Now that two IRS whistleblowers have spent hours testifying before Congress, lawmakers have multiple leads on which to follow up as they investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings and what the Justice Department did to get to the bottom of them.
Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, two top IRS agents who spent years working on the Hunter Biden investigation, focused the House GOP’s efforts in a new and more specific direction: whether the Justice Department prevented Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss from building a case on what is, according to the whistleblowers, strong evidence of financial crimes.
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The pair of whistleblowers introduced new names, documents, and timelines to an investigation that Republicans had, before taking the House majority, struggled to move forward.
House investigators are waiting to receive all of the documents the whistleblowers have indicated they will provide to Congress, a person familiar with the situation told the Washington Examiner. Those notes, communications, and other records could help bolster the allegations Shapley and Ziegler have made.
Lawmakers could also face fewer hurdles in their quest for information from the Justice Department after next week, when, if a judge agrees, Hunter Biden’s plea deal will be finalized. Hunter Biden’s lawyers have said the plea deal marks the end of the criminal investigation, although Weiss has left open the possibility that the investigation will continue.
If Hunter Biden’s attorneys are being truthful, however, that means the Justice Department will no longer have the pretext of an ongoing investigation to cite when denying document and witness testimony requests.
While the whistleblower disclosures advanced the case dramatically, it also opened up numerous additional lines of inquiry that congressional investigators will need to explore.
Here are some of the leads.
WOLF IN CROSSHAIRS
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf featured prominently in both whistleblowers’ testimony as a constant impediment to the advancement of the case.
Wolf stymied the investigation at multiple points, including by tipping off Hunter Biden’s lawyers directly that investigators were interested in the contents of a storage unit known to contain relevant documents. She also allegedly prevented IRS and FBI agents from asking any questions about evidence that President Joe Biden received payments from his son’s foreign work without providing a reason why.
House Republicans requested an interview with Wolf on June 29, but so far, neither she nor the Justice Department have given any indication that she plans to testify.
Congressional investigators pressed Shapley on his perception of why Wolf slow-walked the investigation, such as whether she hoped to land a more prestigious position at the Justice Department.
Shapley said he and his team could not determine why she stopped so many steps. Although other attorneys in Weiss’s office were mentioned in the whistleblowers’ testimony, congressional investigators are likely to focus on Wolf because of the outsize role she played in blocking steps that could have advanced the case.
FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW WITH ROB WALKER?
Shapley lamented in his testimony that, of the dozen unannounced interviews investigators had painstakingly coordinated on the same day in December 2020, only one took place because, the night before the operation, a high-level FBI official tipped off Joe Biden’s transition team and the Secret Service that investigators were coming.
The single interview involved Rob Walker, a close business associate of Hunter Biden’s who sent payments to the president’s son and had sent messages about holding money for “the big guy,” presumed to be Joe Biden.
But Wolf demanded that investigators ask no questions that could involve Joe Biden. According to excerpts of the Walker interview provided by Shapley, an FBI agent did bring up the message referencing money for “the big guy,” and Walker did acknowledge that it was a reference to Joe Biden.
Per Wolf’s instructions, though, the FBI agent did not ask follow-up questions.
Congress may look to conduct its own interview with Walker without the same restrictions placed on the IRS and FBI.
They are also interested in talking to other Hunter Biden associates, including Devon Archer, who worked closely with Hunter Biden in Ukraine and on other foreign business deals.
ESTRADA AND GRAVES
Two U.S. attorneys appointed by Joe Biden have contradicted some of what Weiss has said about the case, further clouding the decisions prosecutors made over the past several years.
E. Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney in the Central District for California, has denied blocking Weiss from bringing charges against Hunter Biden in his district, as the whistleblowers said.
“U.S. Attorney Weiss was given full authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction he deemed appropriate. He did not need approval from this office or the U.S. Attorney to bring charges in this district,” Estrada’s office said in a statement.
But Weiss said in a letter to Congress last month that his charging authority was limited geographically, seemingly contradicting the claim from Estrada and Attorney General Merrick Garland that Weiss had free rein to bring charges where the facts warranted.
The whistleblowers also said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, stopped Weiss from bringing charges in his district.
House Republicans have said they want to speak with both Estrada and Graves about the interactions their respective offices had with the federal prosecutors in Delaware, given the conflicting statements Weiss has made about his authority and the whistleblowers’ testimony.
No charges have been brought in California or Washington, D.C., despite what whistleblowers described as voluminous evidence both in the FBI’s possession and in the public domain, and only weak charges against Hunter Biden were brought in Delaware. That reality supports what the whistleblowers have said about Weiss lacking authority to pursue the strongest charges elsewhere.
CHINA WHAT’S APP MESSAGES
Shapley provided WhatsApp messages between Hunter Biden and Chinese businessmen in which he used the threat of his father’s political influence to force a business deal.
In the messages, involving Chinese businessman from CEFC, a Chinese energy company, Hunter Biden laments an apparent attempt to pay him only $5 million for unspecified services; Hunter Biden wrote that “I can make $5M in salary at any law firm in America.”
“The Biden’s are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership. Please let’s not quibble over peanuts,” Hunter Biden wrote in the messages.
Shapley testified that investigators were prevented from taking any investigative steps related to the threatening messages, including whether Joe Biden was indeed “sitting next to” Hunter Biden, as the president’s son claimed at the time he sent the first threatening messages, what it was that CEFC’s chairman wanted out of the partnership with the Biden family, or whether Hunter Biden paid any taxes on the income he earned from the deal.
Congressional investigators are likely to dig into the circumstances surrounding the messages and why Justice Department officials determined they would not look into the communications despite launching aggressive investigations into less clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing involving Donald Trump’s associates.
WHERE ARE THE DIAMONDS?
Both Shapley and Ziegler testified that, in 2015, some of Hunter Biden’s foreign income appeared to come in the form of diamonds, therefore making his tax liability for that particular year more difficult to track.
IRS officials were attempting to reconstruct Hunter Biden’s income for the years 2014 through 2019 to determine how much he owed the government and how much he brought in through his work with foreign sources.
2015 did not appear to be the only year Hunter Biden received compensation in the form of a diamond.
Sometime in 2017, Hunter Biden received an expensive diamond from the chairman of CEFC, the Chinese energy company, as the Chinese company explored the partnership with Hunter Biden.
In divorce proceedings, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife claimed the diamond was worth $80,000; Hunter Biden claimed its value was less and later said he did not know about the whereabouts of the diamond because he gave it to unnamed associates, the Washington Post reported last year.
“We still don’t know where that diamond is at to this day,” Ziegler told congressional investigators in closed-door testimony.
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While the diamond may represent just a fraction of the millions of dollars Hunter Biden collected from foreign sources, it was a key exchange in one of the most controversial business entanglements in which Hunter Biden found himself around the time his father was in or just out of office.
Why the diamond was given, and where it ended up, could help congressional investigators better understand the nature of the Biden business dealings and how much he truly owes to the IRS.
