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Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Hunter Biden’s Criminal Gun Trial


BY: STEVE ROBERTS, JONATHAN FAHEY, AND ANDREW PARDUE | JUNE 04, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/04/heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-hunter-bidens-criminal-gun-trial/

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Jury selection for Hunter Biden’s first federal criminal trial began Monday in Delaware. The Biden son is facing trial on three charges: two counts of false statements and one count of unlawful firearm possession, all related to a Colt Cobra 38SPL revolver he allegedly purchased and possessed in Delaware in October 2018. Biden faces up to 25 years imprisonment if convicted of these offenses. 

The case the prosecution intends to prove is relatively straightforward. Biden has struggled with addiction to various narcotics for years and was even discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve after failing a mandatory drug test in June 2013. In his 2021 book, Beautiful Things, he openly discussed the fact that during the period that is relevant in this case, “[a]ll my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs — feeding the beast.” Then, amid this addiction, Hunter Biden purchased a handgun.

Every gun owner will be familiar with ATF Form 4473, a document that asks all prospective firearms purchasers a series of questions to ensure they are legally authorized to own a firearm before completing a sale. One of these questions asks whether the purchaser is “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

The prosecution will attempt to prove that Biden answered “no” to this question on his Form 4473 when the truthful answer should have been “yes,” and he therefore obtained a gun that he was not legally authorized to possess. In other words, Hunter Biden is not being prosecuted for being an addict; he is being prosecuted for lying about his addiction to unlawfully obtain a firearm and then possessing that firearm as an unlawful user of illegal drugs.

For years, it appeared as if Hunter Biden would avoid accountability for his conduct entirely. After significant public pressure, however, a plea agreement was reached between Biden and the government that would allow him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax offenses — despite allegedly failing to pay over $1.4 million in taxes by understating his income and inflating his expenses, offenses that themselves carry a maximum of 17 years in prison — and avoid responsibility almost entirely for his gun offenses by entering into a deferred prosecution agreement. Such agreements are almost entirely unheard of for firearms offenses.

To make the deal even sweeter for Biden, the agreement did not even require him to cooperate with the government, which is often a requirement with plea agreements, particularly in cases where extreme leniency is being offered.

But then something happened in the spring of 2023 that threw a wrench into the deal being worked out between Biden and the government and changed the landscape. Two IRS whistleblowers came forward alleging political interference in their investigation of Hunter Biden’s taxes by officials in the Department of Justice who repeatedly limited the scope of the investigation. A New York Times investigation revealed that the U.S. attorney’s posture on whether to require Hunter Biden to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses as a condition of any deal changed shortly after the IRS whistleblowers came forward.

Then Biden’s team demanded that the plea deal include immunity for “any other federal crimes” he may have committed, even beyond the gun and tax-related matters that were the subject of this investigation. Because this broad immunity request went farther than the prosecution was willing to go, the plea deal fell apart and was ultimately rejected by the federal judge.

The case has also raised interesting questions about the scope of the Second Amendment after Hunter Biden’s lawyers argued that the federal law under which he was charged infringes upon his constitutional right to own a firearm. Relying on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Biden’s attorneys argued that the charges should be dismissed because there is no “historical tradition” in the United States of prohibiting users of illicit substances from obtaining firearms simply upon the basis of their addiction (as opposed to a prior criminal conviction for drug charges, for example).

Federal courts are divided on the constitutionality of this law, and while the argument was not successful in preventing Biden’s case from moving forward to trial, it could still be relevant in an appeal. If Biden’s argument succeeds, that would effectively expand Second Amendment rights to a class of people whose right to own a firearm is not currently protected under federal law.

Hunter Biden’s legal troubles will not end with the conclusion of his Delaware trial. His indictment for failure to pay taxes from 2016 through 2019 is pending. And a congressional investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals and lobbying is also ongoing. Of course, his legal troubles may all go away after the November election, when, if reelected, President Biden would have the ability to pardon him, likely without serious political ramifications. 

Steve Roberts and Jonathan Fahey are partners at Holtzman Vogel, and Andrew Pardue is a Holtzman Vogel associate.

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Willfully Blind David Weiss Pinky Promises Political Favoritism Didn’t Affect Hunter Biden Probe


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/13/willfully-blind-david-weiss-pinky-promises-political-favoritism-didnt-affect-hunter-biden-probe/

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Politics absolutely, positively had no bearing on the Hunter Biden investigation, Delaware U.S. Attorney-turned-Special Counsel David Weiss assured the House Judiciary Committee last week. Yet Weiss also acknowledged it would be a “problem” if someone had warned Joe Biden’s transition team of FBI agents’ impending plan to interview the president-elect’s son, as whistleblowers say occurred. Weiss just didn’t bother to ask anyone about the leak or any other concerns of political favoritism, showing the federal prosecutor has opted for willful blindness over oversight of the Hunter Biden criminal probe — even after his appointment as special counsel.

On Tuesday, Weiss sat for an interview before the House Judiciary Committee. A transcript of Weiss’s testimony, which The Federalist has reviewed, shows the special counsel faced several questions about claims that political favoritism infected the Hunter Biden investigation.

But even before the questioning began, in a brief opening statement, Weiss declared that “political considerations played no part in our decision making.” Rather, the Delaware U.S. attorney, doing double duty as special counsel, assured the committee that “throughout this investigation, career prosecutors on my team and I have made decisions based on the facts and the law.”

Weiss repeated that mantra several times during questioning about specific steps his team took — or didn’t take — in the Hunter Biden investigation. “Again, I’m not going to comment on any aspect of the investigation or a prosecution, and from my perspective, the prosecutors who participated in this case followed the law and the facts. That was the motivation.”

Of course, that was Weiss’s “perspective” because, even after the IRS whistleblowers provided concrete examples of the politicization of the Hunter Biden investigation, the U.S. attorney buried his head in the sand rather than inquire about the veracity of the claims. The totality of Weiss’s testimony confirms this reality, but it is best exemplified in an exchange about the warning given to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that agents intended to interview Hunter Biden.

IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had previously testified that the day before their Dec. 8, 2020 “day of action,” when agents planned to interview a host of relevant witnesses, he learned someone had tipped off Joe Biden’s transition team of the plans to interview Hunter Biden and another 10-plus witnesses. “This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee asked Weiss if he knew “who made the decision to tip off the presidential transition team about the day of action, and that the investigators wanted to try to speak with Hunter Biden.” Weiss initially responded that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to comment on the matter but that he would address the question in his special counsel report.

A Concerning Connection

However, additional questioning soon reviewed a concerning connection between the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office and the Biden transition team, in the person of Alexander Mackler, whom Weiss acknowledged had been one of his assistant U.S. attorneys from 2016 through about mid-2019. According to the committee’s questioning, Mackler had at one point served as Joe Biden’s press secretary, had been Beau Biden’s campaign manager during his reelection campaign, and from 2014-2016 served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President Biden. While Weiss testified, he knew Mackler had worked for Biden, he said he didn’t know many of those specifics. However, Weiss acknowledged learning that Mackler had been named to Biden’s transition team, although he said he couldn’t remember when or how he had learned of that fact.

The House Judiciary Committee then pushed Weiss on whether he or anyone else from his office had any communications with Mackler while he was working with the transition team. While Weiss stated he was “very confident” he “had no conversations” with Mackler about the latter’s work on the transition team or about the Hunter Biden case, Weiss said he had “no idea whether anyone else has spoken to Alex Mackler period or about the case.”

Weiss further testified that he was actually unaware of whether the transition team had been tipped off, as IRS whistleblowers claimed. But if so, Weiss confirmed it would be “a concern” and “a problem” and that “it shouldn’t happen.” Yet when pushed on what he would do to address the problem if he “found out that something like that did occur,” Weiss refused to answer the question, saying it was “a hypothetical” that he would not “speculate on” other than saying that “as a general matter, it’s problematic.”

Willful Blindness

On first blush, Weiss’s non-answers about the tip-off to the transition team seem like inconsequential, unhelpful responses that merely lead to a dead end. But Weiss’s acknowledged ignorance is explosive news: The man that Attorney General Merrick Garland named as special counsel to supposedly ensure independence in the investigation and prosecution of the president’s son failed to inquire of his team about whether someone had leaked to the transition team details about the impending questioning of Hunter Biden. In fact, according to Weiss, he didn’t even bother to confirm the tip-off had occurred — much less seek to determine who bore responsibility for the leak — even though he knew that a former Delaware assistant U.S. attorney served on the Biden transition team.

Weiss’s failure in this regard was not an aberration. Rather, throughout his House Judiciary Committee testimony last week, Weiss confirmed he has ignored the whistleblowers’ claims of politicization. For instance, when asked whether “any of the attorneys on your team, whether it’s a Special Counsel team or before the Special Counsel team was stood up, have any ties which you would consider close to the Biden family,” Weiss said he doesn’t “delve into those kinds of things,” but that he is “unaware of any such thing.”

Weiss’s failure to inquire about his staff’s relationship with the Biden family may have made sense initially but given the two whistleblowers’ detailed allegations of political favoritism, not asking some basic questions to ensure an unbiased staff is inexcusable.

Weiss’s failures extend much further, however, with his Tuesday testimony confirming he has not reviewed his staff’s handling of the investigation in light of the whistleblowers’ testimony that there were “politically-motivated decisions made in the Hunter Biden case.” Specifically, while Weiss acknowledged the whistleblowers’ claims, his responses to questions show he disregarded the claims without any inquiry. For instance, when asked, “If an investigator or prosecutor makes what is believed to be a politically-motivated statement or decision, how is that reviewed in your office?” Weiss responded that he was “not aware of such a situation.”

The House committee pushed the special counsel more on this point, asking: “For example, on the Hunter Biden case, if one of your assistant United States attorneys was exhibiting favoritism towards the Biden family or towards Hunter Biden, and that was brought to your attention, what would be the process to sort that out?”

“My office has no process or protocol for dealing with something like that. It’s not something we have engaged in, participated in, or that I have experienced,” Weiss countered. Weiss held firm under additional questioning, stating he was “not aware of any such reviews.”

“I’ve told you. I have no such process. We haven’t experienced it in our office,” Weiss insisted.

Head in the Sand

This testimony establishes that Weiss has done nothing to review his team’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation for possible political bias, notwithstanding the whistleblowers’ detailed claims of such favoritism. No wonder then that Weiss can say he has confidence in his prosecutors and believes they acted “in a professional and unbiased manner without partisan or political considerations.”

Ironically, if this were a criminal case in which federal prosecutors needed to establish the defendant’s knowledge of some sort of “shady dealings,” the U.S. attorney’s office would seek what is collegially called the “ostrich instruction.” The “ostrich instruction” informs the jury that a deliberate effort “to avoid guilty knowledge is all the guilty knowledge the law requires,” and that a defendant who knows or strongly suspects “he is involved in shady dealings” cannot avoid criminal liability by making sure “he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings.”

While there is no suggestion that Weiss is a co-conspirator in some criminal enterprise, he is similarly burying his head in the sand when it comes to the politicization of the Biden investigation exposed by the IRS whistleblowers and congressional oversight committees. Thus, his assurances that “political considerations played no part in our decision making” are meaningless.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Hunter Biden Email Discussing $5 Million Payment From Burisma Corroborates FD-1023


BY: ELLE PURNELL | SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/27/hunter-biden-email-discussing-5-million-payment-from-burisma-corroborates-fd-1023/

screenshot of exhibit from affidavit of Joseph Ziegler

An email apparently sent by Hunter Biden to longtime business associate Devon Archer discusses a $5 million payment from Ukrainian energy company Burisma — appearing to corroborate the FBI FD-1023 form in which a confidential human source recorded testimony from Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky that “It costs 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden.”

“Need to determine what we consider expenses to be deducted from potential Burisma ‘pay’ before we determine true split # with Alex. (i.e. 5-.75/3= 1.42M apiece),” read an email that IRS investigators believed to be from the younger Biden, which was part of a batch of records released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee. According to a slide that investigators presented to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the “5” is a reference to $5 million that would be paid out by Burisma. Of that money, $750,000 would be subtracted — the email asked if Archer thought “750K [was] a reasonable expense # btw Wash and DC offices?”

Of the remaining $4.25 million, splitting the money between Hunter, Archer, and “Alex” (whose last name is redacted) would leave each man with $1.42 million.

IMAGE CREDITEXHIBIT FROM AFFIDAVIT OF JOSEPH ZIEGLER / WAYS AND MEANS COMMITTEE

According to an affidavit from IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler, who worked the Hunter Biden tax case, the discussion “was believed to be [Hunter Biden’s] laying out of the plan related to the Burisma board income he and Archer were about to receive.”

The emails were obtained “by the investigative team via an Electronic Search Warrant served on Google related to RHB’s [Hunter Biden’s] Apple email account,” Ziegler noted.

“RHB references $5 million in total from Burisma (which was referenced in the beginning of the board agreement), which I believe coincides with information on the FBI Form FD1023,” he added.

The FD-1023 was an FBI form completed in June 2020, in which a highly credible confidential human source (CHS) reported having a conversation with Mykola Zlochevsky in which the Burisma founder complained about having to pay $5 million to both Hunter and Joe Biden. Zlochevsky claimed “he didn’t want to pay the Bidens, and he was ‘pushed to pay’ them” and told the CHS he had “recordings” of Hunter and Joe to prove it.

“Zlochevsky [said] he did not send any funds directly to the ‘Big Guy’ (which CHS understood was a reference to Joe Biden),” the FD-1023 notes. When the CHS asked about Zlochevsky’s bank accounts, “Zlochevsky responded it would take them (Investigators) 10 years to find the records (i.e., illicit payments to Joe Biden).”

The CHS also reported on the FD-1023 that another Burisma executive told him Hunter Biden was hired to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

[READ NEXT: Here’s Everything In The Damning FD-1023 Document That Implicates Biden In An International Bribery Scheme]

Despite the explosive allegations contained in the form, Weiss’s team withheld the FD-1023 from IRS investigators, according to Ziegler. Weiss has since been appointed special counsel by Joe Biden’s attorney general.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Wasn’t Supposed to Protect Him, It Was Supposed to Protect Joe


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 27, 2023

Rad more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/27/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-wasnt-supposed-to-protect-him-it-was-supposed-to-protect-joe/

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The twists and turns of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal have been hard to follow, but it’s been clear from the outset that, like his business ventures in Ukraine, the deal was thoroughly corrupt. It’s now clear that the agreement was never meant primarily to shield Hunter from future prosecution, but to protect President Joe Biden.

In a Delaware federal court on Wednesday, Hunter’s lawyers ended up rejecting a plea deal once it became clear the deal would not confer broad immunity on the president’s son. Although the language of the plea deal has not been released, it was supposed to have Hunter plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, as well as enter a pretrial diversion agreement for illegal possession of a firearm. The deal fell apart, however, once the federal judge overseeing the case, Maryellen Noreika, started asking questions. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:

The hearing appeared to be going smoothly before Judge Noreika questioned whether the agreement meant that Mr. Biden would be immune from prosecution for other possible crimes — including violations related to representing foreign governments — in perpetuity. When a top prosecutor in the case said it would not, Chris Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, initially hesitated and then said the government’s position would make the agreement “null and void.”

After a recess during which the lawyers for both sides scrambled to hash out an agreement, Judge Noreika, who earlier had said she felt she was being asked to “rubber stamp” the agreement, said she could not accept the plea deal. Hunter Biden then pled not guilty to the tax charges and the hearing was over. 

What to make of this? The most obvious explanation is that Hunter’s lawyers know what most Americans know: He was involved in complex foreign bribery schemes that implicate his father, President Biden. They were hoping to strike a plea agreement with the Justice Department that would protect him from future prosecution related to corrupt foreign business deals in Ukraine and China that involved trading on his family name, but once it became clear that the judge was not going to sign off on such an agreement, they backed out of the deal.

Why would they want such a deal in the first place? Maybe because they know the Republicans in Congress continue to amass evidence that Joe Biden and his son took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs for protection against prosecution. Hunter’s plea deal, in other words, wasn’t meant to shield Hunter from future prosecution, it was meant to protect Joe. A plea agreement granting Hunter broad immunity would make it harder to dig into his murky overseas business deals — deals which increasingly appear to have involved his father. 

As we have detailed here in recent days, the Biden bribery scheme in Ukraine is shaping up to be the great political scandal in American history. If it’s true, it would mean the end of Biden’s presidency, either by impeachment and conviction or by abandonment by the Democrat Party establishment ahead of the 2024 election. 

Consider what’s come out just recently. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, last week released an unclassified FBI document detailing reports from a “highly credible” informant who says the founder and CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, bragged about paying the Bidens $10 million to make the oil and gas company’s legal problems disappear. Specifically, Zlochevsky wanted Ukrainian authorities to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma.

And of course, that’s just what happened — after then-Vice President Joe Biden, by his own admission, threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was fired.

This same informant says top Burisma executives admitted that the only reason they hired Hunter to sit on their board (for a jaw-dropping $83,000 a month) was “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”

The FBI, for its part, tried to hide this document from IRS investigators and Congress, and the corporate media have done their best to ignore the story altogether. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Indeed, the story keeps growing. As Margot Cleveland reported in these pages earlier this week, the Pittsburgh FBI office told the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office it had corroborated multiple aspects of the informant’s claims, including travel records confirming the informant had indeed traveled to the locales detailed in the document during the relevant time period.

We also know the FBI and Justice Department not only prevented a pair of IRS whistleblowers from learning of the document but also kept hidden portions of the materials found on Hunter’s laptop. That’s no small thing. One of those whistleblowers suggested the FBI informant’s claims could corroborate other evidence the IRS special agents had gathered during their investigation.

As this story develops, it’s becoming obvious that the point of the FBI and DOJ’s obstruction is to protect the president and suppress further evidence of the Biden bribery scheme. That’s why a special counsel won’t cut it. The deep state isn’t going to get to the bottom of this, and the corporate press is going to keep aggressively ignoring it. If the federal courtroom circus on Wednesday demonstrated anything, it’s that we’re going to need an impeachment inquiry to find out the truth about President Biden’s corruption.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Biden Family Scandals Are So Much Bigger Than Hunter’s Hookers And Burisma Bribery


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/26/biden-family-scandals-are-so-much-bigger-than-hunters-hookers-and-burisma-bribery/

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When the New York Post broke the news that documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, the corporate media — to the extent they didn’t frame the story as Russian disinformation — pretended the reporting solely concerned Hunter Biden’s personal life. The scandal, however, was never about Hunter’s sordid sex life and history of drug abuse. Rather, it concerned Joe Biden’s abuse of power as vice president for financial gain. But now it reaches much further — including 10 distinct scandals.

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

While the current scandals swirling around the laptop are unrelated to Hunter Biden’s sex life or drug abuse, the president’s son features in the first scandal: Evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed numerous crimes, including felonies. Evidence suggests Hunter Biden acted as an unregistered foreign agent for, at a minimum, Ukraine and China in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting suggests Hunter also accepted bribes from Burisma or alternatively helped extort $10 million from the Ukrainian oil and gas company for himself and his father. 

IRS whistleblowers and federal prosecutors also believed the evidence supported multiple felony tax counts. Lying on a federal firearm application is a serious felony as well.

The evidence that the president’s son likely engaged in extensive criminal conduct for over a decade is a huge scandal, but it also bred a separate scandal: the DOJ and FBI’s efforts to protect him, No. 7 below. 

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

Hunter Biden’s laptop also exposed the reality that Joe Biden lied to the American public, dating back to September 2019. During a campaign stop, the then-Democrat presidential candidate snapped at Fox News’ Peter Doocy, claiming: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”  

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1175486006348460032?s=20

More than two years later, after The Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Doocy asked then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether “President Biden still maintains he never discussed overseas business deals with his son Hunter,” to which Psaki replied, “Yes.”

While Biden and his team stuck with that lie for two-plus years, his current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is attempting to snuff out that scandal by reframing Biden’s denial. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The president was never in business with his son,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie. 

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

The much more serious scandal, however, concerns extensive evidence of Joe Biden’s widespread corruption. Bank and corporate records, suspicious activity reports, emails and text messages recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, travel records, reporting from a “highly credible” CHS, and testimony and expected testimony from Hunter Biden’s business partners indicate that Joe Biden, while vice president, exchanged political favors for payments to his family members — with a cut of the cash coming to the “Big Guy.” 

People and/or organizations from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, all paid Biden-related business entities millions of dollars, with evidence indicating the now-president received a cut of the bribes. The evidence indicates that in exchange, the individuals received access to the then-vice president. In the case of Ukraine, Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter held a board seat and which allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million in bribes.

The evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption is bad enough, but the scandal deepens when one considers the president has supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs and billions in American tax dollars.

Cover-Ups

While the first three scandals involve misconduct and likely criminality by Hunter and Joe Biden, there are at least twice as many distinct scandals that flow from cover-up efforts to protect the Bidens.

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

By December 2019, the FBI had authenticated the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, knowing the laptop was real and contained spectacularly damaging details implicating Joe Biden in corruption, the FBI spent the months leading up to the November 2020 election grooming tech giants to believe a “hack-and-leak operation” was imminent. The FBI also pushed social media companies to change their terms of service to prohibit the posting of so-called hacked materials.

These combined efforts prompted social media companies to censor the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 blockbuster article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad.” After the story broke and after initially confirming its authenticity to Twitter, the FBI refused to comment on whether the material had been hacked or was Russian disinformation, leading to its continued widespread censorship. Not only did the FBI improperly protect Joe Biden and prompt the censorship of true political speech, it interfered in the 2020 election and likely handed Biden the White House. 

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

Former and current members of intelligence agencies soon joined the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election. The House Intelligence and Weaponization Committees previously detailed evidence of that interference in their report titled, “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.” 

That report established that the infamous October 2020 letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and falsely framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, was concocted by Biden-campaign officials, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. Then-candidate Joe Biden would cite that letter in his final debate with Donald Trump to lie to the American people (again), telling the country the laptop was Russian disinformation.

It is scandalous that scores of former intelligence officials would use their prior positions and reputations to deceive Americans in a way that likely affected the 2020 election. That any of those individuals retained security clearances adds to the scandal, as does the role of the Biden campaign and the involvement of at least one CIA employee in soliciting signatories for the statement. 

6. Intel Agencies’ Failure to Protect America Against Foreign Influence

Not only did intelligence agencies interfere in the 2020 election, but in their efforts to protect Joe Biden, they likely also failed to provide necessary defensive briefings, putting Americans at risk.

To protect our country, intelligence officials must have frank discussions with leaders (and candidates) about the risks of foreign malign influence. Given how hard the FBI and intelligence agencies tried to bury the news of the laptop, it seems likely they omitted any reference to the laptop and details contained on it in briefings to then-President Trump, then-candidate Biden, and the Biden campaign. 

To date, this scandal has been overlooked and merits further inquiry to determine whether the intelligence apparatus fulfilled its duty to the country or omitted inconvenient facts in briefings to protect Joe Biden. Of particular concern is whether intelligence agencies assessed and warned about the risk that the Russians had stolen a second Hunter Biden laptop that contain materials the Biden son believed rendered him susceptible to blackmail.

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

When it comes to how the DOJ and FBI handled investigations into Biden family corruption, the evidence of potential misconduct is overwhelming.

Broadly, this scandal includes conflicts of interest between Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys — including the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney handling an investigation into the Jim Biden-connected company Americorp, and the California and D.C. U.S. attorneys who reportedly refused to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden. Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s conflict of interest proves scandalous given the numerous efforts by the DOJ and FBI headquarters to interfere in the investigations.

Beyond conflicts of interest, the IRS whistleblowers and another whistleblower who’s provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have revealed numerous instances of DOJ and FBI procedural violations, the burying of evidence such as the FD-1023, the false labeling of derogatory evidence as disinformation, and limits on the investigative steps agents could take. Consequently, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden only with misdemeanors and one firearm felony that could be dropped, and to date it appears no investigation has occurred into Joe Biden or his brother, Jim Biden, on allegations of bribery and money laundering.

While Democrats counter the growing evidence of corruption by wrongly claiming it has not been corroborated, that fact does not vindicate the Bidens: It implicates the DOJ and FBI in a separate scandal. 

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

8. DOJ and FBI’s Cover-Up of Failure to Investigate Bidens

Once whistleblowers began exposing the Biden administration’s interference in the family’s pay-to-play investigation, the DOJ and FBI began to cover-up the cover-up. We saw this most clearly when Garland professed that there was no political interference in U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Garland stressed that, as a Trump holdover, Americans could trust Weiss’s independence.

Garland’s testimony cannot be squared with the extensive interference coming from FBI headquarters and the limitations the DOJ placed on investigative techniques. When Grassley pushed on the point, Garland maintained that Weiss had ultimate charging authority. According to an IRS whistleblower, however, Weiss said otherwise, claiming he wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker. 

Here, the cover-up of the cover-up began in earnest, with Garland and Weiss writing a series of letters and making public statements that attempted to obscure the ultimate question of whether Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden and whether DOJ or FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation. This scandal has yet to be unraveled. But on Monday, the DOJ sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee offering up Weiss to testify — indicating Biden’s Justice Department might be preparing to throw Weiss under the bus.

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden 

Many Democrats are also wrapped up in lying to protect Joe Biden. Some of these lies predate the election when they spun the laptop as Russian disinformation. But more recently, we saw Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin lying to the American public about the FD-1023 form. Had former Attorney General William Barr not gone on the record to correct Raskin’s falsehood, the public would have been none the wiser.

Seeking to protect Joe Biden from damning bribery claims, Raskin falsely claimed that Trump appointees Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had reviewed the CHS’s reporting contained in a June 2020 FD-1023 form and closed out the investigation. Raskin also portrayed the CHS’s reporting as connected to Rudy Giuliani.

But as The Federalist first reported, Barr unequivocally said that Raskin’s claim was “not true.” The investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.” “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.” Likewise, Barr explained the CHS’s reporting was unrelated to Giuliani.

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

When the Post broke the laptop story, the legacy media either silenced it or framed it as Russian disinformation. Even two years later, after belatedly authenticating the material recovered from Hunter Biden’s computer, the corporate media refused to cover the implications — that the emails, documents, and texts indicated Joe Biden was involved in a massive corruption scandal. The corrupt press still refuses to cover the news fairly, opting instead to brand the evidence as a conspiracy theory. 

The media’s refusal to seek and report the truth proves the most dire of all the scandals because without a free press checking government corruption, the corruption will only grow.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Mounting Evidence Doesn’t Matter, Corporate Media Will Never Cover the Biden Corruption Scandal


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 25, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/25/mounting-evidence-doesnt-matter-corporate-media-will-never-cover-the-biden-corruption-scandal/

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As evidence mounts that President Joe Biden took millions in bribe money from Ukrainian oligarchs when he was vice president as part of an elaborate influence-peddling scheme headed up by his son, Hunter Biden, let’s check in on how the corporate press is handling what looks like the biggest political scandal in American history.

Nothing to see here, apparently. The New York Times has carried no coverage of the shocking allegations contained in an unclassified FBI document Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released last week. The document, called an FD-1023, details the reporting of a highly credible FBI informant who says the top executive of Ukrainian oil and gas firm Burisma told him he paid Joe and Hunter Biden $5 million each to protect the company from a corruption investigation (that’s in addition to the millions it paid Hunter to sit on its board).

Instead, the “paper of record” ran an article attacking a group called Empower Oversight for helping a pair of IRS whistleblowers at the heart of the Hunter Biden tax fraud investigation who say the FBI and Justice Department hid the informant’s reporting from them, as well as relevant material on Hunter’s laptop. The Times wasn’t interested in the substance of what these whistleblowers had to say, but rather focused on the fact that Empower Oversight helped them follow the proper procedures and whistleblower statutes for bringing their claims to Congress. 

Over at The Washington Post, there was likewise zero coverage of the FBI informant’s reporting, even after portions of it were corroborated this week as reported by Margot Cleveland in these pages. Nor was there any mention of Tuesday’s news that Hunter’s former business partner and fellow Burisma board member, Devon Archer, will testify before Congress that Hunter would regularly call his father and put him on speakerphone with overseas business associates when Joe Biden was vice president.

 None of that seems to interest the editors at the Post. The only mention of any of this comes from media columnist Philip Bump, who devoted an entire column Monday to a tortured explanation of why we should ignore it all. Just because a trusted FBI informant is credible, writes Bump, doesn’t mean that what the informant was told is true: “I trust my wife, but if she tells me that our 6-year-old claims to have seen a dragon on the roof, I don’t suddenly believe that there was a dragon on the roof.”

Indeed not. But what Bump seems to be suggesting is that if his wife ran up to him terrified that there’s a dragon on the roof because his 6-year-old claims to have seen one, he would just shrug it off until further evidence emerged. And maybe he actually would. After all, this is the same guy who once seemed terribly confused about where babies come from. 

But of course Bump, like the rest of the corporate press, is faking it. A normal person, confronted by his hysterical wife claiming the boy saw a dragon on the roof, would take a second to step outside and look at the roof. Bump and his colleagues refuse to do even this, insisting rather that this is all just political theater, the GOP desperately grasping at straws to damage Biden.

In a healthy society with a functioning free press, the Biden corruption scandal — and the rank obstruction of the DOJ and FBI on Biden’s behalf — would dominate the headlines. Instead of merely reporting that the Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy yesterday floated the prospect of impeachment proceedings against Biden, the press would be reporting on the mounting evidence underlying the drive for impeachment.

But no. Instead, the corporate media are twisting themselves into pretzels to explain away every new development in this story. As David Marcus noted on Twitter, “We are precipitously close to, ‘Maybe Joe Biden did take money from Burisma, but here’s why that’s actually a good thing.’”

Or as one Twitter account put it:

We can see the goalposts shifting in real time. Asked Monday about the corruption allegations and the claims that Hunter put his father on speakerphone with foreign business associates when Biden was vice president, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “was never in business with his son.”

That’s a far cry from Biden’s past statements that he has “never spoken” to Hunter about his overseas business dealings. (Never mind the hundreds of meetings Biden has reportedly had with Hunter’s business partners.) But at this rate the laughable White House line will become the media’s fallback position: Biden wasn’t in business with his son! He was just collecting “dividends,” not bribe money! 

The upshot of all this is simple: no matter what evidence emerges, no matter how damning, the corporate media will not cover it. To the extent they mention the story at all, it will be in the context of bashing Republican lawmakers for trying to “dig up dirt” on Biden. If the GOP-controlled House opens an impeachment proceeding, which is the only way we’re ever going to get to the bottom of the Biden corruption scheme, the coverage will be about how Republican lawmakers are conducting a “witch hunt” to get back at Democrats for impeaching Trump.

Everywhere, we’ll hear the same line that CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan tossed to Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie recently, in reference to the outrageous plea deal offered to Hunter Biden for a couple of tax charges: “I wonder after this plea happens if you would advise your party to move on?”

Of course, the whole point of the plea deal was to give the corporate media this line in hopes that the American people would “move on” and forget about the scandal. But no one, it seems, is “moving on” except Democrats and their courtesans in the press. The rest of us are going to take a second to step outside and see if there’s really a dragon on the roof. We’ll make sure to let Philip Bump know.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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FBI Told Delaware U.S. Attorney It Had Already Partially Corroborated Biden Bribery Claims, Source Says


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 24, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/24/fbi-told-delaware-u-s-attorney-it-had-already-partially-corroborated-biden-bribery-claims-source-says/

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When the Pittsburgh FBI office briefed the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office on evidence implicating Hunter and Joe Biden in a bribery scheme, the agents also told the Delaware team they had already corroborated several aspects of the confidential human source’s claims, an individual familiar with the briefing told The Federalist. 

On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released the FD-1023 summary of a confidential human source’s reporting that the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes so the then-Vice President would “protect” Burisma “from all kinds of problems.” Those bribes were in addition to the more than $4 million in total paid to Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer for sitting on Burisma’s board of directors. 

The Federalist has now learned that the Pittsburgh FBI office had corroborated several details contained in the FD-1023 as part of the intake process that former Attorney General William Barr established before the election under the leadership of the Western District of Pennsylvania’s then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady. Significantly, in briefing the Delaware U.S. attorney on the results of their office’s screening of evidence related to Ukraine, the Pittsburgh FBI agents told the Delaware office they had corroborated multiple facts included in the FD-1023, an individual with knowledge of the briefing told The Federalist.

Following the late June 2020 interview with the CHS, the Pittsburgh FBI office obtained travel records for the CHS, and those records confirmed the CHS had traveled to the locales detailed in the FD-1023 during the relevant time period. The trips included a late 2015 or early 2016 visit to Kiev, Ukraine; a trip a couple of months later to Vienna, Austria; and travel to London in 2019. 

As The Federalist previously reported, during their briefing of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, the Pittsburgh FBI agents said the FD-1023 bore indicia of credibility and that it merited further investigation. The person familiar with that briefing now confirms the agents also informed the Delaware office that the Pittsburgh FBI had corroborated the CHS’s presence in the various cities at the times claimed.

The Federalist has also learned that the CHS’s handler corroborated the CHS’s claim that he had met with Oleksandr Ostapenko. According to the source with knowledge of the matter, the CHS’s handler told Pittsburgh’s FBI agents that the CHS told his handler he had an upcoming meeting with Ostapenko. The CHS’s contemporaneous claim of the planned rendezvous with Ostapenko tracked the timing of one of the visits the CHS claimed in the FD-1023 to have had with Ostapenko. Significantly, the Pittsburgh office briefed the Delaware office on that piece of corroborating evidence that came from the CHS’s handler.

Open-source reporting of Burisma’s purchase of an interest in a North American oil and gas company likewise lined up with the discussions the CHS relayed to the FBI, as summarized in the FD-1023, the individual familiar with the briefing told The Federalist. That the Pittsburgh FBI office not only provided the Delaware office with a summary of the damning FD-1023 and its conclusion that it bore indicia of credibility but also identified several pieces of corroborating evidence is huge because, to date, it appears the Delaware office did nothing to investigate the allegations contained in the FD-1023. 

As Barr previously made clear, the role of the Pittsburgh office was limited to providing a “clearing-house function” for information related to Ukraine to weed out “any potential disinformation.” The purpose of the intake process, Barr stressed, was to “check[] out the source and credibility of evidence before assigning it to one of the ongoing investigations already pending in the Department,” such as the Delaware investigation into Hunter Biden. As such, the Pittsburgh office lacked the authority to subpoena witnesses or records or to use grand jury proceedings to further corroborate the FD-1023. That responsibility fell with the Delaware office.

But not only did the Delaware office apparently ignore the allegations contained in the FD-1023, as well as the corroborating evidence already allegedly accumulated by the Pittsburgh FBI office, but U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s office allegedly secreted the very existence of the FD-1023 from the whistleblowers. Both IRS whistleblowers testified last week that they did not even learn of the existence of the FD-1023 until Barr publicly confirmed he had sent the information to Delaware for further investigation. 

Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf also excluded the IRS agents working the Hunter Biden investigation from the meeting at which the Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the office on the FD-1023 and the corroborating evidence they had already uncovered. The IRS whistleblowers further testified that portions of Hunter Biden’s laptop were withheld from them and they were explicitly prohibited from taking any investigative steps connected to Joe Biden — or questioning anyone by using Joe Biden’s name, “Dad,” or “the Big Guy.”

Under these circumstances, even if the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office comes forward now to say it did investigate the FD-1023, its belated claim would be meaningless because the individuals with the knowledge and skill necessary to investigate a complex, international money laundering, bribery, and tax fraud scheme were cut out of the process and barred from interviewing the necessary witnesses. 

The Delaware office remains mum, however, not even pretending to have investigated the FD-1023’s allegations. That failure is even more scandalous now that we know Pittsburgh had already corroborated several aspects of the CHS’s reporting and briefed Weiss’s office on the corroborating evidence. 

Yet the Biden White House continues to falsely claim the FD-1023 charges “have been debunked for years.” On the contrary, the only thing debunked to date has been the lies of Biden’s Democrat apologists, such as Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Jamie Raskin, who doubled down on his claim that Barr had found the FD-1023 not credible and not meriting further investigation.

Americans now know not only that Raskin and his Democrat colleagues lied, but that President Joe Biden lied — both when he said he knew nothing of his son’s business ventures and in claiming now that the FD-1023 has been debunked.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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6 Ridiculous Narratives Democrats Tried In Response To IRS Whistleblowers’ Damning Biden Testimony


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/20/6-ridiculous-narratives-democrats-tried-in-response-to-irs-whistleblowers-damning-biden-testimony/

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IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler’s testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee about the political interference in the Biden investigation proved so unimpeachable that Democrats resorted to a shotgun attack on everything except the facts. Here are the top six themes the left hammered during the hearing. 

1. Orange Man — and His Family And Associates — Bad

Wednesday’s hearing began promptly at 1:00 with opening statements by Republican Chair James Comer and Democrat Ranking Member Jamie Raskin. From the get-go Raskin set one theme Democrats would continue to peddle over the course of the next six hours: Donald Trump is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad man. 

Trump was impeached and is under indictment. His daughter was under investigation, and her husband sold out to the Saudis. Trump’s cronies — Manafort, Stone, Flynn, and Cohen — committed crimes, and Trump pardoned them. On and on they went, pointing to Trump to turn the focus from the whistleblowers’ testimony: that the evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed felonies and now-President Joe Biden may have been complicit in the illegality. Democrats likewise used this misdirection to avoid confronting the overwhelming evidence that the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation and protected the Biden family.

2. How Dare Republicans Say ‘Two-Tier Justice System’

A second prevalent tactic on display during Wednesday’s hearing was Democrats feigning outrage over Republicans’ complaints of a “two-tier justice system.” 

According to Democrats on the committee, that phrase belongs to the civil rights movement and may only be invoked to condemn systemic racism. Some representatives ran so hard with this theme that they spent their allocated time highlighting decades-old hate crimes rather than asking the IRS whistleblowers questions concerning their testimony. 

One representative even quizzed Shapley on his knowledge of the racial disparity seen in the prosecution of tax cases. Shapley said he was unaware of the statistic. The Democrat lawmaker then cited the relative percentages for the IRS agent, while remaining oblivious to the fact that Shapley was complaining of favoritism bestowed on the white, privileged Hunter Biden. 

3. Never Mind the Whistleblowers, Let’s Talk About Rudy and the Arms Dealer

Democrats also sought to distract from the whistleblowers’ testimony by framing the evidence detailed by the two experienced and well-credentialed IRS agents as flowing from Rudy Giuliani. But as Ziegler testified, he launched the investigation into Hunter Biden after evidence implicating him was discovered pursuant to a separate criminal investigation. None of the evidence Ziegler and Shapley developed came from Giuliani. 

Nor did the allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma, as reported by an FBI confidential human source and summarized in the FD-1023, come from Giuliani. The IRS agents never saw the FD-1023 in any event. 

House Democrats likewise attempted to minimize the whistleblowers’ testimony by pretending that, beside Giuliani, the only evidence of misconduct came from a witness charged with being an arms dealer, namely Gal Luft. Whether Luft has credible evidence of Biden-family corruption, however, has nothing to do with Ziegler and Shapley’s claims.

4. Merely a Misunderstanding

In their less hysterical moments, the Democrats offered a gentler spin, framing the House’s hearing as much ado about a misunderstanding. It also came down to the whistleblowers not grasping the difference between a special counsel and a special attorney, several Biden apologists suggested. 

But as Shapley made clear, he had documented U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s statement — that the DOJ had denied Weiss special counsel authority — soon after Weiss made that representation, and thus while Shapley’s memory was clear. In any event, according to Shapley, Weiss had also said during that meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, that he was not the final decision maker on whether to bring charges against Hunter Biden. That fact makes the distinction between a special counsel and a special attorney irrelevant.

Raskin also suggested Shapley was confused about Weiss’s authority, claiming the Delaware U.S. Attorney made clear in his letters to Congress he had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden. 

Both whistleblowers decimated that line of argument by highlighting what Weiss actually said, which was that he lacked charging authority outside of Delaware. In fact, if anything, Raskin hurt his cause by highlighting the contradictions between Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statements, establishing the necessity for both DOJ bigwigs to testify before Congress to resolve the inconsistencies.

5. Just a Difference of Opinion 

A related theme Democrats peddled during Wednesday’s hearing centered on prosecutorial discretion. The left side of the aisle painted the whistleblowers’ testimony as merely a professional disagreement between the IRS agents and Weiss. 

But there was no disagreement in opinion, Shapley and Ziegler stressed: Both the IRS and Weiss agreed that Hunter Biden should be charged with multiple felony counts. Weiss, however, lacked the ability to bring charges in D.C., and it was the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney there, as well as in California, that kept the Delaware U.S. attorney from filing criminal felony charges against the president’s son.

Further, that the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys thwarted efforts to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden proved especially rich given the Democrats continued references throughout the hearing to Weiss being Trump’s “hand-picked U.S. attorney.” Beyond the obvious point that being a Trump appointee establishes nothing, under the Democrats’ standard, the involvement of the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys removes this case from the “difference of opinion” scenario. 

6. There’s No Evidence, I Tell You, No Evidence

A sixth narrative Democrats pushed during the Oversight hearing was that there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism. But to paraphrase Shapley’s line, just repeating the same lie multiple times doesn’t make it true. And to say there’s no evidence of misconduct or favoritism is a whopper of a lie. 

The evidence of misconduct by the Bidens exists in the form of texts, emails, chat messages, bank records, suspicious activity reports, the FD-1023 report, and statements made by former business partners such as Tony Bobulinski. The public record is also replete with evidence of DOJ and FBI favoritism, including the extensive testimony of these two whistleblowers, parts of which a third whistleblower has already corroborated.

The Democrats may not like the evidence or want to talk about it, but to say none exists is about as believable as the Secret Service’s claim that they cannot determine whose cocaine was recovered in the White House. 

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Citing Unpursued Evidence, IRS Whistleblower Calls for Special Counsel to Probe Biden Case


By: Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / July 19, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/19/anonymous-whistleblower-now-revealed-calls-for-special-counsel-in-biden-case/

Joseph Ziegler, right, coming forward as an iRS whistleblower, is sworn in with colleague Gary Shapley on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. (Photo: Brendan Smialowksi/AFP/ Getty Images)

A previously unidentified IRS whistleblower publicly told Congress on Wednesday that federal prosecutors investigating presidential son Hunter Biden were “hamstrung” by political pressure and called for appointment of a special counsel in the case. 

Former IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler—a Democrat who identifies himself as a gay married man—previously gave  anonymous testimony to the House Ways and Mean Committee. In new testimony Wednesday, Ziegler made his identity known to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee during a hearing on why a five-year investigation recently produced a lenient Justice Department plea agreement with Hunter Biden, despite evidence that the president’s son made millions in overseas business deals in China, Ukraine, and other places by using his father’s name.

“People are saying that I must be more credible because I’m a Democrat who happens to be married to a man. I’m no more credible than this man sitting next to me, due to my sexual orientation or my political beliefs,” Ziegler told the committee in opening remarks, referring to IRS colleague and supervisor Gary Shapley, the panel’s other witness.   

“The truth is, my credibility comes today from my job experience with the IRS and my intimate knowledge of the agency’s standard and procedures,” he said.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss reached a plea deal with Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, to charge him on two misdemeanor tax charges and a suspended sentence for lying on a gun purchase form. No prison time likely would result.

This development came after IRS investigators and federal prosecutors had previously determined that the younger Biden should face felony charges, Ziegler said. 

“As I read the public documents of the Department of Justice action against Hunter Biden, there is nothing [saying] that Hunter Biden will be required to amend his false tax return for 2018—a false tax return that includes improper deductions for prostitutes, sex clubs, and his adult children’s tuition,” Ziegler said. 

The two IRS whistleblowers said in previous testimony that Weiss–appointed by then-President Donald Trump and kept on board by the Biden administration for this probe—sought special counsel status. 

This development came after federal prosecutors appointed by Biden in Washington, D.C., and California refused requests from Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden in those jurisdictions. Although Weiss said in a letter to House members that he had independence in the probe, he said in a follow-up letter that he didn’t have prosecutorial power outside his jurisdiction. 

“While the impression has been conveyed by the U.S. attorney in Delaware that he has similar powers to that of a special counsel on this case, free rein to do as needed, that was not the case,” Ziegler told lawmakers. “It appeared to me, based on what I experienced, that the U.S. attorney in Delaware in our investigation was constantly hamstrung, limited, and marginalized by DOJ officials, as well as other U.S. attorneys. I still think that a special counsel is necessary for this investigation.”

Ziegler also talked about his personal experience. 

“I was raised, and have always strived, to do what is right. Although I do have my supporters, others have said that I am a traitor to the Democratic Party and that I am causing more division in our society,” he told the committee. “I implore you to consider that if you were in my position with the facts as I have stated them, ask yourself if you would be doing the exact same thing. I hope that I am an example to other LGBTQ people out there who are questioning doing the right thing at the potential cost to themselves and others.”

Ziegler added that he is “risking my career, my reputation, and my casework outside the investigation we are here to discuss.”

“I ultimately made the decision to come forward after what I believe were multiple attempts at blowing the whistle at the Internal Revenue Service,” he said. “No one should be above the law, regardless of your political affiliation.”

Shapley, Ziegler’s colleague, already had spoken in public interviews with media and in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. Shapley said he had to come forward after he saw the Justice Department cross a “red line,” explaining:

The Justice Department allowed the president’s political appointees to weigh in on whether to charge the president’s son. After the United States attorney for D.C., Matthew Graves, appointed by President Biden, refused to bring charges in March 2022, I watched United States Attorney Weiss tell a room full of senior FBI and IRS senior leaders on Oct. 7, 2022, that he was not the deciding person on whether charges were filed. That was my red line.

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7 Things the House Oversight Committee Should Ask IRS Whistleblowers


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/18/7-things-the-house-oversight-committee-should-ask-irs-whistleblowers/

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The IRS whistleblowers who exposed the Department of Justice and FBI’s interference in the investigation into Biden family corruption will publicly testify on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

The duo, Gary Shapley and a man known now only as Whistleblower X, had previously sat for transcribed interviews with the House Ways and Means Committee. And while some details from that closed-door testimony should be reiterated during the on-camera congressional hearing, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should corral Republicans before Wednesday to coordinate the questioning of the whistleblowers so the country learns the depth of the scandal.

Here’s what they should ask Shapley and the soon-to-be-named second whistleblower and how they should do it.

1. Let the Whistleblowers Do the Talking

Because the legacy press will be poised to present Wednesday’s hearing as a Republican witch hunt and their supposed continued hounding of Hunter Biden, the representatives on the right side of the aisle should save the grandstanding for another time and let the agents speak for themselves.

As experienced agents, both Shapley and Whistleblower X know how to testify in a clear and understandable way. They also know how to respond to a hostile cross-examination, which unfortunately will be what they face from Democrats. Republicans should ask the agents open-ended questions that call for narrative responses and allow the whistleblowers’ words to convey to America the protect-Biden scandal they witnessed.

2. Start with Preliminaries, Not the Most Salacious Details

While it is understandable that the House Oversight Committee will want to strike hard and fast with the most devastating testimony, Republicans must remember the media blackout over this scandal means most Americans remain ignorant of many of the basics of the Hunter Biden investigation and how it connects to now-President Biden. Many Americans likely also know little about the two witnesses and may even believe the Democrats’ defamatory branding of the whistleblowers as “bought and paid for” by extreme MAGA Republicans.

For these reasons, before delving into the details, Republicans should ensure the country learns of the whistleblowers’ extensive and impressive professional background. Comer should also ensure the whistleblowers come clean about any political leanings they have, which appears to be none or, if any, leaning more to the left than the right. The whistleblowers’ opening statements will likely cover these preliminaries to some extent, but providing another minute for each witness to briefly remind Americans of your experience with the criminal investigation division of the IRS and explain to the country where you stand politically would be wise.

3. Begin Big-Picture Before Hitting the Details

The committee should then move to the origins of the investigation and the big picture of the scandal. More detailed questions will follow, but could you first broadly explain why and when the investigation began? Can you summarize the staffing of the investigative team and how the FBI field offices, FBI headquarters, the IRS criminal division, and the U.S. attorneys’ offices interacted at the beginning of the investigation, and then later throughout the investigation? 

Again, let the whistleblowers tell their story, using follow-up questions to draw out more details, if necessary, but from a big-picture perspective. And once the whistleblowers explain how the investigation proceeded, broadly speaking, ask: Was that staffing and interaction, especially with the DOJ and FBI, the norm?

4. Evidence and Interference

With the above backdrop established, the committee should focus next on two main lines of questioning: the evidence uncovered of potential criminal conduct and the interference the agents faced when investigating the case. 

The most effective and efficient way to present this testimony will be by requesting the whistleblowers walk the committee through the chronology of the investigation, identifying at each stage what evidence was uncovered and how, and whether there was any interference in the investigation. 

Follow-up questions for each leg in the investigative journey should inquire of any witnesses or evidence they know of to corroborate their testimony and what steps they normally would have taken absent the interference. 

Because the committee has the transcript of the whistleblowers’ previous closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the staffers should be able to easily sequence the questioning to ensure it is accessible to ordinary Americans.

5. Weiss’s Weasel Words and Garland’s False Ones

While the whistleblowers’ prior testimony revealed scores of ways in which the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation, equally concerning is U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s attempts to cover up that interference. 

For instance, Shapley testified about the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys’ refusal to file charges against Hunter Biden, and Weiss’s inability to indict the president’s son in those venues without permission from the Department of Justice — permission Weiss allegedly claims had been denied him. According to Shapley, Weiss made that statement during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting and said he was “not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Neither Weiss nor Garland has expressly denied Shapley’s claims, but both made statements that cannot be reconciled with Shapley’s testimony. Garland, for his part, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss “has full authority” to bring cases in another jurisdiction if he deemed it necessary. Weiss similarly claimed in a letter to Congress that “he had been granted the ultimate authority” over the Biden investigation, but the Delaware U.S. attorney quickly clarified in a second letter that he didn’t have that authority yet but had been assured he would be granted it if necessary. 

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee should ask Shapley to retell the events of the Oct. 7 meeting because the IRS agents’ testimony implicates Weiss and Garland in a cover-up. Republicans should also ask Shapley whether it is possible Weiss said during that meeting that he had been denied a request to be appointed a special attorney as opposed to a special counsel, as some Democrats are suggesting Shapley misunderstood Weiss. A quick follow-up here, however, will also make clear that no matter which “special” appointment Weiss said he was denied, the U.S. attorney clearly said he wasn’t the decisionmaker.

6. Evidence Seen or Not Seen

The DOJ and FBI also interfered in the investigation by withholding evidence from Shapley and his investigative team. For instance, both Shapley and Whistleblower X stated they were not aware of the FD-1023 form that summarized a confidential human source’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma. Shapley also testified that he was prevented from seeing all the evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop, even after the FBI had removed documents potentially protected by attorney-client privilege. The committee should elicit testimony from Shapley and Whistleblower X concerning this withheld evidence.

Republicans should then attempt to learn what other evidence may have been secreted from the investigative team. The committee should read off a litany of the evidence it has and ask the whistleblowers if they were familiar with that evidence. Similarly, the committee should provide a list of witnesses with likely knowledge of the pay-to-play scandal and ask whether the whistleblowers knew of those individuals’ potential involvement and whether they were questioned. 

This line of questioning may reveal new areas of inquiry — something the whistleblowers may not have known of previously. But in that case, the whistleblowers may not be able to respond to the questions because only the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to receive protected tax information. The right questions, though, will give the whistleblowers the opportunity to convey that they have not seen the particular evidence referenced and therefore cannot respond to the query in this setting, but would be happy to provide the Ways and Means Committee a supplemental affidavit. 

7. Anything More That Could Be Done

The whistleblowers have already made clear the statute of limitations ran out on potential felony tax charges against Hunter Biden because the Delaware U.S. attorney lacked the authority to indict the president’s son in another state. But what about the allegations contained in the FD-1023 or the other banking records recovered by the various House committees? Does that evidence indicate additional crimes have been committed for which the statute of limitations has not yet expired? 

The whistleblowers should be asked: What potential crimes? What investigative techniques would you recommend? Given the international scope of these potential crimes, does the Baltimore FBI field office have the expertise to investigate adequately? Do you and your team have the ability to investigate this evidence and determine if there is a there, there?

Ending the hearing thusly will send a message that Weiss may have called off the investigation, but that doesn’t mean the case of corruption against the Biden family is dead.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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