A key claim from an IRS whistleblower about the botched investigation into first son Hunter Biden has been confirmed by the New York Times — but you have to look hard to find it.
IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee last month that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss was blocked from pursuing charges against the first son in both Washington DC and Southern California by Biden-appointed US attorneys Matthew Graves and Martin Estrada.
A Times story touching on Shapley’s claims said the paper had “confirmed independently” that Estrada had opted not to bring charges against the first son in Los Angeles.
However, the note was buried in the 21st paragraph of the story by Glenn Thrush and Michael S. Schmidt — and was relegated to page A16 of the print edition.
According to Shapley, Weiss also told IRS and FBI investigators in October 2022 that he had been denied special counsel status and was not the “deciding official” for any charges, despite later public statements to the contrary by himself and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Weiss made the comment in front of at least six witnesses, one of whom corroborated Shapley’s claim days later in an internal IRS email.
In March of last year, the Times belatedly confirmed The Post’s bombshell October 2020 report about emails, messages, photos and financial information found on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — more than a year and a half after the initial revelations.
The troubled first son pleaded guilty last week to tax misdemeanors, but evaded more serious charges from the financial probe due to the Department of Justice’s “improper” interference, Shapley and another IRS case agent testified to the House Ways and Means Committee.
“That process meant no charges would ever be brought in the District of Columbia, where the statute of limitations on the 2014 and ‘15 charges would eventually expire,” Shapley told the House panel in his May 26 deposition about Graves’ refusal to prosecute in the nation’s capital. “The years in question included foreign income from Burisma and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon … The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct concealed material facts.”
“I was not afforded an opportunity to present to DC on the merits of the case, what we had found through our investigation for 2014, 2015,” the anonymous IRS whistleblower said in his June 1 closed-door testimony. “I was not afforded the opportunity to present to the Los Angeles US Attorney or the US Attorney’s Office with the evidence that we had found in this case.”
Shapley also testified that he found out in January of this year that Estrada had refused to bring charges in California, meaning, as he put it, that: “For all intents and purposes, the [felony] case was dead, with the exception of one gun charge that could be brought in Delaware.”
Weiss told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a June 7 letter that he had “ultimate authority over the matter” — and Garland said the same in sworn congressional testimony earlier this year.
The attorney general has also denied that Weiss asked him to be designated as a special counsel for the case.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has pledged to initiate impeachment proceedings against Garland if the IRS whistleblowers’ testimony proves true — and tapped Jordan’s committee to lead the effort.
The IRS agents also said they argued for prosecutors to bring felony charges against Hunter for failing to pay $2.2 in taxes, with the unnamed whistleblower alleging Hunter and his business associates took $8.3 million from deals in Romania, China and Ukraine.
Hunter is expected to plead guilty July 26 to two counts of willful failure to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, and agree to a two-year diversion program for a federal firearms charge of possessing a gun while addicted to crack cocaine.
Weiss was nominated to his current position by former President Donald Trump, and was confirmed in 2018.
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