Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) pledged that the Senate will take the report of an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower “seriously.”
On Wednesday, a career IRS criminal supervisory special agent who implied he was working on the Hunter Biden investigation claimed that the criminal investigation has been infected by “politics” and “preferential treatment.” The letter led to outcry from many congressional Republicans, including Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, who told the Washington Examiner that it shows the “Biden administration may be obstructing justice by blocking efforts to charge Hunter Biden for tax violations.”
HUNTER BIDEN INVESTIGATION INFECTED BY ‘POLITICS’ AND ‘PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT’: IRS WHISTLEBLOWER
Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the Senate would take the whistleblower’s letter “seriously” and ensure that there would be no interference in the investigation.
“As I said to the press earlier, we take all whistleblower statements seriously, as we should,” he said. “Some turn out to be very important and some not. But we take them all seriously at the outset and look at them closely. So that’s one of the elements that we’re going to be discussing and watching as we move forward.”
He was speaking in agreement with ranking member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“The whole idea that maybe the investigation was compromised is a [Department of Justice] matter, not just an IRS matter, and many of us worked in a bipartisan fashion with the Mueller investigation,” he said. “And I don’t know where this leads, but I do know we need to embrace the idea that we’re gonna look long and hard at any accusation that an investigation was compromised.”
The whistleblower’s lawyer, Mark Lytle, sent letters to the heads of several congressional committees, telling them his client’s “protected disclosures” lay out “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
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The IRS agent’s allegations also “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee” and “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against Hunter Biden.
The White House maintained that no interference has taken place and that the Biden administration has held up to its promise to preserve the independence of the DOJ.
