IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley testified before Congress behind closed doors Friday about an alleged coverup in the criminal investigation the agency underwent of first son Hunter Biden.
The GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee led the panel of Republican and Democratic lawmakers who were given equal time to question Mr. Shapley about his allegations that prosecutors are dragging their feet over the now 5-year-old case.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats on the Committee released any statements on their exchanges with Mr. Shapley following his 6-hour testimony.
The IRS official turned whistleblower cannot publicly discuss specifics about the probe due to tax privacy regulations. However, disclosures to Congress are legally protected.
Mr. Shapley was an anonymous whistleblower until last Wednesday when he appeared on CBS News and discussed why he decided to come forward with his allegations.
The 14-year veteran of the federal tax agency told the outlet he began documenting his trepidations about the Hunter Biden investigation five months after being assigned to the high-profile case in June 2020.
“There were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice,” Mr. Shapley said. “When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process. It was way outside the norm of what I’ve experienced in the past.”
Mr. Shapley said he noticed that “each and every time” it appeared that Hunter Biden always benefitted.
“It just got to that point where that switch was turned on. And I just couldn’t silence my conscience anymore,” he said.
“For a couple of years, we’d been noticing these deviations in the investigative process. And I just couldn’t, you know, fathom that DOJ might be acting unethically on this.”
By October 2022, Mr. Shapley decided it was time to report his findings and become a whistleblower following a “charged meeting” with the Department of Justice resulted in his team of 12 subordinates being transferred off of the case.
“It was my red-line meeting,” he said.
A second IRS whistleblower, a subordinate of Mr. Shapley’s and primary case agent on the investigation, surfaced early last week. Although he is not scheduled to testify before lawmakers, he wrote in an email last week, “We have been saying for some time [prosecutors have] been acting inappropriately.”
On April 19, he notified Congress in a letter through his attorney Mark Lyttle that there was evidence the president’s son received “preferential treatment” since the launch of the investigation.
Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation for several years for tax crimes and other wrongdoing related to his global business dealings and for lying on a federal form when he purchased a gun.
A GOP aide told The Washington Times that Mr. Shapley has evidence that at least two Biden Department of Justice appointees in U.S. Attorney’s Offices refuse to seek a tax indictment against the president’s son.
In his disclosure to Congress, he described Biden administration actions that contradict sworn testimony to Congress by an unnamed senior political appointee.
The whistleblower wants to report actions that “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case, and detail examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”
The letter was sent to multiple House and Senate lawmakers in both parties, including Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who co-chairs the Whistleblower Protection Caucus and is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees the IRS.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has been investigating the Biden family business deals for several years, told The Times this is not the first complaint that Democrats are mishandling the investigation into Hunter Biden.
Mr. Johnson said a different whistleblower told his office the U.S. Attorney in Delaware tasked with investigating Hunter Biden lacked sufficient resources to conduct a proper investigation.
House Republicans continue to search hundreds of bank records related to the Biden family’s lucrative business deals, many of them orchestrated by Hunter Biden, involving Russia, Ukraine, China and other countries.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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