Attorneys for the IRS criminal investigator who alleged missteps in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Hunter Biden released on Wednesday handwritten notes their client took during a pivotal meeting last year.
The notes corroborate an email and testimony that Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran IRS agent, provided to Congress earlier this year in which he described a controversial meeting he and a handful of other senior investigators sat in on Oct. 7, 2022.
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During the meeting, then-U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly said, according to Shapley, that he did not have the charging authority he needed to prosecute Biden and that he requested special counsel authority from DOJ and was denied. Attorney General Merrick Garland would later appoint Weiss as special counsel in August 2023.
“Weiss stated — He is not the deciding person,” Shapley jotted down while at the meeting, according to his notes.
He added, “Not going to charge 14/15,” a reference to Shapley allegedly discovering at the meeting that Weiss’s team of prosecutors had decided not to charge Biden for any tax crimes he may have committed in 2014 and 2015.
Weiss also said at the meeting, according to Shapley, that he had been blocked from bringing charges against Biden in California and Washington, D.C.
“USA CA — [Martin] Estrada in charge of authorizing these charges in that jurisdiction + Weiss requested Special Counsel status in D.C. + Main DOJ said ‘no’ — follow the process,” Shapley wrote in the notes.
The notes were accompanied by a letter from Shapley’s attorneys at Empower Oversight, a group that works to protect whistleblower rights.
The letter was addressed to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and ranking member Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and was aimed at disputing testimony Thomas Sobocinski, an FBI special agent in charge at the Baltimore Field Office, gave to the House Judiciary Committee last week.
According to a transcript of that testimony obtained by the Washington Examiner, Sobocinski said that while he believed the investigation into Biden moved too slowly, he did not gather from the Oct. 7 meeting, which he also attended, that Weiss lacked the authority he needed.
“Mr. Sobocinski reportedly failed to recall in his interview with Committee staff certain details of the meeting recorded in SSA Shapley’s email,” Shapley’s attorneys wrote. “However, Mr. Sobocinski apparently acknowledged that he took no notes in the meeting, nor did he document it in any contemporaneous fashion afterwards. By contrast, SSA Shapley took notes during the meeting. These notes, combined with his fresh memory of the meeting, formed the basis for the email he sent later that day and corroborate his current recollection.”
The attorneys said they wanted to provide Jordan and Nadler with a copy of the notes so that the lawmakers could “assess the truthfulness and reliability” of Sobocinski’s testimony.
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Asked for comment, Jordan’s committee pointed to a social media statement in which the committee highlighted Shapley’s notes and accused Weiss of “changing his story multiple times.” Nadler’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
See a copy of the letter and notes below:
