Whistleblower: Biden DOJ Sabotaged Hunter Biden case
Это же был трамповский прокурор! (тм)
The House has just released the testimony of IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, an IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent who was assigned to the Hunter Biden investigation. And his testimony is damning.
If you’re curious about the whistleblower’s credentials, let’s start by saying he’s highly qualified and apolitical. He started wit the IRS in 2009 and currently oversees a staff of 12 agents. They work “all high-dollar, complex, international cases” and investigate “foreign financial institutions” and are responsible for “undercover operations and search warrants.”
He was motived to blow the whistle “because the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, Department of Justice Tax, and Department of Justice provided preferential treatment and unchecked conflicts of interest in an important and high-profile investigation of the President's son, Hunter Biden.”
Preferential treatment of Hunter Biden might be an understatement. In reality, it was sabotage, the affirmative effort to decline investigative steps and deny prosecutors the ability to bring charges. The DOJ’s conduct included:
“included slow-walking investigative steps, not allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators' line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before elections.”
Prosecutors even wanted to remove Hunter Biden’s name from electronic search warrants and document requests, even though this could cause investigators to not get certain evidence.
Shapley testified that once Biden became the presumptive Democrat nominee for President, “career DOJ officials dragged their feet on the IRS” taking investigative steps such as interviewing witnesses and approving search warrants. For example, in August 2020, just a few months before the presidential election, prosecutors denied investigators’ requests to develop a strategy to look into Hunter Biden’s communications and “denied investigators’ suggestion” to obtain location data.
One such text, released today, was sent by Hunter Biden via WhatsApp on July 30, 2017. It threatened Henry Zhao (a Chinese Communist Party official and CEO of Harvest Fund Management) with retaliation for not fulfilling a financial commitment. Former Vice President Joe Biden was said by Hunter to be ready to assist with that retaliation. Read it in full:
“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.”
In September 2020 meeting, one Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) conceded that “a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden” but said there was no way a search warrant would be approved. (It appears that search warrant was never approved after Biden’s election.) Treasury records completed around that time confirm the conversation.
That same month (September 2020), a search warrant for Blue Star Strategies (associated with Hunter Biden) for Foreign Agent Registration Act violations was also “being sat on by” the DOJ. It then got worse: again in September 2020, the Deputy Attorney General “issued a cease and desist of all over investigative activities due to the coming election.”
By October 2020, US Attorney David Weiss (who is handling the Hunter Biden investigation) had “reviewed the affidavit for search warrant of Hunter Biden's residence and agreed that probable cause had been achieved.” Yet again this search was not allowed by the DOJ.
After the 2020 election, investigators wanted to question witnesses about an e-mail that said “Ten held by H for the big guy.” The AUSA “said she did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to ask questions about ‘dad’”. She ignored objections from agents and investigators, and provided a false limitation to what investigators could ask.
The sabotage of the investigation would continue. InDecember 2020, that same AUSA blocked a search warrant for all documents in Hunter Biden’s storage unit. She then “reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit,” potentially allowing a target of a criminal investigation to remove evidence of those crimes before the search was conducted.
Yet agents and analysts continued to obtain evidence supporting numerous charges against Hunter Biden. By 2022, there was support for “charging Hunter Biden for tax evasion and false return in 2014, 2018, and 2019, and failure to file or pay for 2015, 2016, and 2017.” (The tax liability was estimated by Shapley to be around $2.2 million.) The DOJ Tax Division then authored a 90+ page memo (that included thousands of pages of evidence) that recommended prosecution. Here’s an excerpt from that memo’s conclusions:
There was a problem, however. David Weis, the US Attorney assigned to investigation Hunter Biden, was based in Delaware. The proper venue to file the criminal charges was in Washington, D.C. or California, not Delaware. Thus, in 2022, the DOJ Tax Division presented its prosecution memo to the Biden-appointed US Attorney for D.C., Matthew Graves. He “personally reviewed the report and did not support it.”
This denial of the recommended prosecution caused US Attorney Weiss to request “special counsel authority from Main DOJ to charge in the District of Columbia.” That request was also denied. The DOJ, in effect, caused the “statute of limitations on the 2014 and ‘15 charges” to expire. Those years are particularly important to the Hunter Biden case, as that’s when he received foreign income from Burisma and perpetrated his scheme “to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon.”
With the rejection from the DC US Attorney, the team sought the approval to bring tax charges for years 2016-2019 in the Central District of California. Shapley concluded that “the Central District of California declined to allow charges to be brought there.”
The rejection to bring charges in DC and California stands in stark contrast to the testimony of Attorney General Garland, who in March of 2023 stated that US Attorney Weiss had the full authority to “bring cases in other jurisdictions.” Garland also said that he personally would ensure that Weiss could “carry out his investigation and that he [would] be able to run it.” Both those statements now appear to be false. (Your humble author thinks the Republicans knew Garland was making misrepresentations at the time.)
The whistleblower would also offer these interesting bits of information:
- The Hunter Biden investigation began in November 2018 as an offshoot to an IRS investigation “into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”
- The FBI confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in November 2019.
- He repeatedly raised concerns about Garland’s misrepresentations and the issues with the prosecution of the case. The government retaliated against his concerns. The IRS “acquiesced to a DOJ request to remove the entire team from the Hunter Biden investigation, a team that had been investigating it for over 5 years.”
Here’s something else - it’s likely the Republicans have more information they have yet to release. This would include exhibits documenting Hunter Biden’s scheme to avoid taxes and the full DOJ Tax memo that recommended charges.
What’s next? Let’s see if they go after the US Attorneys for DC and the Central District of California.