That FD-1023 that there has been so much discussion of? It is now available to the public thanks to Chuck Grassley and James Comer. Your reaction to it will boil down to your inclination to believe that the Bidens are pure as the driven snow or credibly accused of influence peddling. Obviously, I fall into the latter camp, but admit freely that the 1023 contains smoking gun accusations and recounts conversations the confidential informant, who himself is said to be credible, with people involved in the matter.

In other words, the information is 1 step removed from being an accusation by a person involved in the influence-peddling scheme. It all seems credible and is a far stronger predicate for an investigation than the offhanded barroom conversation that got Crossfire Hurricane rolling, but less than an outright confession by a person claiming that he, personally, bribed Hunter Biden.

So here’s the document:

The meat of the document is pretty simple: an executive at Burisma was bragging to the Confidential Human Informant about his scheme to bring Burisma public on the US market, and the CHS thought the scheme was a terrible idea.

At its core were two elements: having Hunter Biden on the Board of Burism and funneling $10 million to the Bidens–$5 million to Hunter and $5 million to “The Big Guy” (you have heard that nickname before, haven’t you?); the second element, suggested by Hunter Biden, was buying an established US Oil company and using it as an entry into the US market.

It was a stupid idea and didn’t work. It was premised on Joe Biden using his influence to smooth the way for Burisma to enter the US market despite being under investigation for corruption. The CHS believed the smart thing to do was not to get involved with politicians but to actually resolve the legal issues in Ukraine and then make a play to enter the US markets. The Bidens would be expensive and useless, as they proved to be.

Both the CHS and the Burisma executives thought Hunter was an idiot, by the way, but the Burisma folks believed business works in the US as it does in Russia and Ukraine, so they expected that money would smooth over all their problems.

It has the ring of credibility and does indeed refer to emails and recordings that would directly link Joe Biden to the influence-peddling scheme, which in turn began when Joe was VP, making the scheme bribery.

What it does not do is show the evidence itself. No recordings or emails to which there were references in the FD-1023 were in possession of the FBI. We can only take the word of the Burisma executives and what they told the CHS.

So it’s not a smoking gun, but rather a building block for an investigation. As of now, we have no idea whether such an investigation has been initiated. The New York Times is apparently not even curious.

Truly amazing. pic.twitter.com/EVAzKpqePE

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 20, 2023

We know far too little to assume that there is a coverup going on, whether anybody has followed up on the accusations, or whether the FBI simply memory-holed the whole thing.

We do know that if this were Trump there would have been an uproar and an immediate all-out investigation because something much less damning did indeed start a multi-year witchhunt, but in and of itself that only shows that the FBI has a double standard, not that it is engaged in a coverup. Those are sins of unequal weight. Both are bad, but one is much worse than the other.

We need to know more to get an idea of what exactly to think.