House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) released the transcribed interviews of two IRS whistleblowers who worked on the Hunter Biden tax evasion investigation on Thursday. The testimonies of IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley Jr., who ran the investigation, and an anonymous whistleblower who was part of his team, bolster the widely-held belief that Hunter Biden received a “sweetheart” deal from the Department of Justice.
Among his many revelations, Shapley told lawmakers that the IRS had obtained a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, the president and CEO of Harvest Capital Management. According to the New York Post, Zhao is a Chinese Communist Party official.
The message read: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
You may recall that 12 days after accompanying his father on an official trip to Beijing in 2013, Hunter Biden’s hedge fund received a substantial investment from HCM. He then co-founded Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., a private equity firm in which he held a 10% stake and a seat on the board.
As the talking heads on liberal cable news shows discredited the veracity of Shapley’s testimony, Fox News reported on Friday that lo and behold, just days after the threatening message was sent, a total of $5.1 million flowed in accounts linked to Hunter Biden.
According to Fox:
On Aug. 4, 2017, Chinese firm CEFC Infrastructure Investment wired $100,000 to Hunter Biden’s law firm Owasco, according to a 2020 report published by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Then, days later on Aug. 8, 2017, CEFC Infrastructure Investment sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a firm Hunter Biden opened with Chinese associates.
…
In addition, the 2020 Senate report revealed that, beginning on Aug. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden initiated a string of 20 wire transactions from Owasco to Lion Hall Group, a consulting firm linked to President Biden’s brother James Biden and his wife Sara. The transactions continued through Aug. 3, 2018, and totaled $1.4 million.
Conspicuously missing from Shapley’s testimony was any mention of the June 30, 2020 FD-1023 in which a confidential human source alleged President Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from a top ranking official at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, in exchange for policy decisions.
On Friday, the Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported on the likely reason for this omission. Shapley’s team at the IRS had never received it. Then-Attorney General William Barr had turned over the 1023 to the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office. This information should have been shared with Shapley. However, both Shapley and the anonymous whistleblower said in subsequent “supplemental statements” provided to the House Ways and Means Committee, the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office “did not inform them of the existence or content of the FD-1023.”
Cleveland wrote:
In fact, the June 12, 2023, affidavit that IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley signed establishes the whistleblowers only realized the FD-1023 had been held back after The Federalist exclusively reported two weeks ago that former Attorney General William Barr said he had sent the CHS’s reporting to Delaware for further investigation.
“Most recently, former Attorney General Bill Barr provided an interview in which he stated that information provided by a Confidential Human Source (‘CHS’) concerning an alleged bribery scheme by President Joe Biden was received through the Pittsburgh [U.S. Attorney Office] and was determined it was not likely to have been disinformation,” Shapley said in his affidavit. Barr noted the FD-1023 “was provided to the ongoing investigation in Delaware to follow up on and to check out,” the affidavit continued.
But according to the IRS whistleblower, the CHS information Barr referenced was never provided to Shapley, nor to any of the IRS agents acting under his supervision, nor to the FBI agents working with the IRS investigators.
Shapley added that he and other IRS criminal investigators had asked to participate in the briefings the Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney’s Office was providing Delaware, but their requests were denied. Had they participated in those briefings, Shapley stressed, they would have undertaken proper investigative steps to determine the veracity of the CHS’s claims. According to Shapley’s affidavit, however, because the information was never provided to the investigators, the agents involved took no steps to determine if the CHS’s allegations could be substantiated.
From the more than 150 suspicious activity reports generated by U.S. banks involving Hunter Biden’s foreign business transactions to the very real progress House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has made (and continues to make) in unraveling the millions of dollars that have poured into the accounts of at least nine family members, including a grandchild, the evidence of the Biden family’s foreign influence peddling scheme is mounting.
But nothing has drawn the ire of the American people more than Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal. His “slap on the wrist” by his father’s DOJ for crimes ordinary citizens have gone to jail for has captured their attention. Hunter’s plea deal offers up a stark reminder that there really are two systems of justice in America.
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