Hunter Biden’s lawyer sent a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) on Friday in an attempt to push back on whistleblower testimony from two IRS employees.
Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, sent a 10-page letter, which was obtained by the Washington Examiner, to Smith, claiming that by releasing the testimony of the two IRS whistleblowers, Smith was feeding “the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father.”
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The two whistleblowers, IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley and an unnamed source, testified that the Department of Justice significantly interfered with the criminal investigation into Biden by blocking the lead U.S. Attorney on the case, David Weiss, from bringing charges in the jurisdiction of his choice, denying his request for special counsel status and claiming the DOJ “concealed” information from investigators related to foreign bribery allegations involving Biden and then Vice-President Joe Biden.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has denied the allegations.
Lowell said the testimonies were “orchestrated recitations of mischaracterized and incomplete ‘facts’” and called the whistleblowers “disgruntled agents” who thought they knew better than the federal prosecutors.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer also alleges that the whistleblowers might not be whistleblowers at all, rather they are using that title “in an attempt to evade their own misconduct.”
In a statement, Smith said this is of “little surprise” that Hunter Biden’s attorneys are attempting to “discredit the whistleblowers.”
“These whistleblowers bravely came forward with allegations about misconduct and preferential treatment for Hunter Biden – and now face attacks even from an army of lawyers he hired,” Smith said in the statement.
Lowell also pushed back on the WhatsApp messages the committee released that show Hunter Biden invoking his father’s name and claiming they were together to Chinese business associates in an attempt to get money. Subsequently, after the texts were sent, Hunter Biden received millions.
Joe Biden has denied he was in the room at the time of the messages.
While Lowell did not dispute the content of the messages, the crux of his issue with them was the made-for-social-media image of the messages that were posted on Twitter.
“The screen-grab images you posted are not real and contain myriad of issues: both include a photo of Mr. Biden not from 2017 but from the White House Easter Eggroll in April 2022 (long after the purported message was sent); both images portray the message in a blue bubble, when WhatsApp messages are in green; one image super-imposed the Chinese flag for the contact ID, when surely that was not how a text or contact was kept; and one purports to be a screenshot with the ‘. . .’ of someone composing a text (as in Apple’s iMessage) when that does not happen on WhatsApp. In short, the images you circulated online are complete fakes,” the letter reads.
Lowell also stated that by releasing the testimony from the whistleblowers, Smith violated “the spirit, if not the letter, of the tax laws and federal rules governing investigations law.”
In his rebuttal, Smith pushed back on this assertion saying the committee took “the appropriate legal steps to share this information with rest of Congress” and blasted Lowell for not addressing some of the key allegations from the whistleblowers.
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“It doesn’t even address concerns that counsel for Mr. Biden was regularly tipped off about potential warrants and raids in pursuit of evidence that implicated him, as well as his father. We will continue to go where the facts take us—and we will not abandon our investigation just because Mr. Biden’s lawyers don’t like it,” Smith said in the statement.
The letter comes one day after the House Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Oversight Committees requested transcribed interviews with more than 13 employees of the IRS, DOJ, and the Secret Service to further investigate the DOJ’s alleged interference in the criminal case. Hunter Biden plans to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.
