On Wednesday, the two IRS whistleblowers whose testimony has been key in the House’s investigation into Hunter Biden will testify publicly for the first time before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
The two whistleblowers, supervisory agent Gary Shapley and an unnamed source known as “Whistleblower X,” who will be revealed tomorrow, are the IRS’s A-team, Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said.
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The anonymous whistleblower originally didn’t want his name out there, but he became “so upset over how the Democrats, including [ranking member] Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and others have mischaracterized their integrity” that he decided to come forward with his identity.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) will also participate in the hearing as he will be waived onto the committee, he told the Washington Examiner on Monday. House Ways and Means, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees have been working together to investigate Biden and Department of Justice interference in his criminal case.
Shapley and the other whistleblower, who were both originally assigned to the Biden criminal investigation, first gave their testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, which released it in June. In their testimony, they alleged the Justice Department’s decisions in the investigation were “influenced by politics,” saying investigators were blocked from questioning Biden, that David Weiss, the lead U.S. attorney on the case, was blocked from bringing charges in the jurisdiction of his choice and that he had his request for special counsel status denied.
The whistleblowers also provided evidence to the Ways and Means Committee, including text messages that show Biden invoking his father’s name as a way to get a Chinese business associate to send him money. The messages resulted in millions being routed to Biden’s account.
Because of the stonewalling and slow walking on behalf of the DOJ, the statute of limitations ran out on some of the tax evasion charges, the whistleblowers alleged. The DOJ has said Biden plans to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax crimes.
“We’re gonna have some specific questions about some things that we think were violations of the law, and we’ll let these two witnesses answer that,” Comer said. “So, I think that these two people will have some insight, and maybe they can answer some questions for a confused media out there.”
The hearing is expected to take six hours, the chairman said.
He hopes that the committee’s theories they’ve raised about the Bidens’ participation in money laundering and creating shell companies will be “substantiated” by the two IRS whistleblowers.
No new information is expected to be presented by the committee during this hearing. Rather, they will present the whistleblowers with the information they have already compiled, including the bank records, bank wires, and “mysterious accounts” and “see what the IRS whistleblowers think,” Comer said.
“I don’t think that a lot of people in the media understand what we’re talking about here,” Comer said. “They’ve created companies that aren’t legitimate companies. They don’t produce any goods or services. They don’t make anything. They don’t sell anything. And it appears the sole purpose of those companies was to launder money to hide the source of revenue, which were from foreign nationals.”
Another thing the whistleblowers expressed concern about was Biden not registering as a foreign agent when he was working with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Biden was a board member, and with CEFC, the Chinese energy company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden not registering as a foreign agent came under more scrutiny from House Republicans after Gal Luft, whom Comer said was a “very credible witness on Biden family corruption,” got indicted for failure to register as a foreign agent during his time working for CEFC, the same company Biden was being paid by.
According to Comer, the testimony from the two IRS whistleblowers was confirmed by a former FBI agent on the Biden investigation who also detailed allegations of political interference on behalf of the DOJ into the Biden investigation.
The former agent testified that on Dec. 8, 2020, when FBI and IRS whistleblowers were scheduled to interview Biden, they were instructed to stand down outside of his house and not approach until Biden called them. The call never came, and the agents never interviewed the president’s son.
“As a result of the change in plans, IRS and FBI criminal investigators never got to interview Biden as part of the investigation,” Comer said in a statement.
The former FBI agent’s testimony has yet to be released in full, but Comer said he would “love” to have it released before the hearing on Wednesday.
Allegations of retaliation against the two IRS whistleblowers will also likely be a topic of discussion during the hearing. After it was revealed that the whistleblowers were making protected disclosures to Congress, they were removed from the Biden investigation, and Shapley also claimed he was passed over for a promotion.
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This has led the chairman of Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Oversight to request the Office of Special Counsel open an investigation into the allegations of retaliation against the two whistleblowers.
“The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have reportedly engaged in unlawful whistleblower retaliation against veteran IRS employees,” the members allege in a letter to OSC on July 5. They continued saying that news reports “indicate that the whistleblower and the investigative team were removed from the Hunter Biden investigation by the IRS at DOJ’s request as retaliation for making protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
