If confirmed, explosive whistleblower testimony by a senior Internal Revenue Service agent released by a House committee yesterday adds to evidence that President Biden was up to his neck in his family’s lucrative business of cashing in on his political influence. Given that this business involves millions of dollars in suspiciously structured payments to Biden family accounts from corrupt and anti-American regimes, prominently including the Chinese Communist Party, national security demands that Congress prioritize this investigation.
Of equally immediate concern, particularly after the sweetheart plea bargain the Biden Justice Department just announced it is giving the president’s son, Hunter Biden, to dispose of his serious tax and firearms crimes, someone in that investigation is lying. Specifically, if the testimony IRS supervisory agent Gary A. Shapley Jr. has provided to the House Ways and Means Committee is true, then the testimony Attorney General Merrick Garland provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee was false.
Let’s start with President Biden’s involvement in the family business. Despite what Shapley portrays as the Justice Department’s zealous efforts to cut investigators off from damning evidence, they did manage to obtain a threatening WhatsApp message that Hunter Biden sent on July 30, 2017, to Henry Zhao — who investigators suspect is a Chinese Communist Party official and an executive of a business that, committee investigators say, had paid Hunter $100,000. Hunter wrote:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.
Obviously, it is imperative that there be a diligent investigation to determine what this call was about. The fact that Hunter was invoking his powerful father is cause for concern on its face, but the FBI and IRS should already have confirmed whether the now-president was sitting beside his extortion-minded son.
Yet, if Shapley and other whistleblowers are right, diligent investigation is exactly what federal agents have been prevented from doing.
Shapley testified about extensive Justice Department interference. The Biden investigation started nearly five years ago, in November 2018. By late the following year, the FBI had not only learned of and obtained the laptop that Hunter Biden abandoned in a computer-repair shop; the bureau had confirmed that the data belonged to Hunter Biden and alerted the IRS that it likely contained evidence of tax crimes.
Yet, as our Andrew C. McCarthy has recounted (here and here), Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) has reported that senior FBI officials colluded with congressional Democrats in 2020 to portray the substantial evidence of financial chicanery amassed by Senators Grassley and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) as Russian disinformation; and, according to tech executives, senior FBI officials admonished them that social-media companies would be abetting Russian interference in the presidential election if they allowed late-breaking derogatory information to be disseminated on their platforms. This led directly to the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on the incriminating laptop data in October 2020 (months after the FBI had established the data’s authenticity); and to the Biden campaign’s collaboration with former national-security officials to gin up a letter falsely suggesting that the laptop reporting was a Russian intelligence operation — a letter that then-candidate Biden used as cover when then-president Trump raised the laptop in the final debate shortly before Election Day.
In the years leading up to the 2020 election, the Biden probe was assigned to Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee whose confirmation in the president’s home state was supported by its Democratic senators (Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons). Following the transition to a new administration, Weiss was retained to continue running the investigation by the Biden Justice Department, even though other Trump-appointed district U.S. attorneys were fired. Garland refused to appoint a special counsel despite the obvious conflict of interest in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son (and, more broadly, the Biden family influence-peddling business). The attorney general’s rationale was that the case was in the capable hands of a Trump appointee and vowed that there would be no political interference.
We’ve always been skeptical about that commitment. Because the Hunter Biden matter has been categorized as a tax investigation, Justice Department rules call for involvement and sign-off by Tax Division at Main Justice, which is run by Biden appointees. Moreover, if the venue for any charges lay outside Delaware, Weiss would need permission from the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those federal districts to file them. Tax charges, for example, must be filed where the taxpayer’s return is filed or prepared, or where he resides. In Hunter Biden’s case, that would be the District of Columbia or the Central District of California.
Nevertheless, Garland has repeatedly testified, most recently in questioning by Senator Grassley just three months ago, that Weiss had been instructed that he would not be interfered with, that he would not be blocked by any other district U.S. attorney, and that Garland would personally grant him any authority he needed to bring cases in any district Weiss believed was necessary. (See here, beginning at the 58-minute mark, or here.)
Shapley recounts, however, that throughout 2020, the IRS was thwarted in its efforts to conduct a search of Hunter Biden’s residences, interviews with his business associates, and basic follow-up of investigative leads. For the most part, he says, the strictures and slow-walking were decreed by a career prosecutor in Weiss’s office, assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf. She claimed that the Justice Department needed to be careful of the “optics” of investigating the son of the then-Democratic nominee because DOJ was under “fire” that was “self-inflicted,” requiring that it “repair” its “reputation” — apparent allusions to the dismal DOJ/FBI performance in the 2016 Clinton-email and Russiagate probes.
The whistleblower agent maintains that Wolf and other Justice Department lawyers not only vetoed searches for which they acknowledged there was probable cause, but that Wolf also tipped off one of Hunter Biden’s lawyers about a storage locker to which Biden had transferred documents from his Washington business office.
Furthermore, according to the whistleblower, when agents were planning to interview Biden associate Rob Walker about a now-notorious email, which related that Hunter was to hold a 10 percent stake “for the big guy” in an anticipated multimillion-dollar deal with Chinese government–connected CEFC, Wolf is said to have directed them not to ask questions about President Biden. According to Shapley, over objections from both FBI and IRS agents, Wolf insisted that there was “no specific criminality to that line of questioning,” and therefore they were not to ask about “the big guy” or “dad.”
As the investigation continued under the Biden Justice Department, Shapley recounts that agents were not given access to the Biden laptop evidence and were prevented by Wolf and the Tax Division from conducting interviews with essential witnesses. Eventually, the Justice Department had the entire IRS team removed from the probe over its complaints about the preferential treatment accorded the president’s son. Shapley says DOJ has also developed a sudden interest in collecting years of his email correspondence documenting investigative irregularities.
Most disturbing, despite Garland’s sworn commitments to the contrary, Weiss is said to have acknowledged to the agents that when he pushed in 2022 to file tax-evasion charges against Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., and the Central District of California, he was rebuffed by Matthew Graves and Martin Estrada, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those districts. Weiss confessed at an October 7, 2022, meeting, “I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed.” He elaborated that the Justice Department had turned him down flat when he asked for special-counsel authority so he could file charges over the objections of Biden’s appointees — exactly the opposite of what Garland promised would happen.
In the course of this dithering, the statute of limitations lapsed on key charges. Investigators had gathered proof that Hunter Biden failed to register as a foreign agent for Burisma, the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that put him on its board while his father was running point on Obama administration Ukraine policy. In addition, in 2014 and 2015, he evaded taxes on his lavish Burisma income. Such charges should have been the backbone of any tax and corruption prosecution against Biden; now they are time-barred.
Garland vowed that the Biden investigation would proceed independently. That investigation has implicated the president in the shady business dealings of his son, who appears to have committed serious crimes. Now, the investigating agents claim the probe has been sabotaged by Garland’s department — the same Biden DOJ that just gave away the store in the plea bargain. Garland, Weiss, Wolf, and everyone connected to this growing scandal owe the nation answers, forthwith.