NANCY SMASH!

It’s been alleged that James Comer got his start in politics with some pretty serious tech tampering, and apparently it convinced him that was a winning strategy:

The FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and other people familiar with the investigation.

Raskin revealed the information about the investigation after he and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) on Monday reviewed a document containing details of the allegation. That document has been at the center of a weeks-long back and forth between the FBI and Comer, who last month sought to force the agency to produce the document via a subpoena.

After the two lawmakers reviewed the document in a secure area on Capitol Hill on Monday, Comer announced that House Republicans would still pursue holding FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt of Congress…

According to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail sensitive information, the allegation in the document came to the FBI through the Pittsburgh field office, where Barr had created a channel for allegations involving Ukraine. That included materials Rudy Giuliani — who was then President Donald Trump’s personal attorney — had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about Biden and his family.

The allegation contained in the document was reviewed by the FBI at the time and was found to not be supported by facts, and the investigation was subsequently dropped with the Trump Justice Department’s sign-off, according to the people familiar with the investigation…

Comer and Raskin offered disparate accounts of their meeting with the FBI. Comer in a written statement said FBI officials told the lawmakers “that the unclassified, FBI-generated record has not been disproven.” Raskin said in a statement that DOJ officials signed off on closing the assessment of the information, “having found no evidence” to corroborate the allegations.

The FBI did not confirm Comer’s account of the meeting, but called his pursuit of a contempt vote “unwarranted.”…

If life-time professional GOP fixer Bill ‘Ever Lower’ Barr couldn’t see a way to use this information to hurt Joe Biden, I’m pretty sure it can’t be done. But Comer doesn’t care — he just wants to gin up the far-right mouthbreathers by talking about ‘the taint’.

Jamie Raskin said the Trump DOJ looked into this material and found it wanting.

“They decided there was no grounds to escalate this up the investigative-prosecutorial chain."https://t.co/tB6bhyIfSq

— Arthur Delaney ???? (@ArthurDelaneyHP) June 5, 2023

NEW: Raskin says the FBI interviewed the confidential source as part of its investigation into material funneled from Ukraine by Rudy Giuliani.

Says AG Barr and his "hand-picked" US Attny "signed off on closing the assessment," found "no evidence" corroborating Giuliani's claims

— Arthur Delaney ???? (@ArthurDelaneyHP) June 5, 2023

New from me: I cannot accurately describe the noise I made when I saw CNN report that the claim inside an FBI doc that House Republicans want for their Biden investigation comes from

[wait for it]

Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine Adventures https://t.co/AeI0yfEEK0

— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) June 2, 2023

… Now seems like a good time to point out that the information in these documents amounts to just accusations. Comer knows this because, as Dunham explained in another letter to him sent Tuesday, the FBI provided a deputy assistant director of its Directorate of Intelligence to brief the Oversight Committee’s staff last month on what FD-1023s contain and why they can’t be disseminated. Moreover, Dunham pointed out that recording information from a source “does not validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI.”

That’s important when you consider the provenance of the information that Comer is after. Giuliani threw a series of unverified claims at the DOJ in February 2020, after his fruitless hunt for dirt on Biden in Ukraine had snowballed into his client, former President Donald Trump, being impeached. When confirming that the department had accepted information from Giuliani’s sleuthing, then-Attorney General William Barr said, “We can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.”

The material in question was dubious enough that Barr “directed that they be reviewed by a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, in part because Barr was concerned that Giuliani’s document tranche could taint the ongoing Hunter Biden investigation overseen by the Delaware U.S. attorney,” CNN reported on Wednesday. “Former Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney Scott Brady oversaw the FBI investigation of the Giuliani claims. The 1023 document being demanded by Comer is among the products of that investigation,” CNN reported…

A few important things to note from this. It is increasingly clear that Comer is knowingly making something out of nothing for the headlines it generates. The FBI has been more than patient in explaining why the documents that he’s after can’t be handed over — but it’s far more sensational to imply that the FBI is hiding something to protect Biden. And there’s little to be gained from the document itself, other than information that Giuliani could provide to Comer himself, if it doesn’t contain proof that the claims are true.

But whether the claims are accurate doesn’t matter to the GOP in this case. That’s not me putting words in their mouths. Comer admitted that the House investigations into Biden are justified by the president’s poll numbers, a Kinsley gaffe that he has scrambled to clean up.…

What’s really incredible, though, is that Republicans remain so addicted to Giuliani’s torrent of misinformation, wild speculation and credulous laundering of unverified information provided by shady characters with their own agendas. Trump’s first impeachment shone a glaring spotlight on the speciousness of the claims Giuliani was gathering about supposed misdeeds by the Bidens in Ukraine. And yet, the GOP is still doing exactly what Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine into doing: running investigations that are solely about hurting Biden politically, based on information gathered by a man who has at this point repeatedly proven himself to be a terrible judge of what counts as credible evidence.