GOP's whistleblower was indicted months before James Comer called him 'a credible source': court documents

National security expert Marcy Wheeler posted a screen capture Tuesday from the court documents for the indictment of the GOP's Hunter Biden whistleblower. What it reveals is that, long before the GOP considered him a "credible source," he was indicted by the Justice Department.

On Nov. 1, 2022, Gal Luft, the director of a Washington, D.C., think tank, was indicted, the papers show. The indictment was then sealed.

It was only a few days later that the Republican Party won back the House. In Jan. 2023, when the Republicans took over Congress, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) became the chair of the Oversight Committee and brought in Luft to give information on President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

"He's very credible and the people on MSNBC who made fun of me when I said we had an informant that was missing, they should feel like fools right now. And this is their worst nightmare," Comer told Newsmax.

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment Monday. It claims he violated Iranian sanctions, trafficked weapons and aided the Chinese government without registering as a foreign agent.

Comer claimed that Luft delivered secret information about a deal between the Bidens and an energy company in China. It was something that The Washington Post reported on about a year before Comer's investigation began. Before that, the Republican-led Senate did its own investigation into the deal in 2020, finding nothing that they could use to attack Biden during the 2020 election.

Luft told the Justice Department that he was working with the Chinese energy company. His involvement in the company is what made him a "whistleblower" in the minds of the Republican House members.

Then, Comer began sounding the alarm that Luft had somehow disappeared. Conspiracies ran wild about where Luft was. As it turns out, his indictment could have been what was taking up so much of his time.

“The timing is always coincidental according to the Democrats at the Department of Justice,” Comer said on Tuesday about the indictment and Luft's video.

But the timing doesn't exactly fit with Comer's narrative because the indictment didn't come on Monday. It was only announced and unsealed on Monday. Luft was indicted before Comer became the chairman of the Oversight Committee.

Still, Republicans have rushed to craft conspiracies around the indictment of Luft, claiming it's all part of the "weaponization of government."

As it turns out, Luft is being accused of being an unregistered foreign agent for China. As NBC News' Tom Winter explained, "when you don't register as a foreign agent, you're not technically conducting espionage on their behalf. But you're putting forward their interests. That's really one of the key components of the charges here."

Another claim made by Luft was that he met with Justice Department prosecutors in Brussels in 2019 during Donald Trump's administration. Wheeler noticed, those proseuctors were the same prosecutors named on the indictment. It led her to suspect that they weren't trying to collect information on the Bidens, but may have been "assessing him as a criminal."

Wheeler later noted that when Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) was removed from the Intelligence Committee for briefly dating a Chinese spy ten years ago, it was under the guise of national security. Ten years prior, Swalwell never brought the woman to Congress or used her as a witness in a hearing. In this case, Comer has. It promopted her to wonder if perhaps Comer should be removed from his post as well for security reasons.