FBI Director Christopher Wray has confirmed the existence of a document alleging that President Joe Biden engaged in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national according to Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
In a Twitter post, the panel announced that Wray had told them the document was real and offered to let them review it, but has failed to produce the document for the Oversight Committee as a whole.
If true, the acknowledgment is the latest in an escalating showdown between House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Wray over the document.
In a May 3 letter, Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that they received “highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures” that the FBI possessed an unclassified record that “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”
Comer gave Wray a May 30 deadline to produce the document or face charges for contempt of Congress—a deadline Wray missed. The threat got a boost after it won the support of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who agreed to hold Wray in contempt if the deadline wasn’t met.
On May 31, Wray met with Comer and others, when he allegedly revealed the truth of the document’s existence.
But he’s failed to turn it over to the panel, prompting Republicans to again warn that they’ll move forward with contempt charges.
“If the FBI fails to hand over the FD-1023 form as required by the subpoena, [Comer] will begin contempt of Congress proceedings,” the Oversight panel wrote on Twitter.
After the announcement, the White House criticized Comer’s investigation into the matter, calling it a “silly charade” and “yet another reminder that his so-called ‘investigations’ are political stunts not meant to get information but to spread thin innuendo and falsehoods to attack the president.
“He has already admitted this isn’t about uncovering facts but about trying to hurt the president’s poll numbers, so the only question left is how long he will waste time, energy, and taxpayer dollars to support a fact-free, politically motivated goose chase simply to get media attention and the Fox News spotlight.”
This is a reference to an earlier comment Comer made, saying, “Look at that polling,” in regard to the public opinion outcome of his investigations into the president’s business dealings.
FBI Reply
Wray’s agency, already facing allegations of weaponization, was accused by several Republicans of withholding the document in order to protect Biden.
In an emailed response to The Epoch Times, the FBI said that it “remains committed to cooperating with the Committee in good faith,” saying that it has made an “extraordinary accommodation” to meet Comer’s request while complying with confidentiality and national security requirements.
“In a letter to Chairman Comer earlier today, the FBI committed to providing access to information responsive to the Committee’s subpoena in a format and setting that maintains confidentiality and protects important security interests and the integrity of FBI investigations,” a spokesperson said.
“Last week, Director Wray scheduled a telephone call for tomorrow to provide additional details of the FBI’s extraordinary accommodation to satisfy the subpoena request.”
The agency dismissed calls to hold Wray in contempt, saying, “Any discussion of escalation under these circumstances is unnecessary.”
The Bidens’ Business Dealings
Due to the FBI’s reluctance to hand over the document, it remains unclear what the exact charges leveled against Biden are. But Republicans have long sought to learn more about possible ethical concerns in the Bidens’ business dealings.
In January 2023, days after Republicans retook control of the House, Comer sent a request for information related to art sales made by Hunter Biden.
Just weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published a report documenting findings from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had reportedly been forgotten at a computer repair shop.
Among other findings, emails on the laptop revealed that while he was still the vice president, Biden had been introduced to a top executive at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father,” reads an April 17, 2015, email allegedly sent from Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma executive, to Hunter Biden.
In December 2015, Joe Biden candidly admitted to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 that he threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee from Ukraine if a prosecutor looking into Burisma was not removed from his post. This threat came about eight months after Pozharskyi allegedly met the elder Biden.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden said of the affair in 2018.
“Well, son of a [expletive],” Biden continued. “He got fired.”
If true, this would mean that Biden’s oft-repeated claim that he has had no role in his son’s business dealings is false.
‘Don’t Mention Joe Being Involved’
James Gilliar, one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, allegedly told fellow partner Tony Bobulinski in a May 20, 2017, email not to mention “Joe being involved.”
“Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that, but they are paranoid,” Gilliar told Bobulinski.
Bobulinski, who confirmed the authenticity of the emails in a later statement, replied at the time, “OK, they should be paranoid about things.”
Another email relayed from Gilliar to Hunter Biden, Bobulinski, and a fourth business partner on May 13, 2017, described the breakdown of each member’s shares in a Chinese business venture dubbed Sinohawk.
“’Sino’ for the Chinese side, ‘hawk’ for Hunter’s brother Beau’s favorite animal,” Bobulinski later explained.
Gilliar suggested each of the primary business partners would receive 20 percent. Another participant, called “Jim” by Gilliar, and likely referring to Biden’s brother, apparently was to receive 10 percent. Finally, the other 10 percent would be “held by H for the big guy.”
On Oct. 22, 2020, Bobulinski made a public statement confirming that “the big guy” was indeed a reference to Joe Biden.
The document alleged by whistleblower allegations could give a more solid basis to allegations of Biden’s business dealings if recovered.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.