Biden investigation: Burisma bribery claims ‘concealed’ from IRS investigators
Jerry Dunleavy
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Whistleblowers revealed that alleged bribery claims related to a Ukrainian oligarch and Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden were not relayed to IRS and FBI investigators on the younger Biden’s case in Delaware.
A paid confidential FBI informant told the bureau in June 2020 that a foreign national allegedly claimed he had funneled $5 million to Joe Biden when he was vice president and $5 million to Hunter Biden in an alleged “criminal bribery scheme.”
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Former Attorney General William Barr said this month that these allegations were forwarded to U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the Delaware federal prosecutor who led the investigation into Hunter Biden, but IRS whistleblowers told Congress this month that the bribery allegations from a confidential human source, or CHS, were never made known and therefore were never investigated by them.
The whistleblower claims came from two IRS Criminal Investigation, or IRS-CI, agents who played key roles in the Hunter Biden investigation — Gary Shapley, a supervisory special agent with the IRS’s criminal investigation, and an unnamed IRS case agent who is referred to as “Whistleblower X.”
The duo originally spoke with Congress in May but sent follow-up statements to congressional investigators in June to say the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office never told them about the alleged bribery claims.
“Neither I nor the line IRS-CI agents acting under my supervision, nor the FBI agents working with IRS-CI, were ever provided the CHS information that Attorney General William Barr recently referenced was sent to Delaware to have it checked out,” Shapley told Congress. “Prosecutors never provided such information to IRS-CI. As such, neither IRS-CI nor the FBI agents working with them were provided the opportunity to conduct a proper investigation into the allegations presented by this CHS.”
Shapley said, “This appears to be another example of prosecutors obstructing the investigative process,” and there are likely “more examples of information that prosecutors concealed from investigators in addition to examples already provided to the committee during my previous testimony.”
Whistleblower X’s attorney told Congress that “as Mr. X has testified, he was the IRS-CI Case Agent over the subject investigation at the time — and Mr. X has stated to me that he has never seen this FBI Form 1023 and that he does not recall ever hearing about this information being turned over in any meetings with the prosecution team in Delaware.”
Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the “foreign national” involved in the alleged “criminal bribery scheme” aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.
The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.
Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.
“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
Raskin then contended that “I stand 100% by my statements … that the Department of Justice team of prosecutors and FBI agents under U.S. Attorney Scott Brady determined that there were no grounds to escalate their probe from an initial assessment of the allegations surfaced by Rudy Giuliani to a preliminary or full-blown investigation and that it was therefore closed down.”
Raskin said that “if William Barr has a problem with this characterization, his problem is not with me but with the FBI, Mr. Brady, and other high-level officials reporting to him in his own Justice Department.”
Barr then retorted that Raskin “is confused as to the process that was involved and the nature of the exercise in Pittsburgh” and that “there were a number of investigations going on in the department related to Ukraine and in some cases relating to Hunter Biden and the Bidens.”
Barr said, “I set up a special process in Pittsburgh” with an “intake process” for information to be “screened” to “determine whether it was disinformation” as a “clearinghouse function to check evidence out before sending it to the ongoing investigations.” He added that “it did not, in my recollection, come from Giuliani.”
“It was stuff that was developed within the department and the FBI from a confidential human source. And that information was checked out, and it was determined that it was not likely to have been disinformation,” Barr said, adding, “So it was provided to the ongoing investigation in Delaware to follow up on and to check out.”
Shapley told Congress, “I, along with other IRS-CI investigators, requested to be a part of briefings that the Delaware USAO and DOJ were having with the Pittsburgh USAO during the investigation, but our requests were denied.” He said that “if IRS-CI investigators had participated in those briefings, we would have ensured that proper investigative steps were conducted to determine the veracity of the information provided by the CHS as it would have likely been material to the ongoing criminal investigation of Hunter Biden.”
The IRS whistleblower said that “as a result of the CHS information being concealed by prosecutors from the IRS-CI and FBI investigators assigned to this investigation, we were unable to follow alleged criminal activity as would normally be completed in an investigation.”
Shapley added that “agents from both IRS-CI and the FBI confirmed that, to the best of their knowledge, this information was never provided to the investigators, and no known investigative steps were taken by IRS-CI or FBI agents assigned to the Hunter Biden matter in order to determine if the allegations could be substantiated.”
The lawyer for Whistleblower X said, “This information could have been relevant to Mr. X’s investigation at the time of the subject as it related to a claim of $5 million being paid to the subject which directly ties to email correspondence reviewed between subject and a business partner of subject sent in May of 2014, which is believed to reference the $5 million being paid to subject from company xxx.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an “insurance policy.”
Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.
Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”
Joe Biden said the bribery allegations were “a bunch of malarkey” when asked about them this month after he first quipped, “Where’s the money? I’m joking.”
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Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.
The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.