Hunter Biden investigation: Jordan presses Garland on IRS’s ‘retaliatory conduct’ against whistleblowers
Jerry Dunleavy
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A top House Republican investigator is demanding answers from Attorney General Merrick Garland about the “retaliatory conduct” taken against IRS agents who have blown the whistle about the handling of the federal investigation into Hunter Biden.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told Garland on Thursday that his committee “is conducting oversight of the Department of Justice, including serious allegations of whistleblower retaliation” and gave him a June 8 deadline to hand over a host of records related to alleged improper retaliation taken against IRS whistleblowers who were involved in the criminal tax investigation into President Joe Biden’s son.
BIDEN AND GOP BLAME EACH OTHER FOR DEFAULT THEY INSIST WON’T HAPPEN
Lawyers for an IRS whistleblower on the Hunter Biden tax case said last month that their client, revealed to be supervisory special agent Gary Shapley, had documented examples of “preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting” the Hunter Biden case. The IRS supervisory special agent rejected the “sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”
A source familiar with the whistleblower letter confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Garland was the unnamed senior Biden official whose testimony before Congress is being challenged.
Garland has repeatedly vowed to ensure that the federal prosecutor in Delaware handling the Hunter Biden investigation is insulated from any political interference and has refused to appoint a special counsel. The investigation has been marred by allegations of political bias and retaliation against whistleblowers.
“There were multiple steps that were slow-walked, were just completely not done, at the direction of the Department of Justice,” Shapley said when he gave his first public interview this week. “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.”
A second IRS whistleblower, a yet-unnamed case agent, has also alleged retaliation for raising concerns that Justice Department leadership was “acting inappropriately” on the investigation into Hunter Biden.
Both whistleblowers were removed from the federal investigation into possible Hunter Biden tax violations in May, which the first whistleblower’s lawyers called “clearly retaliatory.”
Jordan appeared to agree.
“The timing of the Department’s removal of the agent and investigative team raises serious concerns given that the investigation was the subject of the agent’s protected whistleblower disclosure. The Committee will not tolerate the Department’s retaliatory conduct against this or any other whistleblower,” Jordan told Garland on Thursday. “Federal law protects whistleblowers from retaliation. The Department’s alleged efforts to remove an IRS whistleblower from an ongoing investigation could be a retaliatory action prohibited under United States law.”
Jordan told Garland to hand over “all documents and communications referring or relating to the removal” of the IRS criminal supervisory special agent and his investigative team “from an ongoing investigation” into Hunter Biden.
The GOP chairman also told Garland to provide all relevant records from the DOJ and the IRS “referring or relating to any investigations involving both” agencies and further told the attorney general to hand over “all documents and communications” from the DOJ and the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware “referring or relating to the removal” of the IRS whistleblowers and those of the investigative team.
In February 2021, President Biden asked all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Donald Trump to hand in their resignations, with David Weiss, the federal prosecutor in Delaware, being a rare exception.
The IRS whistleblower’s legal team had said last week that the IRS had removed the entire investigative team in the Hunter Biden tax evasion investigation at the request of the Justice Department.
The lawyers for the initial IRS whistleblower, Tristan Leavitt and Mark Lytle, the president of Empower Oversight and a partner at Nixon Peabody LLP, respectively, fired off a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel on Saturday in which they revealed a second whistleblower had also raised concerns about the Hunter Biden investigation.
But IRS leadership quickly responded “with accusations of criminal conduct and warnings to other agents in an apparent attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might raise similar concerns.”
Leavitt also sent a separate letter to the Office of Special Counsel last week, where he revealed that Shapley has allegedly been retaliated against numerous times for making “protected disclosures” in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
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Congressional Republicans last week demanded an “urgent briefing and explanation” from Werfel about whistleblower protections.
The whistleblower claims emerged as the Jordan-led House Judiciary Committee along with the House Intelligence Committee have unearthed a host of new details about the infamous October 2020 Hunter Biden laptop letter by more than 50 former intelligence officials, including the fact that former acting CIA Director Mike Morell was “triggered” to organize the letter by now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken to discredit the New York Post‘s reporting on the abandoned laptop.