Republicans admit their Biden 'bribe' evidence may not even exist

Republican members of Congress have blanketed the right-wing cable news airwaves in recent days, alleging that there are recordings of President Joe Biden accepting a $5 million bribe — proof, they say, that Biden is corrupt and unfit for office.

However, multiple GOP lawmakers admitted this week that they don’t know if those recordings exist. They have also said the foreign national who claims to have the recordings is Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of the Ukrainian company Burisma, who is wanted by Ukrainian authorities on corruption charges and now lives outside Ukraine.

“We don’t know really whether the tapes exist,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Wednesday on a right-wing talk radio program called “The Conservative Circus.” “We just don’t know that, whether this was just a bluff on the part of, whoever the executive was, we think it was Mykola Zlochevsky, the CEO of the corrupt oligarch.”

Johnson made similar comments during a Wednesday appearance on Newsmax, where he said, “I’m not aware that we have verified that those recordings exist.”

In May, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) sent out a news release in which he alleged the FBI had evidence that Biden had “engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.”

The FBI has allegedly had the claim from the oligarch since 2020, when former President Donald Trump was in office and Bill Barr was attorney general. Barr, who ran interference for Trump by mischaracterizing the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Trump’s Russian ties and appointing a special counsel to try to discredit the Russia investigation altogether, did not charge Biden.

Still, Republicans are demanding the FBI make the FD-1023 document, in which the Ukrainian oligarch claimed to have recordings of Biden, public and threatened to hold Director Christopher Wray in contempt if he doesn’t comply. An FD-1023 is a form the FBI uses to collect unverified raw information from a confidential source.

But even Comer on Tuesday said he doesn’t know if the actual recordings exist.

“We don’t know if they’re legit or not, but we know that the foreign national claims he has them,” Comer told Newsmax.

Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday night also appeared on Newsmax to say he, too, doesn’t know if the recordings actually exist.

“[Sen. Chuck] Grassley has not heard them. What Grassley has done is, he’s the only senator who’s read an unredacted version of the FD-1023, so he’s read the report, and the report alleges that these recordings exist,” Cruz said, referring to the Iowa Republican. “We don’t know for a fact that that’s true.”

Republicans have ramped up the Biden “bribe” talk since former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment on Friday for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice, likely in an attempt to distract from Trump’s legal woes.

Democrats are calling the GOP out for spreading unfounded allegations.

“Did the majority actually find some actual evidence of wrongdoing by the president? Of course not. But it’s even worse than that,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who served as lead counsel to Democrats on the first Trump impeachment, said Wednesday at a House hearing. “This document that they will not stop talking about is shockingly just a 3-year-old, second-hand, hearsay, uncorroborated rehashing of Rudy Giuliani’s bogus allegations that he got from corrupt Ukrainian officials.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation