Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are saying the whistleblower who alleges President Biden received a $5 million bribe when he was vice president will not come forward due to safety fears. 

The claims were made following a meeting that select members of the Oversight Committee had with FBI officials on Monday after a month-long fight to gain access to the secret whistleblower complaint, known as an FR-1023 form. 

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sits on the powerful committee, told the Daily Mail that the whistleblower “fears for their own life because of our government.” The Georgia lawmaker said that the FBI’s “excuse” for not turning over the document to committee members is that the agency wants “to protect their informants, even though the names are redacted.”

“The unclassified document should be in our hands right now,” Ms. Greene said. 

Congresswoman Anna Pauling Luna echoed those sentiments, writing on Twitter that the FBI “is afraid their informant will be killed if unmasked, based on the info he has brought forward about the Biden family,”

The committee chairman, Congressman James Comer, announced on Monday after viewing the document that he will move forward with holding the FBI director, Christopher Wray, in contempt of Congress due to lack of compliance with a congressional subpoena. 

The document reportedly alleges Mr. Biden received a $5 million bribe from a foreign interest while serving under President Obama and was paid in exchange for favorable actions in policy.  

Mr. Comer had subpoenaed the document on May 3 and continuously demanded the FBI turn over the document week after week as the agency refused. Facing a hard deadline to produce the document or face contempt charges, Mr. Wray eventually offered to show Mr. Comer the document at FBI headquarters, which the chairman said was not in compliance with the subpoena and asked that he see it at the Capitol. 

The FBI then relented and brought the document to Capitol Hill, where Mr. Comer and the Democratic ranking member, Congressman Jamie Raskin, reviewed it under FBI supervision. Mr. Comer said that simply allowing committee leaders to view the document was still not in compliance with the subpoena, as it required the FBI to “produce the document” to the committee. The chairman has now promised to begin contempt proceedings on Thursday, something Speaker McCarthy said he supports. 

“At the briefing, the FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody of the House Oversight Committee,” Mr. Comer said at a press conference after reviewing the document. “And we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday.”

Mr. Comer also said that the person who alleged Mr. Biden received the $5 million bribe is a highly credible individual who provided reliable information to government investigators during the Obama administration.

If Mr. Wray is held in contempt, it is unlikely anything would come of it as the Department of Justice — of which Mr. Wray is an employee — is given discretion in deciding whether to pursue charges, and the agency has a history of not prosecuting its own. Attorney General Holder was held in contempt of Congress over the notorious “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal during the Obama administration and nothing happened thereafter. 

While congressional Republicans have long focused on Hunter Biden as being at the nexus of possible payment schemes to the family, the whistleblower report could be the first instance of a whistleblower directly tying the sitting president to foreign entities.