a rough idea" of its contents.
"Given the precise nature of the information provided by department whistleblowers with a high degree of credibility, we're confident that the FBI has had these significant allegations for some time now," Taylor Foy, communications director for Grassley, told Newsweek on Friday.
"The question is what did the FBI do with that information. That's what Senator Grassley would like to illuminate."
Newsweek reached out to Comer via email for comment.
Patricia Crouse, a political science practitioner in residence at the University of New Haven, told Newsweek that the allegations at this juncture lack "merit." She is also surprised that, if ultimately proven true, they were not unearthed by Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign.
"It's possible evidence has just been uncovered but campaigns expend a great deal of resources just to uncover things like this," Crouse said. "To me, it does seem like Republicans may be getting desperate to find anything to use against Biden at this point, especially with the legal cases mounting against Trump and most polls, at least at this point in time, show Biden leading Trump."
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has introduced multiple unsuccessful articles of impeachment against Biden that never reached the House of Representatives, claims the whistleblower revealed "very credible" information that would allegedly tie the president to "foreign nationals in an alleged pay-for-play scheme to influence policy decisions."
She has called for FBI Director Christopher Wray to release the currently unclassified document, claimed to only include Biden and nobody else, in front of the Oversight Committee.
"Now on the Oversight Committee, because we have real subpoena powers, we have the power to investigate and we have the power to do what we're doing now," she told Steve Bannon on his War Room: Battleground podcast.
But Republican Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has scaled back threats of impeachment against the president. He has instead focused on officials within Biden's administration.
"You think about [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas, he certainly warrants impeachment, but that's a decision we have to make as a conference...And relative to the president, of course, that's a decision that's going to be made by the full Republican Conference and the speaker, and no one's really focused on that now," Jordan recently told Punchbowl News.
Update 05/05/23, 12 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from Grassley's office.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Nick Mordowanec is a Newsweek reporter based in Michigan. His focus is reporting on Ukraine and Russia, along with social ... Read more
