Democrats on the House Oversight Committee called for an investigation on Wednesday into whether the committee’s Republicans relied on falsehoods and misinformation provided by Gal Luft, a supposed “whistleblower” in the Biden family probe who has been charged with being an unregistered foreign agent for China and lying to investigators.
In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D0MAD) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) brought up the laundry list of charges against Luft, claiming the recently unsealed indictment by the Justice Department “eviscerates and credibility” Luft has as a witness.
“We are concerned that an official committee of the House of Representatives has been manipulated by an apparent con man who, while a fugitive from justice, attempted to fortify his defense by laundering unfounded and potentially false allegations through Congress,” the letter reads.
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“Although Mr. Luft has been on the run for months, you touted him as a ‘potential witness’ and even prepared to interview him as part of your investigation,” the statement continues. “As recently as Friday, you described Mr. Luft as ‘a very credible witness’ about matters relating to the President’s son’s financial dealings with Chinese companies.”
The committee Democrats also said that it “appears as if Mr. Luft sought ‘whistleblower’ status to shield himself from prosecution, as the indictment was actually handed down last November and he was initially arrested in Cyprus in February. Luft had since been on the run after he skipped bail in April.
Adding that the reliance on Luft as a witness raised concerns that he may have been manipulating Republicans “in furtherance of the CCP’s efforts to undermine U.S. security interests and the President of the United States,” the Democrats urged Comer to launch an investigation “into whether the Committee may have been unwittingly duped by Mr. Luft.”
Furthermore, the letter said that due to Comer’s “own public endorsements of Mr. Luft’s information,” there was “no plausible basis” for the chairman to now withhold from Democrats any information that Luft had provided to committee Republicans.
For months, Comer has suggested that one of the reasons he hasn’t been able to provide any real evidence tying President Joe Biden to corruption in his family’s foreign business dealings is that the committee’s star witness had gone “missing.”
“Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” he told Fox News in May. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”
Comer added: “We’re hopeful that we can find the informant. Remember, these informants are kind of in the spy business, so they don’t make a habit of being seen a lot or being high-profile or anything like that.”
After Luft resurfaced last week in a video shared by the New York Post’s Miranda Devine, claiming that he jumped bail because there was “virtually zero” chance of receiving a fair trial, Comer doubled down on Luft’s credibility as an informant.
“Gal Luft, a very credible witness on Biden family corruption, provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the DOJ in a meeting in Brussels in March 2019,” Comer told Newsmax on Friday. “We have no reason to believe the FBI & DOJ acted on this info.”
In light of the unsealed indictment, Republicans have since suggested that the DOJ is trying to “silence our witnesses” with the charges, despite the fact that they were handed down months ago.
