Arecent court filing in the criminal case against Hunter Biden suggests the Justice Department and IRS seek “to dirty up the very whistleblowers” who exposed political favoritism and misconduct in the Hunter Biden investigation, Sen. Chuck Grassley charged in a letter to the IRS commissioner obtained exclusively by The Federalist. A review of the underlying court filing submitted by Special Counsel David Weiss in the federal tax evasion case pending against the president’s son supports Grassley’s charges — highlighting again that Attorney General Merrick Garland never should have named Weiss as special counsel.
On Thursday, Grassley dispatched a letter to the IRS commissioner expressing concern over the agency’s retaliation against IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. As the Iowa Republican’s letter detailed, beginning in 2020, Shapley and Ziegler “made legally protected whistleblower disclosures to IRS officials concerning government misconduct relating to the Hunter Biden investigation.” Following further whistleblower disclosures to the House Ways and Means Committee, and that committee’s vote to release documents and testimony related to its investigation of the whistleblowers’ charges, the country learned the specifics of those charges.
Among other things, the whistleblowers revealed to the House Ways and Means Committee that the investigation into Hunter Biden had been thoroughly thwarted: Search warrant and subpoena requests were improperly denied, limitations were placed on investigators concerning who could be questioned and about what, and then someone tipped off the Biden transition team, preventing agents from successfully questioning nearly a dozen witnesses.
But the obfuscation went much higher. The whistleblowers revealed that in early August 2022, they had recommended in a 99-page memorandum that felony and misdemeanor charges be brought against Hunter Biden. However, prosecutors allowed the statute of limitations to run on the most serious felony counts — because the DOJ refused to grant U.S. Attorney Weiss the authority to charge Hunter Biden in D.C. or California, and the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in those districts declined to bring charges.
