Every taxpayer who dutifully hands over their hard-earned cash every year to the government should be enraged by IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony about how senior leaders at the DOJ, the FBI and the IRS sabotaged the five-year investigation into Hunter Biden and allowed him to walk away with a laughably lenient plea deal and unpaid taxes.
Shapley is a hero, as is the second IRS whistleblower who came forward to the House Ways and Means Committee over the last month to tell the truth about an egregious abuse of power at the highest level of the federal government to protect the president from evidence that implicated him in his son’s overseas business dealings and which line agents worried could have national security implications.
There are two strands to this growing scandal.
First is the original story of political corruption first revealed on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which The Post broke on Oct. 14, 2020.
Second is the coverup, which, like Watergate, has become the bigger scandal.
Corruption
Both strands are covered in Shapley’s bombshell testimony unsealed last week, and is backed up with new evidence he provided, including documents and messages retrieved from a search warrant of Hunter Biden’s iCloud, memorialized conversations of internal IRS and DOJ meetings and interview transcripts with associates of Hunter Biden.
Shapley provides further evidence to add to what we previously have reported, that Joe Biden lied repeatedly to the American people when he said he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
In fact, as we have reported, Joe Biden met with Hunter’s foreign business partners on at least a dozen occasions.
Shapley adds to the list with evidence that Joe joined Hunter and his business partners from the Chinese energy company CEFC at a lunch at the Four Seasons in Washington, DC. This meeting was revealed by Biden family friend Rob Walker when he was interviewed by an IRS and FBI agent in December 2020.
“We were in DC at the Four Seasons, and we were having lunch and [Joe] stopped in,” Walker said in the transcript of Walker’s recorded comments provided to the committee. “He literally sat down. I don’t even think he drank water. I think Hunter said, ‘I may be trying to start a company or tried to do something with these guys and could you . . . and [Joe] was like, ‘If I’m around,’ and he’d show up.”
FBI agent Josh Wilson asked: “So, I mean, you definitely got the feeling that that was orchestrated by Hunter [to] have like an appearance by his dad at that meeting just to kind of bolster your chances at making a deal work out.”
Walker: “Sure”
Walker said that the Four Seasons meeting with CEFC occurred when Joe was “out of office” but gives no date.
On Hunter’s laptop is a diary entry for Dec. 7, 2015, for a meeting with CEFC Chairman Ye, who was in Washington, DC with CEFC Executive Director Jianjun Zang that week to attend a lunch at the Willard Hotel hosted by Israeli Professor Gal Luft, who was working at the time with a think tank associated with CEFC.
In the later trial of Hunter’s CEFC business partner Patrick Ho there was mention of a dinner or lunch Ho was trying to plan on or around Dec. 6, 2015 for “prominent and powerful friends.” The details were redacted from the transcript.
Luft, the “missing” witness in the House Oversight Committee’s Biden family corruption investigation, is living as a fugitive in an undisclosed location after skipping bail in Cypress while awaiting extradition to the US on gun running charges he claims are trumped up by the federal government to protect Joe Biden.
He told The Post in a call on the weekend that he disclosed to FBI and DOJ officials during a “proffer” meeting in March 2019, at the US Embassy in Brussels, that Ye used to brag about Joe and say, “Biden is my guy.”
He told them that Joe Biden had attended a meeting at the Four Seasons with CEFC he believed in 2016. He also told them that CEFC had paid $100,000 a month to Hunter Biden and $65,000 to his uncle Jim, in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.
Agent Wilson also asked Walker: “Did you hear Hunter say that he was setting up a meeting with his dad with them [overseas business partners] while dad was in office?
Walker: “Yeah.”
Inexplicably, Agent Wilson didn’t ask a follow up question.
But as Shapley pointed out, the entire team had been bullied by DOJ prosecutors in Delaware into not asking about “the big guy” — a k a Joe Biden, who was referred to in meetings simply as “dad.”
Shapley also provided encrypted Whatsapp messages from Hunter to the House Ways and Means Committee, which were obtained with a search warrant of the first son’s iCloud.
In one message, sent on July 30, 2017, Hunter writes to CEFC employee and translator Raymond Zhao warning him to pay the $5 million he owes his family: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight.”
Hunter warns Zhao that if he does not comply, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting her waiting for the call with my father.”
Within a week, $5.1 million was wired to Hunter by CEFC, according to bank records published by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson in their September 2020 report into Hunter Biden’s corruption.
While we don’t know if Hunter was telling the truth to Zhao that his father was sitting with him, we do know from photographs on the laptop that Hunter was at his father’s mansion in Greenville, Del., on the Sunday he wrote the WhatsApp, as were various of Joe’s grandchildren.
Another photo obtained by Rep. Claudia Tenney last week shows Joe Biden at a nearby bar on the night of Friday, July 20, 2017.
Shapley and his criminal investigation team wanted to geolocate messages to see if they could find whether Joe really was sitting with Hunter when he wrote the message.
“We don’t know if he was lying that his father was sitting next to him, right?” Shapley testified. “So then we said, well, let’s get the location data for the messages, and if they’re co-located, then we’re on better ground here, right?”
But the Delaware prosecutors refused. “They didn’t allow us to do it,” Shapley said.
He was concerned because: “There’s FARA [foreign lobbying] in play. And the FBI is considering a lot of national security type issues here . . . Some of these people in here, Chairman Ye, Gonweng Dong, Zhao, are believed to be connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
Shapley said, “The prosecutors said don’t do it . . . And if FBI did something at some level, I’m not privy to it . . . You would almost hope that they did, but I don’t know if they did.”
The coverup
Shapley’s testimony is a litany of obstruction by the DOJ and the top echelons of the FBI throughout the five-year investigation in Delaware.
Shapley, who was the veteran supervisor agent for the IRS criminal division and ran a crack team of the 12 best tax investigators in the country, was refused search warrants of a guest house on the grounds of Joe’s Greenville estate where Hunter had been living.
He said that the Delaware assistant US attorney on the case, Lesley Wolf, told them “there is no way we will get that approved” because of the “optics,” and asked “whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”
Shapley’s team were about to issue a search warrant for Hunter’s storage unit in northern Virginia where they believed crucial evidence was kept when he says Wolf “reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit, once again ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed.”
As for the boss, David Weiss, he meekly accepted the refusal of Biden-appointed US attorneys in Washington, DC and California’s central district to allow charges to be brought against Hunter in their jurisdictions.
Shapley said when he confronted Weiss at a “redline” meeting last October Weiss explained that he had asked the DOJ for special counsel status so he could override the refusals by his DC and California counterparts — but had been refused.
Shapley has six witnesses in that memorialized October meeting to back him up.
Garland denies it
Attorney General Merrick Garland denies that Weiss ever asked for special counsel status and has refused to respond to Shapley’s allegations of wrongdoing in his department.
He made an angry public statement last week, obliquely alluding to Shapley: “Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department by claiming that we do not treat cases alike. This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy . . . Nothing could be further from the truth.”
He testified under oath to Congress in April that Weiss had “full authority” for the case. But it’s clear from the IRS whistleblowers that was not the case.
The sabotage of the case against Hunter Biden requires more from Garland than angry threats. He should be hauled into Congress to testify under oath, along with his deputy Lisa Monaco, Weiss, Wolf, FBI Director Christopher Wray and the line agents on the case.
There are lots of questions they need to answer that go to the heart of the integrity of the institutions they lead.
