The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation into Hunter Biden began “as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform,” according to testimony released Thursday.
The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee released transcripts of closed-door testimony by IRS employees, including Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, a whistleblower.
As Breitbart News reported, Shapley told Congress that the Department of Justice had prevented U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss from bringing more serious charges against Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. He also testified that the IRS had been in possession of information that seemed to implicate Joe Biden, such as a WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden pressured a foreign associate and said his father was next to him. And he testified that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf quashed questions into whether Joe Biden was the “big guy” named in an email on Hunter Biden’s laptop describing a business venture with a Chinese firm.
There were several other details in the report hitherto unknown to the public, such as the claim that the probe into Hunter Biden began in 2018 — long after his association with Ukrainian energy company Burisma was a matter of public knowledge — as an investigation of a foreign amateur pornography platform. Shapley did not name the platform.
Shapley’s claims could raise questions about whether Attorney General Merrick Garland was being truthful when he claimed that Weiss had been free to direct the investigation of Hunter Biden without interference.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.