A former IRS employee told the House Oversight Committee that U.S. Attorney David Weiss has requested the authority to indict Hunter Biden in two federal districts on charges broader than the tax-related offenses to which the president’s son agreed to plead guilty this week. according to 212- page transcript of his interview.
Whistleblower Gary Shapely says Attorney General Merrick Garland did not tell Congress the truth in earlier testimony when he claimed Weiss, who is based in Delaware, had the ability to sue in other jurisdictions, including California and Washington, D.C. Shapely said. bringing charges in those districts is not something the US attorneys there, appointed by President Joe Biden, would do.
Shapley told the committee that as an IRS investigator, he obtained messages sent by Hunter Biden on the WhatsApp platform, including one he read requesting payment from a Chinese businessman named Henry Zhao. In the message, Hunter Biden appeared to indicate that he was sitting with his father, then the former vice president, and said, “I’m going to make sure that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to hold a grudge forever that you will regret not following my instructions.”
Shapley, who is the IRS’s supervisory special agent for criminal investigations and has worked for the agency since July 2009, testified in May and the committee released a transcript Thursday.
The Justice Department insists that Weiss, who remained the U.S. attorney in Delaware after being appointed by former President Donald Trump, was able to act independently and that he was under no pressure to relieve Hunter Biden.
Weiss’ office declined to comment, but pointed to his June 7 letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he said his decisions were made independently.
“During my tenure as U.S. Attorney, my decisions have been made — and must be made with respect to this matter — regardless of political considerations,” Weiss wrote.
But critics of the president accused him of tipping the scales in favor of his son and that Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and avoid prison was a “sweetheart” deal.
In his opening statement before the Republican Oversight Committee, Shapely said, “I’m arguing with the evidence that the Justice Department gave preferential treatment, slowed down the investigation, did nothing to avoid an obvious conflict of interest in this investigation.”
He added that “the investigation into Hunter Biden, codenamed Sportsman, was first launched in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign amateur online pornography platform.”
Hunter Biden’s guilty plea related to his 2017 and 2018 tax returns. But Shapley said he saw evidence that Hunter Biden should also have been charged in connection with his 2014 tax filing — the year his father was vice president.
The Justice Department would charge “in any other case I’ve ever worked with similar fact patterns, similar acts of evasion, and similar taxes due and owed,” Shapley told the committee.
During an interview with the House Ways and Means Committee, he was shown an email — first reported by NBC News in December — from a Hunter Biden business associate that said Hunter Biden needed to re-report his income on his tax returns in bulk. part due to his payments to Burisma.
Shapley said the email was important to the case, but that it was not delivered because the statute of limitations had been allowed to expire.
In addition, Shapely says efforts to search properties associated with Biden and a public relations firm called Blue Star Strategies were not authorized. The latter “was a significant blow to investigations under the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” referring to the law that requires individuals working in the U.S. on behalf of foreign governments to register.
Shapely said he was involved in the investigation of the 2018 tax return. Court filings filed in Delaware indicating a plea deal was imminent were sparse on details, but Shapely testified under oath that Hunter Biden listed personal expenses as business expenses.
“He was making personal expenses, his business expenses,” Shapley said. “So, I mean, everything, there was a payment that – one of his girlfriends got $25,000 and it said ‘golf membership.’ And then we went out and followed the money that was on sex club memberships in LA.”
Shapely says travel expenses to visit prostitutes were also incorrectly booked as business expenses.
He says he thought it was valuable for the FBI and IRS to ask questions about the now-infamous “10 for the Big Guy” email, which apparently refers to money for Joe Biden from one of Hunter Biden’s attempted deals with a Chinese firm. .