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The Department of Justice denied agents investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business deals access to evidence and witnesses, according to two IRS whistleblowers.
The House Oversight Committee heard testimony from Special Agent Joseph Ziegler and his supervisor Gary Shapley of the IRS during a six-hour hearing Wednesday. The two agents involved in Biden’s criminal probe expressed frustration at how US attorney for Delaware David Weiss and prosecutors within the DoJ handled the investigation.
“It appeared to me, based on what I experienced, that the US attorney in Delaware in our investigation was constantly hamstrung, limited and marginalized by DoJ officials as well as other US attorneys,” said Ziegler, who had been known only as “Agent X” before Wednesday’s hearing.
According to Ziegler, Biden’s plea deal did not match the charges that IRS investigators discussed with prosecutors leading up to the announcement. In August 2022, federal prosecutors from the DoJ tax division drafted a ninety-nine-page memorandum that recommended felony and misdemeanor charges for 2017-2019 tax years. “That did not happen here. I am not sure why,” Ziegler said.
Among the charges that Ziegler investigated were Biden’s misfiled business expenses in his 2018 tax returns. Biden filed a hotel room for his drug dealer, membership to a sex club and college tuition for his adult daughter as business deduction, which resulted in his total income being underreported by $260,000.
Shapley, who has worked at the IRS for fourteen years, said he first started seeing deviations from standard procedure in June 2020, but it wasn’t until an October 2022 meeting with Weiss that he reached “a red line.” At the meeting, Weiss told senior FBI and IRS agents that he was not the “deciding person on whether charges were filed” despite Attorney General Merrick Garland’s testimony that Weiss had complete authority in the case. Prosecutors had already been declined special authority in Washington, DC, and Weiss admitted that he would need an attorney appointed by Joe Biden to partner with him to charge the case outside of his district. “I understood the gravity of those admissions,” Shapley said.
Both whistleblowers also complained that they were barred access to evidence, including Biden’s laptop and iCloud backup that suggested Biden was sitting next to his father while contacting a Chinese business associate. According to Shapley, Delaware assistant US attorney Lesley Wolf blocked investigators from asking witnesses questions about Joe Biden and Justice Department officials stopped them from interviewing Hunter’s adult children, after finding evidence potentially linking them to Hunter’s finances.
“When the subject’s father is somehow related to the finances of the subject, in the normal course of any investigation, we would have to get that information, to properly vet the financial flows of money, and determine what we end up charging,” Shapley said.
At one eyebrow-raising point during the hearing, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene brandished blown-up photographs of Hunter Biden engaging in sexual acts with “a prostitute he had paid for out of his law firm’s bank account.”
Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, said that there is no concrete evidence that the president was involved in his son’s business dealings or gave him preferential treatment in the investigation.
“We’ll hear about how they disagreed on investigative steps and what criminal charges to bring on normal stuff in government investigations that doesn’t usually lead to a congressional hearing,” Raskin said. “But one thing you will not hear today is any evidence of wrongdoing, by President Joe Biden or his administration.”
