The compelling congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblower agents has established three things.
First, the investigation into Biden corruption — millions of dollars pouring into the family coffers from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes seeking to buy Joe Biden’s political influence — is real and has been thwarted by the Biden Justice Department. Second, the president’s son Hunter Biden received preferential treatment, and, next week, a federal judge should reject the sweetheart plea deal he was given by the Justice Department. Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland owes the country an explanation for why the Biden investigation has been sabotaged from within, even as he maintains publicly that it was conducted with independence and integrity.
The two whistleblowers — supervisory agent Gary Shapley and the Biden investigation’s main case agent, Joseph Ziegler — began cooperating with the House Ways and Means Committee several weeks back. While Shapley went public in June, Ziegler was not publicly identified until Wednesday’s hearing. Their revelations have been jaw-dropping.
The agents recounted being blocked at every turn by Justice Department prosecutors as they tried to go about the routine steps investigators would take in any case — or, at least, any case not involving politically connected suspects. The investigation was slow-walked by prosecutors from the office of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss, to whom the case was assigned in 2018.
Garland and congressional Democrats never tire of branding Weiss a Trump-appointee — it’s Garland’s rationalization for not appointing a special counsel. Conveniently omitted from this story is the fact that Weiss could not have been confirmed absent the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators, Biden allies Tom Carper and Chris Coons. More to the point, Weiss reports to Garland and, because the Hunter Biden matter is a tax case, DOJ rules dictate that any tax charges must be approved by the Tax Division at Main Justice — run by Biden appointees. Most obviously, Weiss’s appointment by Trump does nothing to eradicate the conflict of interest inherent in the Biden Justice Department’s investigation of the president’s son over conduct in which the president himself is implicated.
Weiss and his underlings used the pendency of the 2020 presidential campaign as an excuse to instruct the IRS and FBI agents on the case not to take measures that might call attention to the investigation and thus influence the election. Note that, simultaneously, according to tech executives and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, FBI agents were signaling that the pre-election emergence of derogatory information about the Bidens — e.g., the Hunter laptop and the influx of money from foreign sources — was likely the result of a Russian intelligence operation.
After Biden was elected, Shapley and Ziegler recalled being undermined in attempting to uncover evidence. The day before they planned to conduct interviews of Hunter Biden and other investigative subjects, the FBI alerted the Secret Service, which tipped off the Biden transition team. As a result, lawyers for Hunter and most other subjects refused to speak to the IRS. In connection with interviews that were later planned, the lead prosecutor from Weiss’s office, Lesley Wolf, forbade them from pursuing investigative leads that could potentially connect the president himself to the Biden family business — instructing them not to ask questions about Hunter’s “dad,” or about “the big guy” (as we now know several investigative subjects referred to the now-president).
In 2019, the FBI obtained Hunter’s laptop, teeming with data about the Bidens’ lucrative foreign transactions and Joe Biden’s potential connections to them; yet Weiss’s office denied the IRS agents access to this evidence. In early September 2020, Wolf agreed with the agents that there was more than enough probable cause to support a warrant to search a guest house at the Bidens’ Wilmington residence where Hunter was living; still, she is said to have declined to seek the warrant because “the optics” would be bad. After the election, the agents learned that Hunter had moved documents from his business office in Washington, D.C., to a commercial storage unit in northern Virginia. They convinced Weiss, over Wolf’s objection, to allow them to seek a search warrant if Hunter did not access the unit for 30 days. But, while the agents were preparing the warrant, Wolf precluded them by alerting Hunter’s defense lawyers about the existence of the storage unit, again putting the evidence out of the investigators’ reach.
Shapley and Ziegler are among the IRS’s most experienced and accomplished agents. Despite the strictures placed on them, they built a compelling tax case against Hunter Biden — even the limited evidence, according to Ziegler, showed that Hunter had evaded roughly $2.2 million in taxes on $8.3 million in foreign income between 2014 and 2019. The agents and the line lawyers in DOJ’s Tax Division and Weiss’s office all agreed that a felony prosecution was called for.
Nevertheless, Shapley recounted a meeting with the top investigators on the case at which Weiss conceded that he was not the final decision-maker on whether charges could be filed. Delaware was not the proper venue for tax charges — those could be indicted only in Washington, D.C. (for tax years 2014 and 2015), or California (for the subsequent years). Weiss explained to the flabbergasted agents that he had asked the Justice Department to give him special-counsel authority so that he could file charges in any federal district without interference, but had been rebuffed. He was thus being blocked from filing charges by Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington.
The 2014 and 2015 tax years included Hunter’s lavish, undeclared income from his sinecure at the allegedly corrupt Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. This period is crucial to the potential corruption scheme. According to information provided to the FBI by an informant with a reliable track record (and released yesterday by Senator Chuck Grassley), after speaking with then–Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky placed Hunter on the company’s board and paid him over $80,000 per month (a rate that, reportedly, was roughly halved once Joe Biden was no longer vice president). The informant added that Zlochevsky told him he’d paid then–Vice President Biden and his son a combined $10 million bribe to use Biden’s influence on Burisma’s behalf, and had made the payments through a byzantine array of companies and accounts that he bragged would take investigators a decade to trace to Joe Biden. This alleged scheme strongly resembles the pattern uncovered by House investigators showing foreign actors paying Biden family members (including grandchildren) millions of dollars through labyrinthine channels that included some 20 obscure business entities, most of which Hunter set up while Joe was vice president.
Yet, the Biden Justice Department’s infighting and foot-dragging caused the statute of limitations for the 2014 and 2015 tax years to lapse, vitiating some of the investigation’s key allegations. And it gets worse. Shapley and Ziegler testified Wednesday that, in the interests of negotiating a plea agreement, Hunter’s lawyers had agreed to extend the statute of limitations by stipulation; it was the Justice Department that allowed the charges to lapse. This is simply inexcusable: Prosecutors never have an incentive to forego the possibility of filing serious criminal charges.
As for the tax years from 2016 through 2019, Shapley learned that, when Biden’s newly appointed U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, E. Martin Estrada, was confirmed in September 2022, the felony tax charges for those years were rejected. It is thus through the tender loving care of Biden appointees that Hunter was given the sweetheart plea bargain which — if Delaware federal judge Maryellen Noreika approves it next week — would allow him to dispose of the case with pleas to two misdemeanor tax charges. Not only would there apparently be no incarceration term; it is anticipated that a gun charge — for which someone not named Biden would be staring at a prison sentence of up to ten years — would be dismissed.
Garland has insisted for years that Weiss had ultimate authority over whether and where to file charges. Weiss initially backed this story publicly, but he has subtly changed his tune since the whistleblower disclosures began. Realizing how credible and corroborated the agents are, Weiss has strained to avoid contradicting them while echoing Garland, a needle that can’t be threaded. After claiming the mantle of ultimate authority, he conceded that he could not indict outside Delaware, but made the caveat that he had been consulting with the Justice Department about that problem. Later, he weaseled about how he had never formally sought special-counsel authority — which doesn’t address whether he told a room full of agents that his request for it had been denied, and whether he didn’t seek it because he knew it would be denied.
Meantime, Garland’s story is a crock. He asserts that Weiss would have been given any necessary authority — he only needed to ask. But the U.S. attorneys for Washington and California work for Garland; they couldn’t have blocked Weiss without the attorney general’s support. And it’s not a district U.S. attorney’s job to ask the attorney general for special-counsel authority — which would be tantamount to asking to be fired since, by regulation, a special counsel must be a lawyer “from outside the United States Government.” Rather, it is the attorney general’s duty to appoint a special counsel if there is a conflict of interest that prevents the Justice Department from investigating in the normal course.
Garland knew there could be no more profound conflict of interest than a Biden Justice Department investigation of a corruption scheme involving the first family. The scandal is that, instead of doing his duty, the attorney general manacled his own Justice Department’s investigation. Thanks to the eye-opening whistleblower testimony, Garland has lots of explaining to do.