House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is demanding a transcribed interview with an FBI official who reportedly mislead Republican senators to offer congressional Democrats ammunition in a smear campaign.
On Wednesday, the Ohio Republican sent a letter to Amazon Senior Risk Manager Bradley Benavides, who worked in a senior role at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division from 2019 to 2022, requesting the former agency official appear before House lawmakers.
“On August 6, 2020, you provided a briefing to Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson that hampered their investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments and questionable foreign nationals,” Jordan wrote.
The two GOP senators would later blast the 2020 briefing as an “unnecessary” exercise that “provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.”
“The allegations that the FBI arranged a briefing for two United States senators as a
pretext to impede their investigation — and then leaked that briefing to the media — are deeply
troubling,” Jordan wrote. “We, therefore, ask that you make yourself available for a transcribed interview with Committee staff.” Jordan gave Benavides until the end of the day on June 21 to provide a schedule to the House.
Johnson and Grassley ultimately published their report on Hunter Biden’s financial dealings in September 2020, a month before the infamous laptop surfaced in the New York Post. The senators found Hunter Biden took $3.5 million from an ex-Moscow mayor’s wife. Senate investigators also accused the younger Biden
