David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland as special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation, forced the IRS to remove a top agent from the tax fraud investigation after the agent had reported the case was being mishandled, a report said.
Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who disclosed evidence of alleged political interference by the Department of Justice to protect Hunter Biden from tax fraud charges, said Weiss first sought to push him off the case after a "contentious" meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, Susan Ferrechio reported for The Washington Times on Monday.
Shapley, a special agent for the IRS Criminal Investigation, eventually went to Congress seeking whistleblower protections in order to disclose his complaints about the handling of the case.
It was at the Oct. 7 meeting where Shapley raised concerns about “updates and communications” in the Hunter Biden case, which had been open for years with no charges despite evidence of hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes.
The meeting with Weiss, who was then the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, Shapley later told Congress was “surprisingly contentious” and “ended quite awkwardly.”
Shapley’s legal team told The Washington Times that, after the meeting, Weiss began reviewing “protected disclosures” that Shapley had been filing to his supervisor about the Hunter Biden IRS investigation dating back to 2020. The disclosures documented the ways Shapley believed the investigation was being slow-walked and mishandled.
“Gary raised concerns in the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting. Weiss realized that and started looking into Gary’s communications, and he realized he made protected disclosures,” said Shapley’s attorney Tristan Leavitt.
Soon afterward, Weiss “pushed to get Gary off the case, even though Gary’s supervisors say Gary committed no misconduct,” Leavitt said.
Related: Hunter Biden sues the IRS; FBI shut down informant to protect first son, September 18, 2023
Ferrechio noted that Shapley’s attorneys "are highlighting the timeline that led to his removal from the case amid new leaked congressional testimony disclosed by House Democrats eager to invalidate Shapley’s claims of political interference in the Hunter Biden tax investigation."
Shapley’s supervisor, Darrell J. Waldon, confirmed to House investigators that Shapley and Weiss clashed at the Oct. 7 meeting. After the meeting, Waldon said, Weiss told him that he would no longer be talking to Shapley, the point person for the DOJ in the Hunter Biden investigation until that moment.
“I recall more vividly him stating he was not going to be responding to Shapley’s emails anymore, and at some point, he said he would be talking to me,” Waldon said, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by The Washington Times.
Waldon testified that the reason Shapley was pushed out of the investigation was because Weiss said he would no longer talk to Shapley because of a “conflict” over obtaining evidence in the investigation.
Waldon said the move by Weiss left him with no choice but to remove Shapley from the investigation, not because of misconduct but because Weiss’s refusal to talk to Shapley would hobble the investigation.
“I didn’t think that that would be resolved quickly,” Waldon said. “And in order to move the investigation forward, I recommended that he be removed so that we could continue to push the investigation forward.”
Shapley was informally cut out of the investigation in December 2022 and officially taken off the case on May 15.
Shapley told lawmakers that the DOJ had blocked his investigative team from pursuing critical evidence in the case, including financial records belonging to Hunter Biden that were stored on his father’s property and lines of questioning about Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s business deals.
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