IRS Whistleblowers Take Center Stage
House testimony by two highly respected IRS agents did real damage to the notion that Hunter Biden was treated with equal justice under the law.
Yesterday’s House testimony of two longtime IRS investigators was supposed to be hard-hitting, and it didn’t disappoint.
As Fox News reports, “The House probe has centered around [Gary] Shapley and fellow whistleblower Joseph Ziegler’s claim there was a pattern of ‘slow-walking investigative steps’ into Hunter Biden, which included instructions not to speak with him at his residence, tipping the president’s son and staff off about the ongoing efforts and delaying enforcement actions in the months before the 2020 presidential election.”
The opening statement of Gary Shapley, a highly decorated senior IRS investigator, was particularly devastating. Indeed, said Shapley: “[This case] was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS. At every stage, decisions were made that benefited the subject of this investigation.”
Brave Whistleblower Gary Shapley says Biden’s DOJ allowed the President’s political appointees to weigh in on whether to charge the President’s son.
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) July 19, 2023
“After U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves, appointed by President Biden, refused to bring charges, I watched Mr. Weiss tell a… pic.twitter.com/KdAt5sVcVO
One of the most steadfast claims of Joe Biden’s defenders is that whatever Hunter Biden may or may not have been doing, it doesn’t involve the president. Indeed, Joe Biden still says, implausibly, that he never discussed his son’s overseas business dealings with him. But yesterday, one of the nastiest and smarmiest critics of these whistleblowers and of the entire investigation, New York Democrat Dan Goldman, actually scored an own goal on this point, inadvertently conceding that, yes, Hunter did discuss his overseas business dealings with his dad.
"I may be trying to start a company or try to do something with these guys,” Goldman says Hunter told Joe.
YIKES: Rep. Dan Goldman was trying to prove that Joe Biden was not implicated in the IRS Whistleblowers’ allegations, but instead accidentally showed that Joe Biden did discuss foreign business dealings with his son Hunter. pic.twitter.com/6nyEhfm36G
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 19, 2023
Shapley concurred that “it does show he told his father he was trying to do business,” contrary to Joe Biden’s insistence. Goldman realized his error too late, stubbornly still insisting that it shows there’s “no direct evidence” of Joe’s involvement and is, in fact, “proof that he wasn’t involved.” Up is down, left is right.
“Rep. Goldman just tripped the wire on Joe Biden,” said constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley. “In trying to grill the whistleblowers to show that there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved, he elicited an answer that the witnesses established that Joe Biden did discuss business deals of Hunter with the Chinese. Goldman prompted a sworn statement from the investigator that Biden did indeed discuss his son’s business deals. In doing so, Goldman may have delivered one of the most damaging moments in the hearing for the Bidens. Unfortunately, time ran out. With a few more minutes along this line, Goldman could well have sealed the case for the appointment of a Special Counsel.”
So now we have the Democrats admitting that Joe Biden has been lying all along about this key point. It was perhaps the lowest point of the day for House Democrats, who were mostly ugly, unprepared, and utterly Trump-obsessed.
And then there’s the special treatment that Hunter Biden has been afforded. In an interview last night with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said that the IRS “has been obstructed from the start, and they have confirmed what I have been complaining about for months: Biden lawyers, DOJ, FBI, they are doing everything they can to intimidate witnesses, to obstruct our investigation.”
As to that obstruction, one of the most tiresome claims of Joe Biden’s defenders is that a Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss, had ultimate charging authority in the recently adjudicated case against Hunter Biden — a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. But, as National Review’s Brittany Bernstein reports, IRS special investigator Gary Shapley, “who worked as an IRS investigator for over ten years and oversaw the agency’s tax investigation into Hunter Biden, told the House Oversight Committee that despite Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss claiming he had ultimate authority over the investigation that in fact D.C. U.S. attorney Matthew Graves was in charge.”
To be clear, then: Graves, a Biden appointee, was the decider. Not Weiss, the Trump appointee.
But wait. There’s more. “Graves’s wife, Fatima Gross Graves, has visited the White House at least 28 times since Biden took office. In the first three months of 2023 alone Graves, a vocal liberal activist, visited the White House ten times.”
What on earth is the wife of the guy who’s calling the shots in the investigation of the president’s son doing making so many trips to the White House? We can hear the FBI now: Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Beyond the sworn testimony of the two IRS agents, Comer says he also has a transcribed interview with an FBI agent who confirmed much of what yesterday’s two IRS whistleblowers said with respect to the federal government having told the IRS agents to stand down in their investigation. As the whistleblowers noted, they weren’t allowed to follow up on the WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud backup — on one of which he claimed to be sitting next to his dad while threatening retribution toward a Chinese business associate. Nor were they allowed to ask about the “big guy” or any involvement of Joe Biden in any of Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
So now we have multiple credible, directly involved sources within the federal government who claim that Hunter Biden got extraordinarily special treatment during his investigation.
The next step, it seems to us, is to haul U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland before the same committee and demand that they reconcile the sworn testimony of these unimpeachable witnesses to the wrongdoing of the Biden Justice Department.
That’ll be some must-see TV.
*Updated with additional info on how IRS investigators were prevented from conducting a thorough investigation of Hunter Biden.
