Joe Biden has long insisted that he had no involvement in or knowledge of his son's overseas business deals, but the elder Biden met with his son's Chinese business partners, according to an IRS whistleblower's testimony to Congress that was revealed on June 22, 2023.
The whistleblower, supervisory IRS agent Gary Shapley, also divulged to Congress widespread interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden, including the blockage of two search warrants and more extensive criminal charges.
“I am alleging, with evidence, that DOJ provided preferential treatment, slow-walked the investigation, did nothing to avoid obvious conflicts of interest in this investigation,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee in testimony last month.
The committee voted Thursday to release the testimony publicly, waiving a section of federal law that generally shields private taxpayer information.
Shapley also confirmed prosecutors had evidence that Joe Biden met with officials of his son's Chinese energy client called CEFC, describing an interview that family associate Rob Walker gave the FBI.
Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee: "Walker went on to describe an instance in which the former Vice President showed up at a CEFC meeting. Walker said: 'We were at the Four Seasons and we were having lunch and he stopped in, just said hello to everybody. I don't even think he drank water. I think Hunter Biden said, 'I may be trying to start a company or try to do something with these guys and could you?' And I think he was like, if I'm around and he'd show up."
"The FBI agent asked: 'So you definitely got the feeling that that was orchestrated by Hunter Biden to have like an appearance by his dad at that meeting just to kind of bolster your chances at making a deal work out? Walker answered: 'Sure.' The FBI agent continued: 'Any times when he was in office, or did you hear Hunter Biden say that he was setting up a meeting with his dad with them while dad was still in office?' Walker answered: 'Yes.' "
The IRS whistleblower also confirmed that career prosecutors had intended to charge Hunter Biden with numerous tax violations dating to 2014, but appointees of Joe Biden shut down the plan for a more sweeping indictment. In the end, the charges were narrowed to two counts in 2017 and 2018 that most likely spared Hunter Biden prison time.
"I am blowing the whistle because the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, Department of Justice Tax, and Department of Justice provided preferential treatment and unchecked conflicts of interest in an important and high-profile investigation of the President's son, Hunter Biden," Shapley told lawmakers.
On two occasions federal prosecutors blocked search warrants seeking evidence from Hunter Biden, including one for a storage locker with corporate documents and another for Joe Bidens' Delaware residence where Hunter Biden was living. The search warrants were blocked even though agents had met the standards for probable cause, Shapley said.
Shapley recounted how an assistant U.S. Attorney working on the case in Delaware rejected the warrant for Joe Biden's home in December 2020.
"The decision was whether the juice was worth the squeeze and also a statement made here was that she said that, well, we had to consider the optics of doing a search warrant on, you know, Hunter Biden's residence and/or the guest house of President Biden," Shapley testified. "She further states about the guest house of Joe Biden that there was no way we'd get that approved."
When agents sought a search warrant for a storage locker where Hunter Biden stored some of his corporate records, they were thwarted again, Shapley said, adding that prosecutors went as far as to alert the Biden legal team. Shapley said the denial was unprecedented in his many years as an IRS agent.
"So it was off the table. And that was even after the election. So there's many things. Any other case I ever worked, if they were like there's a storage unit with documents from the business and personal documents in relation to the years under investigation — the risk was zero, because it's on a storage unit, it's not on a residence — there's no prosecutor I've ever worked with that wouldn't say, go get those documents," Shapley said.
A second whistleblower, identified as “Mr. X” in committee documents, was Shapley‘s subordinate. He said the DOJ’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation “has honestly been appalling.”
“Looking back on everything, they had the best investigators in the nation and the prosecutors were the JV squad and weren’t up to the task of handling such a big case,” Mr. X said. “They would often slow-walk investigative steps, often not follow the appropriate investigative procedure, and would say that we couldn’t do or had to wait on certain steps because there were too many approvals in front of us.”
Mr. X said he began investigating Hunter Biden as far back as 2018, when bank reports suggested he had paid prostitutes and was living lavishly, in what investigators saw as red flags for tax problems.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, Missouri Republican, said: “The American people deserve to know that, when it comes to criminal enforcement, they are not on the same playing field as the wealthy and politically connected class. The preferential treatment Hunter Biden received would never have been granted to ordinary Americans.”
(Read Shapley's full testimony here.)
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