DOJ contacted Hunter Biden, whistleblower teams over Weiss’ head: rep

WASHINGTON — A senior Justice Department official’s contact with lawyers for both Hunter Biden and IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley shows that DOJ headquarters — not Delaware US attorney David Weiss — controlled the federal investigation of the first son, Shapley’s legal team said Wednesday.

Shapley’s lawyers revealed their contacts with associate deputy attorney general Bradley Weinsheimer after his role as a conduit for Hunter Biden’s legal team in the final stretch of the tax fraud investigation by Weiss’s office was noted in a recent report.

The disclosure comes as House Republicans move closer to launching an impeachment inquiry into President Biden’s alleged role in his son’s foreign business deals and what whistleblowers allege was a coverup in the criminal investigation of Hunter Biden that ended in a probation-only plea deal that was dramatically rejected by a federal judge last month.

Weinsheimer, a subordinate of Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, spoke on the phone with Shapley’s attorney Mark Lytle on April 25 and said that he wanted to understand his claims against other department officials, to which Shapley alluded one week prior in a letter to Congress, according to Lytle.

In the conversation, Lytle asked Weinsheimer for written assurances that Shapley could relay sensitive legally protected information about the ongoing tax fraud investigation to ensure that he wasn’t breaking any laws while blowing the whistle, but never heard back.

One day later, on April 26, Weinsheimer met with Hunter Biden’s attorney Chris Clark and Weiss, who purportedly was in charge of the case, according to a report by Politico.

Clark had asked in an email for a meeting with someone “to hear our client’s appeal, in the event that the U.S. Attorney’s Office decides to charge Mr. Biden.”

“After our client offered whistleblower testimony to Congress, Lisa Monaco’s righthand man, Bradley Weinsheimer, scheduled a meeting with Mr. Biden’s defense counsel to appeal over the head of Mr. Weiss in a way that was totally at odds with the narrative that David Weiss was acting independently,” Lytle told The Post Wednesday evening.

“The Deputy Attorney General’s office then claimed to us it was genuinely interested in addressing the whistleblower’s allegations, without disclosing its meeting with Hunter Biden’s lawyers. We now know that shortly after that meeting Weiss’s assistant [Lesley Wolf] offered to end the case with no guilty plea at all on the very same day that DOJ removed our client and his entire IRS team from the case.”

Although Weinsheimer professed to be interested in Shapley’s allegations of a cover-up in the case, the longtime IRS agent’s team say they were shocked by his apparent disinterest during a follow-up May 16 call with Lytle and other representatives for Shapley.

That call took place one day after the 13-person IRS investigative team was purged from the Hunter Biden investigation, allegedly on DOJ orders.

“When we followed-up with the Deputy Attorney General’s Office on May 16 about this obvious retaliation, Mr. Weinsheimer’s tone had taken a dramatic turn from claiming interest in the whistleblower disclosures to being completely unwilling to engage and referring us to Mr. Weiss,” Lytle said.

The change of tone and failure to follow up with a written assurance that Shapley’s disclosures to him would be lawful prompted the whistleblower team to question the reason for Weinsheimer’s original outreach and whether it was a sincere attempt to understand and rectify alleged wrongdoing, or a fact-finding mission for other purposes.

The Justice Department and Weiss’ office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

Attorney General Merrick Garland testified twice under oath to Congress that Weiss was able to independently bring charges against Hunter Biden outside of Delaware — a claim later contradicted by Shapley and a subordinate, IRS agent Joseph Ziegler, who said that Biden-appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington blocked tax-fraud charges.

Garland elevated Weiss to be a special counsel on Aug. 11 in what Republicans said also was proof that he originally lacked the authority to bring charges. 

Garland previously told Congress under oath that Weiss had “full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”

At an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, Weiss allegedly told Shapley and a group that he actually didn’t have that authority.

Weiss and Garland have publicly denied Shapley’s account, though an email from another IRS official, Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, affirmed the accuracy of his emailed notes from the meeting.

The House Judiciary Committee on Monday issued subpoenas to four alleged witnesses.

Shapley and Ziegler said that Weiss’ office indicated that it sought to bring federal charges against Hunter Biden in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, but was blocked by his father’s appointed US attorneys. confirming that Weiss lacked the power that Garland told Congress under oath that he had.

The whistleblowers also said prosecutors in Weiss’ office blocked them from investigating President Biden’s alleged role in his son’s foreign ventures, despite communications that directly implicated the president, such as a threatening July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message that Shapley gave to Congress in which Hunter Biden wrote to a Chinese government-linked business associate that he was “sitting here with my father” and warned of consequences if a deal was aborted.

Within 10 days of that text message, $5.1 million flowed from CEFC China Energy to Biden-linked bank accounts.

As part of the same venture, Joe Biden, described as the “big guy,” was penciled in for a 10% cut from the deal with CEFC, according to a May 2017 email retrieved from Hunter’s laptop.

Shapley, backed up by testimony from a recently retired FBI agent who worked on the case, accused Weiss’ office of giving Hunter Biden’s legal team advance knowledge of a planned interview attempt in December 2020, scuttling the plan after the office also allegedly gave a heads up to Hunter’s lawyers about plans to search a northern Virginia storage unit.

The tax agents said that Weiss’ office didn’t give them full access to files from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, blocked them from interviewing other Biden family members and vetoed a reject for a search warrant for a guest house at Joe Biden’s home.

Shapley said that the prosecutors in Delaware also failed to inform the IRS team that a paid FBI informant provided a tipoff that Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings — which paid Hunter up to $1 million per year beginning in 2014 — said in 2016 that he was “coerced” into paying $10 million in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for the then-vice president’s help getting a prosecutor fired.

Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer told the House Oversight Committee on July 31 that Joe Biden dined at least twice with his son’s Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani associates, had coffee with his son’s Chinese partner in a state-backed investment fund and was put on speaker phone by Hunter during about 20 business meetings.

Critics of Weiss’ appointment point to reports that he worked with Hunter’s late brother Beau and that his office is full of prosecutors with links to the Bidens — and note that Justice Department special counsel regulations call for the appointees to be selected from outside the department to ensure their independence.