Bribery accusations involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and foreign nationals were brought to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018, a full two years before similar claims were made by the whistleblower currently cooperating with the House Oversight Committee.

Former federal prosecutor Bud Cummins initially reported the allegations to then-New York US Attorney Geoff Berman on October 4, 2018. In an email acquired by John Solomon's Just The News, Cummins claimed to have evidence that Joe Biden had "exercised influence to protect" his son's Ukrainian employer "in exchange for payments to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and Joe Biden."

Cummins' email stated that Ukraine's then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko wanted to visit the US to meet Berman and could provide two "John Doe" witnesses to substantiate the claims about the Bidens. However, Berman never replied to the email.

Instead, Cummins alleges that federal prosecutors retaliated by secretly obtaining data from his iPhone through a grand jury subpoena to Apple on December 9, 2019, amid then-President Donald Trump's impeachment proceedings.

Cummins, who served as Arkansas' chief federal prosecutor under George W. Bush, expressed his disappointment with the DOJ's lack of follow-up: "I can't really imagine a legitimate reason for the DOJ not to follow up on an offer like that. I felt like it was stonewalled."

He added, "It doesn't make much sense to investigate the guy who brings you the allegation rather than the allegation."

When Apple informed him in October that his data had been accessed three years earlier, Cummins found it "perverse that you report an allegation of a pretty serious crime and they don't investigate [it] but they were investigating you."

Cummins' report was one of several warning signs the DOJ received between 2016 and 2020 regarding the Biden family's influence-peddling scheme. The FBI has held Hunter's abandoned laptop since December 2019. Additionally, Tony Bobulinski, Hunter's former business associate, turned over the contents of his three devices to the FBI and offered evidence of then-candidate Biden's involvement in his son's overseas business transactions during a five-hour interview just days before the 2020 election.