Attorneys for Gary Shapley, a criminal investigator-turned-whistleblower, questioned the credibility of U.S. Attorney David Weiss after his appointment as special counsel Friday in the yearslong investigation into Hunter Biden.
Jason Foster pointed to his client Shapley, a veteran IRS agent, testifying to Congress in May that Weiss had once asked for special counsel status in the case and was rejected.
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Weiss in subsequent letters to Congress denied that, saying he had been “granted ultimate authority” on “where, when, and whether to file charges” in the case.
Foster said the appointment of Weiss was “odd because both Mr. Weiss and [Attorney General Merrick] Garland had been saying for a long time that he didn’t need special counsel authority.”
Shapley was one of two IRS agents to raise concerns to Congress with the Biden investigation, which they had both worked on in coordination with federal investigators in Delaware.
Shapley in particular said Weiss had been blocked from bringing harsher charges against Biden in California and Washington, D.C., and that he witnessed “conflicts of interest, preferential treatment, [and] deviations from normal investigative procedures.”
Foster said he found it to be an “odd choice” for Garland to select Weiss, who has been leading the inquiry since 2019.
Weiss is leading the prosecution “during a time when the IRS whistleblower has brought forward all kinds of concerns about the way that the probe was handled and the lack of independence and the special preferential treatment given to the president’s son, to choose that very same person to go ahead and elevate them to special counsel status when he has been claiming to Congress all along that he didn’t need it is seems like an odd choice,” Foster said.
Foster and Tristan Leavitt are former Capitol Hill attorneys for Republicans who left Congress to form their own group called Empower Oversight, which focuses on legal protections for whistleblowers.
Leavitt also weighed in on Friday on Garland’s announcement, saying Weiss had an obligation to answer for the allegations leveled by the IRS agents.
Weiss has to answer for all of the allegations the IRS whistleblowers brought forward. And Congress has requested to interview Weiss for his misleading and contradictory letters to Congress. This seems like nothing more than a play to forestall that testimony.
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) August 11, 2023
Weiss has already agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in the fall, and the committee said in a statement Friday it expects the Justice Department to “fully cooperate” with Congress by “upholding his commitment to testify.”
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As special counsel, Weiss will operate more independently in that he will not have to regularly report to other officials at the Justice Department.
He will also have to provide a public report to Garland at the conclusion of his investigation explaining any decisions he has made on prosecutions.
