The FBI made good on director Chris Wray’s commitment last week to have agents bring a sensitive document to Congress today, so that it could be reviewed by chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) and ranking member Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) of the House Oversight Committee. The document, as I’ve previously explained, is an informant report — in bureau parlance, an agent interview of a confidential human source, as to which the CHS’s statements are summarized in a standard FBI form, FD 1023. The CHS in question reported in June 2020 on a conversation the informant had with an unidentified person, who claimed that President Joe Biden, while he was Obama administration vice president, was complicit in a bribery scheme with a foreign person.

As I related at the end of last week, the FBI’s agreement to display the document to the committee’s top members induced Comer to pause his push to hold Wray in contempt of Congress. Early this afternoon, shortly after reviewing the document and receiving a briefing from the FBI (one that Comer suggests raised more questions than it answered), Comer announced that he will resume taking steps to hold Wray in contempt of Congress, with the committee likely starting hearings on the matter later this week.

In a nutshell, the FBI’s display of the report to the committee’s two top members is simply not compliance with the subpoena Comer issued to Wray. The subpoena called for the FBI to provide the committee with a copy of the FD-1023. Comer agreed to the FBI’s proposal of the Monday briefing as a next step in the dialogue between the bureau and the committee but did not concede that the briefing would be in full satisfaction of the subpoena. The bureau and committee Republicans are still at odds. The FBI continues to refuse to provide a copy of the document, with redactions to protect the source’s identity, even to the committee’s chairman and ranking member, much less to the full committee, which is what the subpoena demands.

At bottom, this is a dispute about constitutional power. Congress has oversight authority over the FBI, which was created by Congress and whose lawful activities depend on Congress’s providing statutory authority and taxpayer funding.

For years, the FBI, with the support of the Justice Department, has deflected congressional demands for investigative information by claiming that such inquiries could obstruct investigations and imperil sources and methods of intelligence and evidence gathering. This would generally cause Congress to back down. But here’s the important point: Congress backed down out of political calculation, not for legal reasons. As a matter of constitutional law, the FBI has no basis to refuse to disclose information demanded by Congress as part of its oversight responsibility. The bureau can plead that a congressional committee that presses for information is foolishly harming law enforcement and/or national security; but it is up to Congress to decide whether to relent or persist in its demands.

The bureau seems to be under the misimpression that chanting “sources and methods” is some sort of talisman that eviscerates Congress’s legal right to demand information. It isn’t. The FBI used to win these battles because Congress perceived that the bureau had a strong public reputation for nonpartisanship and investigative rigor. Over the last eight years, however, the FBI put itself in the service of the progressive Democratic agenda, including in electoral politics, and it has wounded its reputation by making misrepresentations to the judiciary and systematically violating its surveillance authority. Its public standing has thus significantly diminished. As Comer is demonstrating, Congress is just not that worried about the FBI’s crying wolf; it has been caught in enough malfeasance and misfeasance that many in the public now see the bureau not as the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency, but as just another partisan.

So, besides the fact that a contempt citation against the FBI director is once again a live issue, what do we know after the committee’s top members spoke to the press this afternoon? A few interesting tidbits — although, after they spoke separately, one after the other, it sounded as if Comer and Raskin must not have read the same document or attended the same FBI briefing.

Before continuing, I must repeat this caution. The allegation against President Biden is unproven hearsay. Obviously, anyone can make an allegation, and it is not at all unusual for baseless allegations to be made against powerful people, particularly government officials.

On the other hand, allegations are often how investigations get rolling, particularly if they are credible. Here, the informant in question is apparently a longtime source, with a ten-year track record of providing the FBI with information (for which the bureau has evidently paid handsomely). Moreover, an allegation that Biden has leveraged his political influence for foreign payments to his family is hardly an outlier. It is consistent with a great deal of information amassed by Comer’s committee, by Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), and by public reporting, particularly in connection with the Hunter Biden laptop.

That said, the most jarring contradiction in the dueling Comer and Raskin press statements concerned the state of the investigation. Comer said the FBI represented at the briefing that the CHS’s information is part of an ongoing investigation and that the Biden allegation has not been shown to be false. Raskin, by contrast, claimed that the investigation has already been closed, implicitly because there was nothing to the allegation. Yet, he was dodgy on this point — noting that he hadn’t heard what Comer heard about an ongoing investigation and suggesting that maybe the FBI hadn’t exactly closed its investigation, but had decided not to escalate from a low-level inquiry to a preliminary or full-scale investigation.

Comer’s and Raskin’s versions of the state of things can’t be correct. You can bet, moreover, that Raskin’s performance will only stiffen Comer’s resolve to press for a copy of the document and, eventually, for public hearings. After all, reliable information will only come if the FBI has to answer questions in the open; if everything is kept behind closed doors, and the politicians are left to spin whatever the FBI grudgingly told them, we’ll know nothing.

Raskin is probably kicking himself for saying more in his press conference than he meant to. While Comer kept mum about the country allegedly complicit in the bribery, Raskin disclosed that it was Ukraine (though he tried to walk that back once he realized, based on media questions, that Comer had not mentioned Ukraine in his remarks). In intimating that the FBI had looked into the bribery allegation and refuted it, Raskin claimed that an investigation had been undertaken at the direction of Trump attorney general Bill Barr. Raskin elaborated that Barr assigned Scott Brady — then the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) — to evaluate information proffered to the Justice Department by Rudy Giuliani, then-president Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani maintained that his information established Biden family corruption in Ukraine.

This makes me more, rather than less, suspicious.

To be sure, the Ukraine connection makes sense. It has been reported that the 1023 form of the CHS interview, which is said to have outlined claims of a $5 million bribe, is dated June 30, 2020. That was just 17 days after authorities in Kyiv announced that they had implicated Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky in a $5 million bribery scheme. Burisma is the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that gave Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer, lucrative seats on its board in 2014 — i.e., right after the Obama administration made Vice President Biden its point man on U.S. policy toward the new government in Kyiv. But note: At the time of its June 13, 2020, press conference, the Ukrainian government indicated that Zlochevsky had been trying to bribe Kyiv’s anti-corruption officials; they did not expressly implicate the Bidens.

Still, while we don’t know the identity of the CHS who provided the information in the 1023 form, we can be confident that it is not Giuliani. Whatever the Ukraine connection to the Biden corruption allegation may be, the CHS who heard the information is said to be a credible informant who has been giving the FBI information for years. What’s more, Raskin’s injection of Giuliani into the mix seems eerily similar to efforts by congressional Democrats, top FBI agents (especially Timothy Thibault and Brian Auten), Biden apologists in the intelligence community, and the 2020 Biden campaign to discredit evidence of foreign payments to Biden family members as Russian disinformation. Indeed, when 51 former national-security officials sympathetic to Biden suggested that the New York Post’s October 2020 reporting on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop might be Russian information, they had no basis in the laptop data for that whopper; they were relying on the fact that the Post may have gotten the data from such Trump allies as Giuliani.

In his remarks to the media, Comer made the surprising disclosure that some portion of the documentation that the FBI allowed him to review today was classified. Up until now, it had been reported that the 1023 form was unclassified. Comer was not clear on whether the classified intelligence he was shown (but could not take notes about) was part of the 1023 document or was some other part of the FBI briefing that he and Raskin received. Because we’d been told that the pertinent information was not classified, I had been assuming that the FBI’s relevant investigation was a criminal probe and that the 1023 form was being withheld because it was nonpublic “law-enforcement sensitive” information (i.e., information that, though unclassified, is kept under wraps until there is a case-related reason to disclose it publicly). If some of the information was classified, that suggests that at least some portion of the Biden investigation was (or is) being conducted under the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence authorities.

I am skeptical of the FBI’s motives to withhold the informant information from Congress. It is not just that the FBI lacks a valid legal rationale to refuse compliance with a congressional subpoena of the type at issue. The fact is that Congress gets sensitive information all the time, and it is usually a simple matter for the Justice Department and FBI to provide lawmakers with the gist of the information they are seeking without compromising intelligence sources and methods. Clearly, Comer and other Republicans do not want to be responsible for endangering an informant’s life or blowing a valuable, ongoing intelligence channel.

But I am not saying that this is always easy.

In raising suspicions that President Biden is corrupt, Comer is stressing that the source who provided the information has a long record of being credible. That could be misleading in these circumstances. Understand: From what we’ve been told, the 1023 form does not indicate that the informant personally concluded that Biden engaged in a bribery scheme; instead, the informant heard from another person — whose reliability is not clear — that Biden was implicated in a bribery scheme. The informant apparently was not in a position to gauge whether the allegation he or she reported to the FBI was credible, just that it was made. That’s why it matters what follow-up investigation the FBI did.

But notice two things. First, the informant could have reliably reported an allegation from a third party, but that allegation could still be untrue; our assessment would depend, not on the informant’s credibility, but on what we learned about the third party’s credibility. Second, if the information came to the informant from a third party, as appears to be the case, then the FBI might well be right that there is no way to disclose the information without blowing the informant’s cover, with all the peril that implies.

Bottom line: We know a bit more now than we did before today, but not enough to evaluate whether the information at the center of the Comer–Wray dispute is convincing evidence of corruption on Biden’s part. And Comer is poised to take the steps necessary to hold Wray in contempt.

Obviously, as a law-enforcement officer whose agency relies on subpoena compliance, Director Wray does not want to be cited as a contemnor for flouting a subpoena. Nevertheless, the FBI director knows that, if he thumbs his nose at Comer, he won’t be impeached and removed by the full Congress or prosecuted by the current Justice Department (and it is highly unlikely that a Republican-controlled Justice Department, if there is one in 2025, would indict him for criminal contempt). Chairman Comer is right on the law, but the politics are not on his side. The question is whether the FBI is willing to risk another blackened eye.