Whistleblower X details unusual roadblocks in Hunter Biden investigation
Eden Villalovas
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IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler, the second IRS employee to come forward who was assigned to the Hunter Biden case, spoke on Friday about the Department of Justice’s delayed actions in the yearslong investigation into the president’s son.
Ziegler said that there were limitations on what evidence the agents could follow about potential tax crimes that existed.
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“We should be able to interview witnesses. We should be able to do all the proper procedures,” Ziegler said on Fox News on Friday.
“I understand that this was a politically sensitive case, but at the end of the day, it was a matter of, ‘No, you can’t do that. Let’s think about it.’ And at the end of the day, we weren’t following all the evidence that we should have,” Ziegler said.
The whistleblowers accused Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf of obstructing their team from investigating further into the case. Ziegler said the first disagreement with Wolf was related to the search warrant for a storage unit in northern Virginia holding documents from Hunter Biden’s office.
Wolf, an assistant to U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who led the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, was accused of preventing the agents from searching Hunter Biden’s storage unit and giving his lawyers notice about the intent to investigate.
“We didn’t have a seat at the table,” Ziegler said, calling the instance a “defining moment” that showed the investigation was not “following the proper procedure that we would normally follow.”
The anonymous IRS investigator was revealed on Wednesday as Ziegler, an IRS special agent who has been with the agency since 2010. Ziegler handled a majority of the tax evidence in the Hunter Biden investigation.
The House Oversight Committee heard testimony on Wednesday from two IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Ziegler, who accused the Justice Department of favoring Hunter Biden in the criminal investigation and claimed more serious charges were warranted against the president’s son. Hunter Biden reached an agreement with prosecutors last month. He agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges.
“I just want to say that in August of 2022 all four assigned prosecutors agreed to recommend prosecution of felony and misdemeanor charges,” Ziegler said, pointing to the notion that agents provided “a ton of evidence that showed willfulness.”
“When you work a criminal case, there’s a thing called willfulness, whether someone intentionally with knowledge either evaded their income taxes or filed a false return,” Ziegler said.
On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released an internal FBI document that included witness details of President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in a bribery scheme during his vice presidency. Republicans accused the FBI of concealing the unclassified FBI document, an FD-1023, in an untimely manner.
Ziegler said he had never seen the FD-1023 document but noted it was important to “further validate some other evidence that we are trying to prove in the case.”
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Ziegler, who said he has faced backlash from his own party as a Democrat for coming forward, clarified he is pushing to get this information out there because “we have to treat taxpayers the same.”
“It’s all about following the evidence and making sure that justice is served,” Ziegler said.