IRS whistleblowers describe alleged Hunter Biden coverup: ‘Not letting me do my investigative job’
WASHINGTON — IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler gave their first public testimony to Congress Wednesday about what they described as a far-reaching coverup in the tax fraud investigation of Hunter Biden.
Shapley and Ziegler laid out an array of alleged irregularities in the five-year probe of the 53-year-old first son, which concluded last month with a probation-only plea deal announced by the Justice Department.
Ziegler remained anonymous until moments before the House Oversight Committee hearing — at which he described himself as a Democrat who felt he had to do the “right thing” by coming forward about aberrations in the case.
Shapley, who supervised the IRS team on the case for more than three years, and Ziegler, who worked on the case since it opened in 2018, previously gave closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The hearing featured at-times contentious examination of claims that political appointees interfered in the case and that prosecutors blocked standard investigative steps. To underscore a point, a congresswoman even displayed photos from Hunter Biden’s laptop of him cavorting with a prostitute whose fees allegedly were treated as business expenses.
Shapley initially contacted Congress in April warning of a coverup. One week later, lawyers for Hunter visited the Justice Department, prefacing his agreement to plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes in 2017 and 2018, in addition to a gun-possession felony that will be expunged after two years of probation.
The major claims presented by the whistleblowers include:
ALLEGATION 1: Joe Biden’s role in his son’s finances was not investigated
Shapley testified that “there were multiple instances in this investigation where there were references to the father of the subject, President Biden” — but that investigators weren’t allowed to dig into the details.
“When the subject’s father is somehow related to the finances of the subject… in the normal course of an investigation, we would have to go get that information to properly vet the financial flows,” he said.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) raised an alleged Hunter Biden WhatsApp message on Aug. 3, 2017, that the IRS investigators provided to Congress, referring to a payment from Chinese government-linked energy conglomerate CEFC China Energy.
That message said “the Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership” — days after Hunter on July 30, 2017, allegedly threatened a Chinese executive to follow through with promised funds or risk Joe Biden’s wrath, writing he was “sitting here with my father.” Within 10 days, about $5 million was transferred to Biden-linked accounts.
Shapley, who has worked at the IRS for 14 years, said the WhatsApp messages were “something we clearly needed to follow up on” but further investigation “simply wasn’t supported by the prosecutors.”
Ziegler told Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) that he wanted to get location data to determine if Hunter and Joe Biden actually were sitting together at the time of the alleged shakedown message.
“I never obtained location data regarding that message,” Ziegler said. “When I asked [Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf] about the location data … it wasn’t like, ‘Yeah, let’s figure it out’ it was like, ‘How do we know that?'”
Joe Biden — referred to as the “big guy” — was penciled in for a 10% cut in the CEFC partnership, according to a May 2017 email retrieved from Hunter’s laptop. First brother James Biden also was involved in the deal and Joe Biden allegedly met their partners.
Ziegler said the “big guy” reference combined with the “sitting here with my father” text message gave plenty of grounds for additional investigation into the elder Biden’s role.
“With the previous email that was referenced, ’10 held by H for the big guy’, now that you have those two things kind of correlating with each other, as a normal process or procedure that we would go through, you would want to figure out if the information is truthful in that WhatsApp message,” he said.
“Who did you infer that the big guy may be?” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) asked at one point.
“That email, ’10 held by H for the big guy’ — from what I understand that to be [is] President Biden, his dad,” Ziegler said.
Ziegler, who has worked for 13 years at the IRS, said of the Aug. 3 message, “there was a long WhatsApp message contained in that, that was only a portion of it… we can turn it over to the House Ways and Means Committee, they can vote to release it, and then that information can be available to you.”
One day before that text message, an Aug. 2, 2017, email retrieved from Hunter’s abandoned laptop said that CEFC chairman Ye Jianming offered Hunter a three-year consulting contract with CEFC that was to pay $10 million annually “for introductions alone.”
Hunter wrote in emails retrieved from his abandoned laptop that he had to provide “half” of his income to his father, who met with Hunter’s foreign associates from China, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine, including during his vice presidency.
In a pre-taped interview with CBS News that was released during the hearing, Ziegler said that “any time we potentially wanted to go down the road of asking questions related to the president, it was, ‘That’s going to take too much approvals, we can’t ask those questions.’”
“It created an environment that was very hard to deal with … it would be like, ‘Well, let’s think about it, let’s put that on the backburner,’” Ziegler said.
“Did you uncover evidence that President Biden financially benefited from his son’s deals?” CBS reporter Catherine Herridge asked.
“I don’t feel comfortable answering that question,” Ziegler said.
At one point in the Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) shouted: “We don’t care about Hunter Biden! We care about our country’s national security decisions and whether our president is compromised. That is why we are here.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that the White House does not intend to focus on the hearing, saying House Republicans’ “focus is continuing to do political stunts.”
ALLEGATION 2: AG Garland lied, Biden appointees blocked charges in DC, California
Delaware US Attorney David Weiss was blocked from bringing tax fraud charges against Hunter Biden by his father’s appointed US attorneys in California and Washington, DC, Shapley and Ziegler testified — which would mean Attorney General Merrick Garland gave false statements about Weiss’ independence.
The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, argued there was a mere “misunderstanding” about what Weiss meant and that it was “his decision” not to charge Hunter in other jurisdictions after the Biden appointees persuaded him by stating their opposition.
Raskin contended that it appeared that “Mr. Weiss took a good hard look at those charges himself and ultimately decided not to charge them” — prompting pushback from Shapley, who said investigators recommended misdemeanor and felony tax charges against Hunter for the five years from 2014 to 2019, most of which ultimately were not pursued.
“It was [Weiss’] decision, isn’t that right, Mr. Shapley?” Raskin asked.
“No, that’s not supported by the facts,” the supervisory agent replied, referring to an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting at which Weiss allegedly told Shapley and five others that he lacked independent charging authority.
“Well, which facts is it not supported by?” Raskin pressed.
“His own admissions in the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that I documented contemporaneously,” Shapley said.
Ziegler added that “there are a lot of different tax cases that include misdemeanors and felonies … when you have a felony charge with a misdemeanor, you have to charge the felony, and in this case they did not charge that felony.”
Raskin interrupted: “Excuse me, when you say you have to charge the felony, that is a Justice Department rule?”
Ziegler said: “That is in their manual, that you have to charge the felony in order to avoid the inequitable treatment of taxpayers.”
Other Democrats attempted to portray the taxmen as overzealous, with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) calling Shapley a “stickler” similar to the fictional Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”
Shapley said that “there were seven total people, including me” at the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting.
None have publicly disputed Shapley, though Weiss has obliquely indicated he stands by his prior assertions he had independence. One participant in the meeting, IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon, affirmed Shapley’s written notes of the meeting, saying in an email that he “covered it all”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) accused Weiss of concealing the truth by giving the impression that the DC and Southern California US attorneys — Matthew Graves and Martin Estrada, respectively — had nothing to do with the failure to bring charges.
“The story has been changing from the Department of Justice and US Attorney Weiss, and I think the only person who has really had any documents corroborated are my own,” Shapley said.
“I think what happened, I think it’s obvious, anyone with common sense can see what happened,” Jordan said, “[Weiss] said… he had discussions with the people at main Justice and suddenly things changed.”
ALLEGATION 3: Hunter was tipped off on planned search, approach
Both men said that investigative steps were slow-walked or blocked and that Justice Department authorities tipped off Hunter Biden’s legal team about their interest in searching a northern Virginia storage locker that may have contained evidence, as well as about a bid to interview Hunter in late 2020 — sabotaging both attempts.
“US Attorney Weiss agreed that if the storage unit wasn’t accessed for 30 days, we could execute a search warrant on it,” Ziegler wrote in prepared testimony submitted into the record.
“We later heard that Wolf and DOJ-Tax Attorney Mark Daly had ultimately reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told them about the storage unit, once again circumventing our chance to get to evidence from potentially being destroyed, manipulated or concealed.”
The account about Hunter being tipped off about an interview attempt, meanwhile, was corroborated in a Monday deposition by Shapley’s counterpart, the FBI supervisory agent on the case.
Shapley testified May 26 to the Ways and Means Committee that he and his FBI partner were waiting outside Hunter Biden’s California home when a plan to interview Hunter unraveled.
“However, the night before, December 7th, 2020, I was informed that FBI headquarters had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day. This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley said at the time.
“The next morning, when I saw my FBI counterpart, Supervisory Special Agent Joe Gordon, he was clearly dejected about how our plan had been interfered with,” Shapley added.
“Gordon and I waited in the car outside of Hunter Biden’s California residence waiting for a phone call. It was no surprise that the phone call SSA Gordon received was from his ASAC Alfred Watson, who informed us that Hunter Biden would contact us through his attorneys. We received a telephone call later that morning from Hunter Biden’s attorneys, who said he would accept service for any document requests, but we couldn’t talk to his client.”
ALLEGATION 4: Biden bribery tip, Hunter laptop files not shared
Shapley said tax agents weren’t given important documents, including files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and an FBI informant file that accused Joe and Hunter Biden of accepting $10 million in bribes from a Ukrainian businessman.
Shapley said agents weren’t even aware of the alleged bribery, which President Biden recently laughed off by saying “where’s the money?” — as Republicans investigate laptop references to Ukrainian gas company Burisma opening a Maltese bank account.
“Information like this would have been really helpful to have,” Shapley said.
“The team, to the best of my knowledge, never saw that document,” he said later in the hearing.
Burisma hired Hunter to serve on its board in early 2014, despite no relevant energy industry experience, with a salary of up to $1 million per year as his father assumed control of the Obama-Biden administration’s Ukraine policy.
Shapley also testified that Wolf said in September 2020 that “they had information from the laptop that they were not providing to the investigators.”
Shapley previously said in testimony to the Ways and Means Committee that data from the laptop, which the FBI retrieved from a Delaware repairman in 2019, was filtered to remove potentially sensitive information including attorney-client privilege, even if an attorney was cc’d on communications.
ALLEGATION 5: Interviews weren’t allowed with Biden family
Ziegler outlined how tax investigators weren’t able to talk with various members of Hunter’s family, despite transfers that indicated they may have relevant information.
“I can recall wanting to interview and get records from Hunter Biden’s adult children and members of the Biden family,” Ziegler said in the prepared version of his testimony.
“There were expenses paid for the adult children, as well as potential credit card expenditures and Venmo payments, which were deducted on Hunter Biden’s 2018 tax return. On October 21, 2021, AUSA Wolf told us it ‘will get us into hot water if we interview the president’s [adult] grandchildren.’ This, again, was abnormal and a deviation from normal procedure.”
Ziegler added: “I can’t recall another situation in which investigative activities were being held up by unnecessary approvals and constant slow-walking. In essence, they were not letting me do my investigative job.”
Only one Biden family associate who the IRS team sought to interview in December 2020 was reachable, according to the whistleblowers — Rob Walker, through whom funds from Chinese and Romanian figures were distributed to nine Biden family members, according to subpoenaed bank records released earlier this year by Comer. Walker confirmed that Joe Biden appeared at a Los Angeles meeting of CEFC associates shortly after leaving the vice presidency, the agents said.
