House Republicans canceled a Thursday meeting to consider holding FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt for refusing to fully comply with a subpoena in its investigation of President Joe Biden.
(Bloomberg) — House Republicans canceled a Thursday meeting to consider holding FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt for refusing to fully comply with a subpoena in its investigation of President Joe Biden.
The confrontation involved access to a document that Republicans claim links Biden to wrongdoing by an unnamed foreign national.
Both Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer and its top Democrat, Jamie Raskin, had on Monday been given a briefing about the document and looked at it. But Comer argued that the session did not fully oblige his committee’s subpoena. He and Speaker Kevin McCarthy were demanding that all committee members be given access.
In a statement late Wednesday night, Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said “the FBI has caved and is now allowing all members of the Oversight and Accountability Committee to review this unclassified record that memorializes a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden.”
Earlier: FBI Director to Face Contempt of Congress Hearing in Probe
Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, praised the FBI’s “spirit of good faith.”
“Chairman Comer’s acceptance of these further accommodations comes after he has spent weeks attacking the FBI despite its extraordinary efforts to provide committee Republicans the information they claim to seek,” Raskin said in a statement.
The FBI said in a statement on Monday that had “demonstrated its commitment to accommodate the committee’s request, including by producing the document in a reading room at the US Capitol.”
“The escalation to a contempt vote under these circumstances is unwarranted,” the bureau said in the statement.
A White House spokesman, Ian Sams, said in May that the effort to get the document was part a Republican campaign of “lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the president and his family without offering evidence for their claims.”
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