The Hunter Biden Whistleblowers The IRS agents are under oath in public. Will Attorney General Merrick Garland respond?
With each day it’s getting harder to believe Attorney General Merrick Garland’s insistence that there was no interference in the Hunter Biden case. A month ago President Biden’s son was given a deal on tax and gun charges that probably means no prison time. Now comes Wednesday’s testimony by two IRS whistleblowers, who say their attempt to investigate Hunter faced unprecedented meddling.
The two IRS agents are Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. Two months back, each had spoken behind closed doors to the House Ways and Means Committee, but Wednesday was their first in the spotlight and the first time that Mr. Ziegler’s name was released.
They say the Justice Department interfered in their investigation, for example, by tipping off Hunter’s legal team to a planned search and preventing questions related to Joe Biden. They also said the IRS team didn’t have access to Hunter’s laptop and or the FD-1023 document in which an FBI informant alleged that Joe and Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.
Some Democrats, such as Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, tried to dismiss this all as normal disagreement between investigators and prosecutors. But Mr. Shapley testified that Justice’s “handling of the Hunter Biden tax investigation was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS.”
They were backed up by a new FBI whistleblower, a former supervisory special agent assigned to the Biden investigation. According to the House Oversight Committee, the FBI agent confirmed Monday that on the day he and Mr. Shapley planned to interview Hunter, agents were told not to approach him and instead to wait for Hunter to call them. The interview never happened.
Mr. Shapley testified that at a meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney assigned the Hunter Biden investigation, admitted to six IRS and FBI agents that he wasn’t the deciding authority. According to Mr. Shapley, Mr. Weiss said he had applied and was turned down for special counsel status.
Mr. Weiss’s statements in response have only added to the confusion. Recently he claimed he never asked for special counsel status, but he discussed a potential appointment as a special attorney, which would have let him “file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney.”
Throughout the hearing instead of pressing Messrs. Shapley and Ziegler for answers, Democrats mostly opted for whataboutism. New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury suggested the testimony was a political waste of the committee’s resources. “The real criminal, and the actual threat to our democratic institutions, is Donald Trump,” she thundered.
The IRS agents who investigated Hunter are saying live on C-Span that they were prevented from getting evidence. The allegations are becoming more specific as the number of witnesses backing them up grows. If Mr. Garland and Mr. Weiss want to persuade America they’re telling the truth, they ought to go before Congress and do what the two IRS agents have now done: answer questions under oath.
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