Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley says FBI spooked witness

WASHINGTON — IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley claimed Tuesday that the FBI spooked a retired supervisory agent out of telling Congress all he knows about an alleged coverup in the criminal investigation of first son Hunter Biden.

FBI general counsel Jason Jones wrote a warning letter to the recently retired agent the afternoon before his July 17 deposition before the House Oversight Committee advising him not to share information about any “deliberations or ongoing investigative activity.”

“He was given a letter the Sunday before from DOJ basically telling him not to talk,’ Shapley told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” following former Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer’s closed-door deposition to the panel Monday.

“I know that he could have confirmed additional material facts on this investigation,” Shapley added. “And he did confirm the FBI headquarters notifying the transition team and Secret Service [about a planned Hunter Biden interview attempt in December 2020], but really that was the only thing that he was able to speak about.”

The Oversight Committee has not yet released the transcript of the former FBI supervisor’s interview.

The former agent traveled to Hunter Biden’s residence in California as part of a plan to approach him for an interview about tax fraud and other possible crimes, according to records released by the House Ways and Means Committee.

The plan crumbled when federal prosecutors alerted the Biden transition team and the Secret Service, prompting Hunter’s lawyers to block the attempt.

An Oversight Committee aide told The Post that the panel believes the Biden administration and attorneys for President Biden’s son have sought to block transparency into the elder Biden’s alleged role in his son’s foreign dealings and into the purported coverup in the Hunter Biden criminal investigation.

“Anyone who agrees to talk to the Oversight Committee receives a letter from the Justice Department or [Hunter Biden’s lawyer] Abbe Lowell, or both, like Devon Archer did this past weekend,” a committee spokesperson said.

“Both the Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s attorneys, as well as their Democrat defenders in Congress, claim there’s nothing to investigate and everything is on the up and up. If this is true, why do they attempt to intimidate witnesses who appear before the committee?”

The FBI denied that its letter to the former supervisory agent on the Hunter Biden case was meant to intimidate a congressional witness, with a spokesperson telling The Post that “these are called authorization letters and are standard practice.”

The FBI and Delaware US attorney’s office have said that it’s impossible to be fully transparent with Congress about investigations involving the Bidens because there’s an “ongoing” investigation — using the term even after Hunter agreed to a probation-only plea deal which was rejected last week by a federal judge at a dramatic court hearing.

Although assistant US attorney Leo Wise said in court last week that federal prosecutors retained the right to prosecute Hunter, 53, for other past crimes — including possibly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act — Hunter’s legal team insisted his legal exposure would end with the plea deal and a leaked document indicated prosecutors had secretly agreed to broad immunity for past conduct.

Shapley led the IRS’s investigation of Hunter for more than three years and was joined at a public House Oversight Committee hearing last month by IRS agent Joseph Ziegler, who was the primary case agent since the Hunter Biden case started in 2018.

Shapley and Ziegler testified that standard investigative steps were blocked and that they were steered away from analyzing Joe Biden’s role in his son’s enterprises, despite communications that clearly implicated him.

Among those messages was a threatening July 30, 2017, WhatsApp missive in which Hunter wrote to a Chinese-government-linked associate that he was “sitting here with my father” and expected a business agreement to be fulfilled, immediately preceding the transfer of about $5 million to Biden-linked accounts.

Shapley is a registered Republican who says he voted for Democrats in the past, including President Bill Clinton, and Ziegler is a Democrat who said he was smeared online for being gay by critics of the Bidens who incorrectly assumed he was in cahoots with the first family before he became a whistleblower.

The FBI supervisory agent has not been identified by the House Oversight Committee but documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee indicate he is former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Joe Gordon.

“I think there’s lots of people with information that can shine light on this. And the House Ways and Means Committee has requested, you know, those names. We provided those names,” Shapley told Fox News Tuesday.

The House Judiciary Committee has demanded testimony from 11 FBI and Justice Department figures regarding the alleged coverup in the Hunter Biden case, including Delaware US Attorney David Weiss.

The panel hopes to interview Weiss last after the other witnesses comment on the claim of Shapley and Ziegler that Weiss was blocked from bringing felony charges against Hunter Biden by his father’s appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

That would directly contradict under-oath testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland.

There’s at least some corroboration already of the IRS whistleblower claims. For example, after Shapely detailed Weiss’ alleged statement at an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that he wasn’t the final decision-maker on charging the president’s son, IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon replied in an email that Shapley “covered it all.”

The Justice Department has offered to allow Weiss to testify, but has not agreed to permit the other 10 officials to answer questions, meaning the Judiciary Committee may issue subpoenas to force their testimony.

Weiss has given the impression in written statements that he denies the IRS whistleblowers’ claims, though his precise meaning is difficult to discern.

Shapley said Tuesday that the fact that Hunter Biden received preferential treatment in his plea deal — the fate of which is unclear pending further court action this month — is obvious when comparing similar cases.

The IRS supervisor pointed to former Baltimore Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to three tax misdemeanors — while Hunter copped to two — and received 10 months in prison for evading fewer than $68,000 in taxes.

The first son skipped out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax payments in 2017 and 2018.

“There are 300 million taxpayers out there that demand that they get treated fairly. And this is a perfect example of that not occurring,” Shapley said.

“Daryl de Souza in 2018, 2019 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax charges — the same charge as Hunter Biden was charged with. His tax loss was $67,000. Hunter Biden’s tax loss was between $1.2 and $1.5 million — and that’s per the court documents, not our calculations.”

“The government attorneys on that [de Souza] case recommended 12 months incarceration. He ended up getting 10 months incarceration. The government attorneys on this case recommended zero months incarceration. Those prosecutors in those two cases are the same prosecutors — Leo Wise and Derek Hines. That’s not treating taxpayers the same.”