A pair of special agents from the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation division testified before the House Oversight Committee about their experiences investigating Hunter Biden's taxes and complained that Justice Department officials had "slow-walked" the probe and given the president's son preferential treatment.
Hunter Biden
"I sit here before you not as a hero or a victim but as a whistleblower compelled to disclose the truth," said Special Agent Joseph Ziegler. "That said, I'm coming forward. I believe I'm risking my career, my reputation and my casework outside of the investigation we are here to discuss. I ultimately made the decision to come forward after what I believe were multiple attempts at blowing the whistle at the Internal Revenue Service. No one should be above the law, regardless of your political affiliation."
Prior to starting at the IRS in 2010, he said he had worked at Big Four firm Ernst & Young as an external auditor.
He disagreed with David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney in Delaware who had been overseeing the Biden investigation ever since the Trump administration.
"In a recent letter to Congress, Mr. Weiss stated that he had been granted ultimate authority over this matter, but then later stated in the same letter that his charging authority is geographically limited, and that he would need a President Biden-appointed U.S. attorney to partner with him to charge in the case," said Ziegler. "Mr. Weiss stated that he was making all decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the principles of federal prosecution and departmental regulations. In the Criminal Tax Manual, Chapter 10, found on the DOJ website, Tax Division policy states that cases involving individuals who failed to file tax returns or pay a tax but who also commit acts of evasion or obstruction should be charged as felonies to avoid inequitable treatment. In early August 2022, federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice Tax Division drafted a 99-page memorandum. In so doing, they were recommending for approval felony and misdemeanor charges for the 2017, 2018 and 2019 tax years. That did not happen here, and I'm not sure why. And as the special agent on this case, I thought the felony charges were well supported when considering the elements of a felony tax case."
His colleague, Special Agent Gary Shapley, described his frustrations with the case during his testimony. "There should not be a two-track justice system depending on who you are and who you're connected to, yet in this case, there was," he said. "Based on my experience, I'm here to tell you that the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office and Department of Justice's handling of the Hunter Biden tax investigation was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS. At every stage decisions were made that benefited the subject of this investigation. For example, prosecutors concealed the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop from investigators. The DOJ slow-walked steps including interviews, serving document requests and executing search warrants — warrants that were ready as early as April of 2020, but were delayed until after the November 2020 election and never pursued. Investigators were not allowed to follow up on WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden's Apple iCloud backup, where he suggested he was sitting next to his father."
He noted that the assistant US. attorney in Delaware cited the optics of executing a search warrant at President Biden's residence as a deciding factor for not allowing it, even though she agreed that probable cause existed. He said prosecutors instructed investigators not to ask about the "big guy" or "dad" when conducting interviews, in reference to the WhatsApp messages, and he claimed the Biden transition team was tipped off about interviews the night before they were supposed to occur, with the result that only one witness spoke to investigators that day.
"These are just some of the examples of how our investigation was stymied," said Shapley. "I'm not here to support partisan agendas on either side. I'm here because our tax system relies on the American people having confidence it is administered fairly and equally for everyone regardless of your last name or political connections. If the handling of this case was inappropriate, it doesn't matter whether it happened under a Republican or Democrat administration."
Republicans on the committee backed the IRS whistleblowers' claims. "These two courageous whistleblowers provided my committee with devastating testimony showing that the government is not treating all taxpayers equally and that DOJ and the IRS gave preferential treatment to the president's son during a criminal investigation into his taxes," said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith, R-Missouri. "These individuals in front of us today are credible, and sat for nearly 15 hours of interviews with both Republicans and Democrats."
Democrats pointed out that prosecutors have the discretion to disagree with charging recommendations from IRS agents, and that they frequently disagreed with Shapley's recommendations.
"It seems to me that a lot of your testimony has been about the problem of prosecutorial discretion, and the traditional tug of war between investigators who characteristically want to charge as many offenses as they come across, and prosecutors who are more attuned to the rigors of the courtroom and the complexity of forensic evidence," said House Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland. "I admit as a former state assistant attorney general, I see it more from the prosecutor's standpoint than the investigator's standpoint."
He asked Shapley about the recent decision by prosecutors in the case involving former President Trump's retention of classified documents only to charge Trump with possessing the 15 boxes of documents recovered after a search warrant on his home, but not the ones he had turned over prior to that. He also pointed out that Hunter Biden had paid $2 million in back taxes and that could be seen as a mitigating factor by prosecutors. Ziegler insisted that did not include $100,000 in additional tax owed and that it was the prosecutor's responsibility to bring felony charges.
"That's for the U.S. attorney to decide and I'm afraid we're not going to be able to investigate every tax case in America," said Raskin.
