Global Courant
A former IRS employee told the House Ways and Means Committee that U.S. Attorney David Weiss sought authority to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts with rates that are broader than tax-related violations the president’s son agreed to plead guilty this week, according to a 212-page transcript of his interview.
The whistleblower, Gary Shapley, says Attorney General Merrick Garland was not telling Congress the truth when he claimed in previous testimony that Weiss, who is based in Delaware, had authority to sue in other jurisdictions, including California and Washington. charges in those districts is not something the US attorneys there, who were appointed by President Joe Biden, would do.
The Justice Department denied Shapley’s claims.
“As both the Attorney General and U.S. Attorney David Weiss have said, U.S. Attorney Weiss has full authority over this matter, including the responsibility to decide where, when, and if charges should be filed, as he sees fit. He needs no further approval to do so,” said Wyn Hornbuckle, the deputy director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs.
Shapley told the committee that as an investigator for the IRS, he received messages Hunter Biden sent on the WhatsApp platform, including one he read demanding payment from a Chinese businessman named Henry Zhao. In the message, Biden seemed to imply that he sat with his father, then the former vice president, saying: “I will make sure that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to hold a grudge forever cherish that you will regret not following my directions.”
Shapley, a special oversight agent with criminal investigations for the IRS who has worked for the agency since July 2009, testified in May, and the commission made the transcript available Thursday.
The Justice Department has insisted that Weiss, who remained the U.S. attorney in Delaware after being appointed by President Donald Trump, be allowed to act independently and that he was not pressured to make things easy for Biden.
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Weiss’s office declined to comment, but pointed to his June 7 letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying his decisions were made independently.
“During my tenure as a U.S. attorney, my decisions have been made — and should be made with respect to the case — without reference to political considerations,” he wrote.
Critics of the president, however, have charged that he put his thumb on the scales in favor of his son and that Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and avoid jail time was a “cutie.”
In his opening statement to the Republican-controlled Ways and Means Committee, Shapley said, “I assert, with evidence, that DOJ provided preferential treatment, proceeded slowly through the investigation, and did nothing to prevent an obvious conflict of interest in this investigation.”
He added: “The investigation into Hunter Biden, codenamed Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS conducted into a foreign-based amateur online porn platform.”
Biden pleaded guilty in connection with his 2017 and 2018 tax returns. Shapley said he saw evidence that Biden should also have been charged in connection with his 2014 tax returns — a year his father was vice president.
The Justice Department would have charged in “every other case I’ve ever worked with involving similar patterns of facts, similar evasion, and similar taxes owed and owed,” Shapley told the committee.
In his interview with the committee, he was shown an email — first reported by NBC News in December — from Biden’s business associate that stated that Biden had to re-declare most of his income on his tax returns because of his Burisma payments.
Shapley said the email is important to that case, but it was not filed because the statute of limitations has expired.
In addition, Shapley says attempts to search Biden-affiliated properties and a PR firm called Blue Star Strategies were not approved. The latter “was a major blow to the Foreign Agents Registration Act component of the investigation,” referring to the law requiring people who work on behalf of foreign governments in the US to register.
Shapley said he participated in the investigation into the 2018 tax return. Court records in Delaware indicating a plea deal is coming are sparse on details, but Shapley testified under oath that Biden listed personal expenses as business expenses.
“He paid his personal expenses, his business expenses,” Shapley said. “So, I mean everything, there was a payment that — there was $25,000 to one of his girlfriends, and it said ‘golf membership’. And then we went out and followed that money, it was for a sex club membership in LA”
Shapley says travel expenses to visit prostitutes were also erroneously recorded as a business expense.
He says he thought it was valuable for the FBI and IRS to ask questions about the now-infamous “10 to the big man” email, a clear reference to money for Joe Biden from one of Hunter Biden’s attempted deals with a Chinese firm.
This article was originally published on NBC News. com
