After months of wrangling for transparency with a tight-lipped FBI, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Thursday unilaterally released a lightly redacted copy of an internal FBI document containing allegations from a trusted informant about a bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a top Burisma executive in Ukraine, Breitbart reported.

Grassley asserted that he obtained the FBI's FD-1023 form -- which outlines conversations with the Ukrainian energy firm's founder and CEO, Mykola Zlochevsky, about paying off Joe and Hunter Biden -- through "legally protected disclosures" from anonymous Justice Department whistleblowers.

Informant learned of Burisma bribe to Bidens

The four-page report dated June 30, 2020, first detailed the recollection of the "CHS," or confidential human source, about a meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2015 or 2016 with multiple executives of the Burisma energy firm to discuss plans for the Ukrainian company to purchase a U.S.-based energy company for the purpose of an initial public offering (IPO) on a stock exchange.

It was noted in that conversation that Hunter Biden had been hired to sit on Burisma's board of directors in order to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems." However, it was also acknowledged that "Hunter Biden was not smart, " which is why Burisma needed additional assistance from the CHS and others.

The CHS then recalled a 2016 meeting in Vienna, Austria with just Zlochevsky and one other Burisma executive to further discuss the plans to purchase a U.S.-based company for an IPO, during which the CHS raised concerns about the ongoing anti-corruption investigation of then-Ukrainian General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin, to which Zlochevsky reportedly replied, "Don't worry Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad."

The informant continued to argue against the plan to buy a U.S.-based company and also suggested that Zlochevsky should just pay a Ukrainian attorney $50,000 to fight against Shokin in court. Yet, Zlochevsky was said to have laughed off that suggestion and said that instead of $50,000, "it costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden."

The CHS recalled that he continued to advise Zlochevsky against his apparent course of action to handle Shokin's investigation but noted that the Burisma executive seemed confident that the Bidens would handle everything for him in that regard.

Subsequent meetings and phone calls

The FD-1023 form then skipped ahead to a phone call in late 2016/early 2017 between the CHS and Zlochevsky during which Zlochevsky lamented the election of then-President Donald Trump and revealed that he had felt "forced or coerced to pay" the aforementioned bribes to the Bidens.

When asked if he had any proof to support the claim of being forced to pay the Bidens, Zlochevsky asserted that he had numerous text messages and "recordings" -- later revealed to be "17 recordings," including two with Joe Biden and 15 with Hunter Biden -- as well as "documents" that were presumably wire transfer receipts.

The form also mentioned the informant's recollection of a 2019 meeting in London with the other Burisma executive from the Vienna meeting that initially discussed other matters but eventually led to another phone call with Zlochevsky in which the founder and CEO of Burisma joked that he should have listened to the informant's advice years earlier to not get involved with the Bidens, given all of the negative news at that time about Hunter Biden's board position with the company.

It was during that conversation that Zlochevsky reportedly said he didn't pay the "Big Guy" directly but rather funneled the money through various shell companies and that it would take investigators "10 years" to fully unravel the complicated transfer.

Sen. Grassley, Chairman Comer issue statements

"For the better part of a year, I’ve been pushing the Justice Department and FBI to provide details on its handling of very significant allegations from a trusted FBI informant implicating then-Vice President Biden in a criminal bribery scheme," Sen. Grassley said in a statement. "While the FBI sought to obfuscate and redact, the American people can now read this document for themselves, without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats, thanks to brave and heroic whistleblowers."

The Iowa senator added, "What did the Justice Department and FBI do with the detailed information in the document? And why have they tried to conceal it from Congress and the American people for so long? The Justice Department and FBI have failed to come clean, but Chairman Comer and I intend to find out."

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said, "The FBI’s Biden Bribery Record tracks closely with the evidence uncovered by the Oversight Committee’s Biden family influence-peddling investigation. In the FBI’s record, the Burisma executive claims that he didn’t pay the ‘big guy’ directly but that he used several bank accounts to conceal the money. That sounds an awful lot like how the Bidens conduct business: using multiple bank accounts to hide the source and total amount of the money."

"At our hearing with IRS whistleblowers, they testified that they had never seen or heard of this record during the Biden criminal investigation, despite having potentially corroborating evidence," the Kentucky congressman added. "Given the misconduct and politicization at the Department of Justice, the American people must be able to read this record for themselves. I thank Senator Grassley for providing much-needed transparency to the American people. We must hold the Department of Justice accountable for seeking to bury this record to protect the Bidens."