Washington
CNN
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Documents released Wednesday by House Republicans shed new light on how two Internal Revenue Service agents who investigated Hunter Biden felt like they hit roadblocks whenever President Joe Biden’s name came up in the criminal probe.
However, some of the documents also show that senior Justice Department prosecutors believed there were legitimate reasons for investigators to steer away from the elder Biden. And there is no indication that the DOJ officials were acting at the request of senior leadership.
The roughly 700 pages of internal government documents became public after a party-line vote by the House Ways and Means Committee. The trove includes emails among IRS agents and Justice Department prosecutors, internal IRS reports, transcripts of interviews with witnesses in the criminal probe, handwritten notes from meetings and more.
The materials came from IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, who turned over the files to back up their prior allegations of political interference in the Hunter Biden criminal probe. The new disclosures provide some context on their string of disagreements with federal prosecutors.
One of the more notable files among the 700 pages released Wednesday was an August 2020 email showing a deputy for David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor now overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, directing colleagues to remove Joe Biden’s name from a draft search warrant – because there wasn’t any legal basis to include it.
Republicans are hoping the documents bolster allegations central to their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, that federal investigators put up roadblocks that protected him and his family. But some of the alleged examples referenced in the documents released Wednesday occurred before Joe Biden took office, and during the Trump administration.
Republicans argue that those alleged roadblocks demonstrate why their congressional investigations are legitimate, including their efforts to fill in the gaps left by the two IRS whistleblowers. But Democrats have repeatedly pointed out that their GOP colleagues haven’t uncovered anything directly implicating Joe Biden in wrongdoing. And they argue that the new documents released by Republicans are cherry-picked and only tell one side of the story.
Congressional Republicans and the IRS whistleblowers have argued that a deputy for special counsel David Weiss, the Trump-appointed prosecutor now overseeing the Hunter Biden criminal probe, was part of a Justice Department effort to protect Joe Biden and interfere with the Hunter Biden probe.
The department vehemently denies those allegations, and some of the email exchange they cite as evidence occurred during Donald Trump’s presidency and while Bill Barr was attorney general.
The August 2020 email from Weiss’ deputy said the warrant was for “BS,” an apparent reference to Blue Star Strategies, a lobbying firm that represented Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was on the board. By then, the Hunter Biden criminal probe had expanded to include whether the firm’s US activities violated foreign lobbying laws known as FARA.
“I am not sure what this is cut and pasted from, but other than the attribution, location and identity stuff at the end, none if it is appropriate and within the scope of this warrant. Please focus on FARA evidence only,” Weiss’ deputy said in the email.
Wiess’ deputy then instructed her colleagues to take out any references to Joe Biden, writing, “There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here.” A single page of the draft search warrant, which was also released Wednesday by House Republicans, identifies “Political Figure 1” as Joe Biden. The rest of the page is completely redacted.
In his private testimony earlier this year to lawmakers, Shapley claimed that in September 2020, federal prosecutors, including Weiss’ deputy, had been “slow-walking” a search warrant for Blue Star’s emails and that this was a “significant blow” to the FARA probe.
Hunter Biden hasn’t been charged with any FARA-related lobbying crimes, though prosecutors from Weiss’ team said at a July court hearing that this was still a possibility.
The GOP-run panel also released an internal IRS report from May 2021 where officials complained of further “obstruction” by Wiess’ deputy. They were frustrated by her alleged refusal to let them dig into potential “campaign finance criminal violations” that they found. The report doesn’t say which candidate or party received the political donations.
The IRS agents wrote that Weiss’ deputy didn’t think there was enough evidence to back up the campaign finance angle, and instead pressed them to focus on the stronger parts of their investigation, including Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes.
It’s unclear who wrote the report, which originated from the IRS field office in Washington, DC.
Weiss has signaled in recent court filings that he’s considering indicting Hunter Biden on federal tax charges. He already charged Hunter Biden with three gun felonies, related to a revolver he’s accused of buying while addicted to drugs, which is illegal. Hunter Biden’s layers said he will plead not guilty.
When announcing the release of the documents, Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith called the material “new and alarming.”
“It is clear that then Vice President Joe Biden’s political power and influence was ‘the brand’ that Hunter Biden was selling all over the world,” Smith said.
Democrats meanwhile have argued that Republicans are ignoring the fact that the government is about to shutdown.
“Today is another distraction,” the top Democrat on the panel, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, said in a statement provided to CNN. “A distraction from my colleagues’ inability to govern and from their inability to fund the government. Amid their chaos, they’ve failed to convince their own colleagues of the necessity of their political stunt, let alone the American people.”
During the closed door executive session, Democrats raised questions about whether the committee could trust the documents provided by the whistleblowers if the panel was not able to see the unredacted version, according to documents provided to CNN. Democrats also were concerned about how the whistleblowers could access documents pertaining to the case when they were removed from it.
White House spokesperson Sharon Yang said in a statement to CNN, “Instead of wasting time with media stunts trumpeting half-baked conspiracy theories, House Republicans should realize the clock is ticking – it’s time they stop trying to distract and start focusing on priorities that matter to the American people, like doing their jobs to prevent a government shutdown that would inflict real pain on working families.”
