Hunter Biden investigation: Agents barred from accessing the laptop
Reese Gorman
Video Embed
Investigators on Hunter Biden’s criminal case testified that they were denied access to information found on his infamous laptop by prosecutors, which inhibited their ability to investigate further possible crimes committed by the president’s son.
Internal Revenue Service supervisory agent Gary Shapley, one of the whistleblowers, testified to the House Oversight Committee that IRS special agent Joe Ziegler, the other IRS whistleblower, requested access to the laptop in a meeting with investigators and was told they weren’t going to be given access to it as part of their investigation into Biden.
WHITE HOUSE LAUNCHES PROGRAM TO LABEL CYBERSECURITY RISKS OF SMART DEVICES
According to Shapley, who was Ziegler’s superior, when Ziegler brought up the lack of access he had to the information on the laptop, a federal prosecutor on the Hunter Biden investigation, Lesley Wolf, said it was because “prosecutors decided not to give it to you all.”
Shapley said in his testimony that the authenticity of Biden’s laptop had been confirmed in 2019.
Another example of the Department of Justice hindering their investigation was a request for a search warrant of then President Joe Biden’s guest house, where Hunter Biden had been staying.
They were blocked from executing a search warrant at the guest house because Wolf believed it would cause bad optics, they testified.
“With the circumstances of the probable cause being achieved and knowing that this was there, I don’t know how she could have not allowed us to execute the search warrant,” Shapley said.
It wasn’t just the guest house; pursuing questioning or leads that would have involved Joe Biden was highly discouraged.
“Any time we potentially wanted to go down the road of asking questions related to the president, it was, ‘That’s going to take too much approvals. We can’t ask those questions,’” Ziegler said in a pretaped interview with CBS News.
This also was the case with text messages that Hunter Biden sent a Chinese business associate where he brought up his father by saying he was sitting next to him in an effort to pressure the associate to send him money. Ultimately, Hunter Biden would receive millions by invoking “my father” in messages.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But, investigators were barred from using location data in the obtained messages to see if the elder Biden was actually with Hunter Biden when he sent those messages.
Shapley said the location data was “something we clearly needed to follow up on,” but it “simply wasn’t supported by the prosecutors.”