IRS whistleblowers talk alleged coverup in Hunter Biden case

WASHINGTON — IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler gave their first public testimony to Congress Wednesday about what they described as a far-reaching coverup in the criminal tax fraud investigation of first son Hunter Biden.

Shapley and Ziegler laid out an array of allegations before the House Oversight Committee after previously detailing their claims in closed-door testimony released June 22 by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Ziegler remained anonymous until moments before the hearing — at which he described himself as a gay Democrat who felt he had to do the “right thing” by coming forward about alleged aberrations in the case.

Shapley initially contacted Congress in April about his concerns — weeks ahead of the probation-only plea deal announced last month by the Justice Department for 53-year-old Hunter, who agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes for the years 2017 and 2018, in addition to a gun charge felony that will be expunged after two years.

The major claims presented by the whistleblowers include:

ALLEGATION 1: Joe Biden’s role in his son’s finances was not investigated

Shapley testified that “there were multiple instances in this investigation where there were references to the father of the subject, President Biden.”

“In the course of any normal investigation, when the subject’s father is somehow related to the finances of the subject — that, in the normal course of an investigation, we would have to go get that information to properly vet the financial flows of money… to determine what we end up charging,” he said.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) asked about a WhatsApp message on Aug. 3, 2017, referring to $5 million from Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC and claiming “the Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership” — sent days after a threatening message in which Hunter pressured a Chinese executive to follow through on a promise or face Joe Biden’s wrath.

Shapley said the WhatsApp messages were “something we clearly needed to follow up on” but further investigation “simply wasn’t supported by the prosecutors.”

Ziegler said “there was a long WhatsApp message contained in that, that was only a portion of it… we can turn it over to the House Ways and Means Committee, they can vote to release it, and then that information can be available to you.”

In a pre-taped interview with CBS News that was released during the hearing, Ziegler said that “any time we potentially wanted to go down the road of asking questions related to the president, it was, ‘That’s going to take too much approvals, we can’t ask those questions.’”

“It created an environment that was very hard to deal with … it would be like, ‘Well, let’s think about it, let’s put that on the backburner,’” Ziegler said.

“Did you uncover evidence that President Biden financially benefitted from his son’s deals?” CBS reporter Catherine Herridge asked.

“I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” Ziegler said.

At one point in the Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) shouted: “We don’t care about Hunter Biden! We care about our country’s national security decisions and whether our president is compromised. That is why we are here.”

ALLEGATION 2: AG Garland lied, Biden appointees blocked charges in DC, California

Shapley and Ziegler also testified that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss was blocked from bringing tax fraud charges against Hunter Biden by his father’s appointed US attorneys in California and Washington, DC.

The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) argued there was a mere “misunderstanding” about what Weiss meant and that it was “his decision” not to charge Hunter in other jurisdictions after the Biden appointees stated their opposition.

Raskin contended that it appeared that “Mr Weiss took a good hard look at those charges himself an ultimately decided not to charge them” — sparking pushback from Shapley.

“It was his decision, isn’t that right, Mr. Shapley?” Raskin asked.

“No, that’s not supported by the facts,” the supervisory IRS agent said.

“Really? Well, which facts is it not supported by?” Raskin followed up.

“His own admissions in the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that I documented contemporaneously,” Shapley said.

“His own admissions in the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that I documented contemporaniously,” Shapley said.

Ziegler added that “there are a lot of different tax cases that include misdemeanors and felonies … when you have a felony charge with a misdemeanor, you have to charge the felony, and in this case they did not charge that felony.”

Raskin interrupted: “Excuse me, when you say you have to charge the felony, that is a Justice Department rule?”

Ziegler said: “That is in their manual, that you have to charge the felony in order to avoid the inequitable treatment of taxpayers.”

Shapley said that “there were seven total people including me” at the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting at which Weiss allegedly said he lacked prosecutorial decision-making power.

None have publicly disputed Shapley and one participant,  IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, affirmed the supervisor’s written notes of the meeting, saying in an email that he “covered it all”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) charged that Weiss was attempting to conceal the truth by giving the impression in carefully worded statements that the DC and Southern California US attorneys had nothing to do with the failure to bring charges.

“The story has been changing from the Department of Justice and US Attorney Weiss, and I think the only person who has really had any documents corroborated are my own,” Shapley said.

“I think what happened, I think it’s obvious, anyone with common sense can see what happened,” Jordan said, “[Weiss] said… he had discussions with the people at main Justice and suddenly things changed.”

ALLEGATION 3: Hunter was tipped off on planned search, approach

Both men say that investigative steps were slow-walked or blocked and that Justice Department authorities tipped off Hunter Biden’s legal team about their interest in searching a northern Virginia storage locker that may have contained evidence, as well as about a bid to interview Hunter in late 2020 — sabotaging both attempts.

“U.S. Attorney Weiss agreed that if the storage unit wasn’t accessed for 30 days, we could execute a search warrant on it,” Ziegler wrote in prepared testimony.

“We later heard that [Assistant US Attorney Lesley] Wolf and DOJ- Tax Attorney Mark Daly had ultimately reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told them about the storage unit, once again circumventing our chance to get to evidence from potentially being destroyed, manipulated or concealed.”

The account about Hunter being tipped off about an interview attempt was corroborated in a Monday deposition by Shapley’s counterpart, the FBI supervisory agent on the case.

Shapley testified May 26 to the Ways and Means Committee that he and his FBI partner were waiting outside Hunter Biden’s California home when a plan to interview Hunter unraveled.

“However, the night before, December 7th, 2020, I was informed that FBI headquarters had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day. This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley said at the time.

“The next morning, when I saw my FBI counterpart, Supervisory Special Agent Joe Gordon, he was clearly dejected about how our plan had been interfered with,” Shapley added.

“Gordon and I waited in the car outside of Hunter Biden’s California residence waiting for a phone call. It was no surprise that the phone call SSA Gordon received was from his ASAC Alfred Watson, who informed us that Hunter Biden would contact us through his attorneys. We received a telephone call later that morning from Hunter Biden’s attorneys, who said he would accept service for any document requests, but we couldn’t talk to his client.”

ALLEGATION 4: Biden bribery tip, Hunter laptop files not shared

Shapley said tax agents weren’t given important documents, including files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and an FBI informant file that accused Joe and Hunter Biden of accepting $10 million in bribes from a Ukrainian businessman.

Shapley said agents weren’t even aware of the alleged bribery, which President Biden recently laughed off by saying “where’s the money?” —  as Republicans investigate laptop references to Ukrainian gas company Burisma opening a Maltese bank account.

“Information like this would have been really helpful to have,” Shapley said.

Burisma hired Hunter to serve on its board in early 2014, despite no relevant energy industry experience, with a salary of up to $1 million per year as his father assumed control of the Obama-Biden administration’s Ukraine policy.

Shapley also testified that Wolf said in September 2020 that “they had information from the laptop that they were not providing to the investigators.”

Shapley previously said in testimony to the Ways and Means Committee that data from the laptop, which the FBI retrieved from a Delaware repairman in 2019, was filtered to remove potentially sensitive information including attorney-client privilege, even if an attorney was cc’d on communications.

ALLEGATION 5: Interviews weren’t allowed with Biden family

Ziegler outlined in his prepared testimony how tax investigators weren’t able to talk with various members of Hunter’s family, despite transfers that indicated they may have relevant information.

“I can recall wanting to interview and get records from Hunter Biden’s adult children and members of the Biden family,” Ziegler said. “There were expenses paid for the adult children, as well as potential credit card expenditures and Venmo payments, which were deducted on Hunter Biden’s 2018 tax return. On October 21, 2021, AUSA Wolf told us it ‘will get us into hot water if we interview the president’s [adult] grandchildren.’ This, again, was abnormal and a deviation from normal procedure.”

Ziegler added: “I can’t recall another situation in which investigative activities were being held up by unnecessary approvals and constant slow-walking. In essence, they were not letting me do my investigative job.”