Prosecutor vetting Hunter Biden case dealt with ‘very unusual’ hurdles

Former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady found the Department of Justice’s process in 2020 for investigating public information about Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine “very unusual” and heavily bureaucratic, he told Congress in closed-door testimony this week.

Brady, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, told the House Judiciary Committee, according to a transcript reviewed by the Washington Examiner, that he experienced abnormally elaborate approval processes and weekslong pauses in work.

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His testimony comes as House Republicans are leading an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over allegations he abused his power as vice president to personally profit off his son’s business dealings. Part of their inquiry involves examining whether Hunter Biden received special treatment from the DOJ while it was conducting its own investigation into the president’s son.

Brady, who worked as the top prosecutor in the Western District of Pennsylvania beginning in 2017, had been assigned by the DOJ in January 2020 to vet the credibility of information provided by the public related to corruption in Ukraine and Hunter Biden’s work there.

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He was then required to brief the U.S. attorneys’ offices that had relevant ongoing grand jury investigations on his findings. Those offices were in Delaware and the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York, Brady said.

He also worked with FBI field offices corresponding to those districts.

Excessive bureaucracy

Brady described being hit with walls at times when trying to speak with the Delaware office, led by now-special counsel David Weiss, and with FBI headquarters.

While he attributed some of the communication challenges to the sensitivity of the material, which involved then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, he said he had never before seen certain issues, even with other high-profile and sensitive cases.

Asked specifically about issues with the Delaware office, Brady said he believed Weiss’s office was skeptical of the information he was developing.

“I think they were very concerned about any information sharing with our office,” Brady said. “It became problematic at different points, which required Mr. Weiss and me to get involved and level set, as it were, but it was regularly a challenge to interact with the investigative team from Delaware.”

He described one time when the communication between the Pittsburgh and Delaware offices became “so constricted” that Brady’s office had to compile written questions for Delaware and then receive written answers back.

“This was very unusual, but we had to involve the [deputy attorney general’s] office with Delaware and the FBI on a regular basis,” he said.

Coordinating with FBI headquarters was particularly difficult, Brady said, noting it was a “challenging working relationship” and that he was often met with “reluctance on the part of the FBI” to help Brady with investigating.

“There were a lot of steps of approval and a lot of eyes that had to look at things and sign off on any action that the special agents that were doing the day-to-day work and interacting with our team would take,” Brady said.

Asked if he found the process normal, Brady said, “Not in my experience. In my experience, on most investigations, even sensitive investigations, and/or public corruption investigations, it was usually contained within the [FBI] field office.”

He said at one point that he needed an extension for his work and that it required approval from 17 different people, mostly at the headquarters level.

“We were told by the special agents that they had to go pens down sometimes for two or three weeks at a time before they could reengage and take additional steps because they were still waiting on, again, someone within the 17 chain signoff to approve,” Brady said.

“And had you ever seen a 17-person signoff required by the FBI?” Brady was asked by the committee.

He replied, “Never in my career.”

Brady also said he was never informed that the FBI had possession of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which the bureau subpoenaed and obtained toward the end of 2019.

He described feeling “surprised” by the laptop upon learning about it from the New York Post’s initial story on it, which was published in October 2020.

Brady said, “I would have expected that be shared.”

He conceded, however, that if the FBI had obtained it by way of a subpoena or search warrant, he could understand why he was not informed about it.

While Brady’s assignment had a narrow scope, he said he still had a general expectation from Weiss’s office and others that they engage with him for efficiency purposes.

Communication from them would allow Brady “to understand what they had looked at, what they had not looked at, to make sure we weren’t … duplicating efforts, stepping on toes, doing anything that would in any way complicate their lives and their investigation,” he said.

Brady came under scrutiny in 2020 after the New York Times reported that his “arrangement,” and specifically an interview he conducted with embattled Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in January 2020 as part of his assignment, had “immediately raised alarms within” the DOJ and FBI.

Brady was asked repeatedly by committee Democrats during his testimony this week about the interview with Giuliani.

He said Giuliani’s attorney had reached out about providing the Pittsburgh office with information and that Giuliani was the first person Brady talked to as part of his broader vetting assignment.

Brady maintained, however, that gathering information from Giuliani was no different than gathering information on any other public leads.

Grassley’s FD-1023

Brady also addressed an accusation made by House Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) that he and then-Attorney General Bill Barr signed off on closing an investigation into an FD-1023 form, later published by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), because they could find no corroborating evidence for it.

An FD-1023 is an investigative form the FBI uses to record information it gets from confidential human sources, and the one Grassley obtained, which he released in July, contained explosive allegations about the Bidens.

The form detailed information from a source alleging that Joe and Hunter Biden accepted $5 million each in bribes so that Joe Biden, who was at the time vice president, would use his authority to protect a Ukrainian energy company from scrutiny while his son held a lucrative board position with the company.

The accusation has not been proven, and Joe Biden has repeatedly denied ever speaking to his son about his foreign business deals and has dismissed questions about the form.

Asked about Raskin’s remarks specifically, Brady said, “That’s not true. What … Barr said publicly is true.”

Barr said this year that the form was never closed and was, in fact, sent to Delaware for further investigation.

Brady also confirmed public reports that the source on the form was highly credible and had been used in multiple past investigations, including during the Obama administration.

He said that while he was vetting the form in 2020, he was able to confirm that the source’s travel and meeting schedule lined up with the travel and meetings mentioned on the form. He said, however, that he could not confirm the substance of the allegations beyond that because his assignment was limited to vetting public information, so he did not have certain investigative tools at his disposal.

Brady said his team “felt that there were sufficient indicia of credibility in this 1023 to pass it on to an office that had a predicated grand jury investigation.”

He noted that his office held a final briefing with Weiss’s office in October 2020 and relayed that his team thought the FD-1023 was credible enough for the Delaware office to continue investigating it.

After that briefing, “our tasking was done, and our visibility into what any of the offices did with that information ended,” Brady said.

Asked about Brady’s testimony and his charges about the abnormally excessive approval processes he said he experienced, the FBI told the Washington Examiner its work is “thorough, methodical, and rigorous.”

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“We follow the facts without regard for politics,” the bureau stated, adding that “while other opinions and criticism often come with the job, we will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead, do things by the book, and speak through our work.”

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment. The House Judiciary Committee declined to comment.