In an age of sleazy political corruption that seems insurmountable, there is enormous power in the integrity of two ordinary men willing to stand up, show their faces and tell the truth under oath.
Two elite IRS agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, put their reputations on the line to testify yesterday about egregious wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, which they say obstructed and ultimately destroyed their five-year criminal investigation into Hunter Biden.
Their integrity is as rare as a unicorn in Washington, DC, and they put to shame all the cowards in the IRS and DOJ and FBI who have stayed silent about this Watergate-level coverup.
The testimony they gave and the evidence they will continue to provide Congress helps put the nail in the coffin of Joe Biden’s repeated claims that he knows nothing about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
Not only did he know, but there is mounting evidence that he was involved in the international influence peddling scheme run by his son and brother Jim Biden while he was vice president.
We will learn more about the president’s involvement in his son’s business meetings with shady foreigners when Hunter’s business partner Devon Archer testifies to the House Oversight committee next week.
Yet, according to Shapley and Ziegler, the IRS and FBI team in Delaware that spent five years investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings between 2014 and 2019 were warned by prosecutors not to pull on any string that led to Joe Biden.
They were not allowed to ask witnesses about the “Big Guy,” who has been identified as the former VP.
They were not allowed to obtain search warrants for a cottage on Joe Biden’s property.
They were sabotaged in their efforts to search a storage unit of Hunter’s because a prosecutor tipped off his lawyers.
They were not allowed to interview Joe Biden’s grandchildren who had received money that formed part of the tax investigation.
They were not allowed to geolocate Hunter to see if he was telling the truth in a shakedown message on WhatsApp when he told a Chinese business associate that he was sitting next to his father who wanted to know why money had not been paid.
They were not allowed access to the laptop, which the FBI had, and which contained a wealth of information that could have boosted their investigation.
Ultimately, when Shapley and an FBI supervisory agent flew to California to interview Hunter in December 2020, they were sabotaged by someone at FBI headquarters who tipped off then president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team and the Secret Service.
Shapley never did interview Hunter, and his team was obstructed from interviewing 11 of the total 12 witnesses they had planned to interview.
All roads lead to Joe
As The Post has pointed out since the first day of our coverage of this scandal, all roads from the Hunter Biden scandals lead to Joe Biden.
That is the only reason that an unemployed 53-year-old recovering crack and hooker addict remains in the news.
It is because he was the bag man in an international influence-peddling scheme that stret
ched from China to Ukraine, Romania, Russia, Kazakhstan and beyond.
Ziegler spent five years painstakingly following that money trail.
He itemized yesterday exactly how much money he found that had flowed through to Hunter and his associates, which include the president’s younger brother Jim Biden.
Ziegler testified to $17.3 million from 2014 to 2019 in total foreign income streams through various shell companies to Hunter and associates.
From Romania: $3.1 million.
From China: $3 million from State Energy HK, a firm affiliated with the Chinese Communist party-backed energy company CEFC.
From China: $3.7 million from CEFC-affiliated Hudson West III.
From Ukraine: $6.5 million from corrupt energy company Burisma.
Of that $17.3 million, he said Hunter received $8.3 million, while the rest went to immediate family members and associates, the committee has found.
Shapley demolished the lie from Democrats that they are just disgruntled investigators unhappy that prosecutors determined they didn’t have a case.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna even compared him to Inspector Javert from “Les Misérables,” the villainous cop who jailed people over a loaf of bread.
But Shapley testified that “Two assistant United States attorneys, two DOJ tax attorneys, DOJ Tax Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stuart Goldberg and US Attorney David Weiss all assisted on this investigation since its inception, knew all of the evidence and agreed with the prosecution of felony charges in both DC and the Central District of California.”
Ultimately the case was sabotaged by the DOJ in ways we are still discovering, and the statute of limitations was allowed to expire on the most serious charges.
Hunter got a slap on the wrist in a plea deal allowing him to plead guilty to two misdemeanors. And he hasn’t even repaid all the taxes!
In response to all these the truth bombs, Democrats on the committee behaved like panicking clowns yesterday, injecting red herrings like “racial inequity” and Trump Trump Trump into every question.
By contrast, Shapley and Ziegler are frank and serious men.
For Shapley what is important is “the equal application of justice . . . There are 300 million taxpayers out there who think this hearing is a big deal because they’re paying their taxes and they see someone who isn’t.”
Ziegler said: “We need to hold those accountable who basically for the last five years hasn’t been following proper procedure.”
‘Never compromise’
These are not partisans. Shapley, who has voted for both parties, told the committee: “I am the first person in my family to go to college. It was not an Ivy League school, and I don’t have a network of rich and powerful friends to help me weather the storms of retaliation and character assassination raging on me for doing the right thing. “I am putting myself at risk for the American people who support me and for those who do not. At the end of the day, I am just a small town kid from Norwich, New York who worked hard to get where I am and will never compromise my integrity.”
Ziegler’s life story was a rebuke to Democrats who frame the witnesses as GOP stooges: “I am a gay Democrat married to a man. But I’m no more credible than [Shapley] due to my sexual orientation or my political beliefs. I was raised and have always strived to do what is right. I have heard from some that I am a traitor to the Democratic party [but] I implore you, that if you were put in my position . . . that you would be doing the exact same thing — regardless of your political party affiliation. I hope that I am an example to other LGBTQ people out there . . . We should always do the right thing, no matter how painful the process might be.”
They are true American heroes.
Their sacrifice will help right the rotten ship of state.
