Jul
30
What the House Learned from IRS Whistleblowers re the Biden Probe
This actually happened several days ago, and there has been more reported on the probe since, but I still thought it worth mentioning.
You’ve all probably heard or read about the investigation(s) into Hunter Biden and his father, and a big part of that has to do with huge “consulting” fees and unpaid taxes. The House Oversight and Accountability Committee conducted a hearing on the matter in which they questioned Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley — two IRS whistleblowers with many years experience on such investigations and who worked on the Biden case before sacrificing their careers in order to tell the truth about what was going on.
Ziegler in particular called for a special counsel to determine why the DoJ overlooked Hunter’s felonies and instead was giving him a “sweetheart” plea deal that avoided prison time. (That deal has since “collapsed in court”, ostensibly because the government wouldn’t agree to complete immunity for other possible offenses.)
Fred Lucas of “The Daily Signal” provided four “takeaways” from the hearing, which I will attempt to summarize below:
1) You may be aware that the FBI has a document in which a confidential informant claims that a Burisma executive paid a $5 million bribe to then-V.P. Joe Biden and another $5 million payment to Hunter Biden. When asked about it, Shapley said,
“[All] I can say [is] there were investigative steps that involved President Biden that were not allowed to be taken. Information like this would have been really helpful to have for investigators when we received any pushback, when we were asked to take names on a document or search warrants. It would have been nice to have information that helped to prove [the case].”
Also, back in Sep. 2020, Assistant U.S. Attorney for Delaware Lesley Wolf told IRS and DoJ investigators that they “had information from the [infamous Hunter Biden] laptop that they were not providing to the investigators.” So, not just Treasury Dept. investigators (IRS) were forbidden from seeing that evidence, but so were the DoJ’s own investigators. Plausible deniability? Too damning to risk a leak? That’s not suspicious at all! (/sarc)
2) Using Joe Biden’s name and influence, Hunter Biden and his business associates collected roughly $17 million from foreign companies. This included $3.1 million from a Romanian company, $3 million from State Energy HK Ltd. via the Robinson Walker LLC, $6.5 million from Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) who also paid ~$800,000 to Blue Star Strategies and an unnamed law firm, plus miscellaneous other payments.
3) Through contradictory statements and ignoring official requests, the Justice Dept. — specifically, Attorney General Merrick Garland and U.S. Attorney (for Delaware) David Weiss — appear to have “slow-walked and impeded the investigation”, as per evidence and testimony from the whistleblowers. As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it:
“Who are you going to believe? The Justice Department that can’t get their story straight, change three times in 33 days, or these two guys, the go-to guys in international tax evasion cases, the A-team when it comes to these kind of investigations, all over the world they’ve done this, and have been consistent throughout?”
4) Lucas writes: “During the 2020 presidential campaign, Ziegler said, the Justice Department used that as grounds not to follow certain leads because of a policy against election interference. But, he said, after Biden was elected, the investigation of his son was ‘hamstrung.'” As Ziegler stated,
“When it came to questions as a part of the investigation, we interviewed a lot of people. As a part of that investigation, you want to feel free to ask questions. It should be an open environment. [But] there was an environment when we were interviewing witnesses when you were afraid to ask questions that could lead to the presidential campaign. And this is after the campaign is over, it was restricted.”
For more details on the above, you can read Lucas’s article here.
