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‘Highly Credible’ Source Reveals Scandal Bigger Than Biden Bribery: FBI Election Interference

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 05, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

The confidential human source (CHS) behind the detailed allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions was reportedly “highly credible” and used by the FBI in multiple criminal investigations dating back to the Obama administration. Friday’s exclusive by Fox News provides further insight into Sen. Chuck Grassley’s focus on the FBI — as opposed to the Biden family — as the primary scandal in play.

“We aren’t interested in whether or not the accusations against [then]-Vice President Biden are accurate,” Grassley said during an interview last week discussing FBI Director Christopher Wray’s refusal to comply with the congressional subpoena issued for the FD-1023 form. That form, dated June 30, 2020, included detailed information from a CHS to the FBI regarding an agreement by now-President Biden to deliver preferred foreign policy positions for a $5 million payment.

After Grassley revealed he had already seen the FD-1023, Fox News’ Bill Hemmer queried: “How damning is this document to the sitting U.S. president?”

“I don’t know,” responded Grassley, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He stressed that while “there’s accusations” in the FBI report, the congressional oversight committees’ concern is whether “the FBI does its job.” “That’s what we want to know,” he continued.

Friday’s revelation that the CHS was “highly credible” and had served as a source in multiple prior criminal investigations — including ones run under the Obama-Biden administration — proves Grassley is properly focused on the FBI.

Yes, the CHS’s allegations offer more evidence of a Biden family pay-to-play scandal, and unraveling any criminal conduct by the Biden family remains important. But more significant to the future of our country is uncovering government actors responsible for violating the rule of law: America can survive select injustices, but it cannot withstand a corrupt bureaucracy that obstructs justice and interferes in elections.

Yet that is precisely what occurred, according to the whistleblower. He claimed that “in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters’ team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” The whistleblower further alleged that the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.

Now knowing the CHS behind the FD-1023 was not just “trusted,” as Grassley had previously indicated, but “highly credible,” and relied upon in multiple criminal cases dating back to the last time Biden worked for the executive branch, makes the whistleblower’s accusations even more damning because those additional facts mean the agents had reason to believe the buried accusations were true.

Not only does this evidence suggest FBI headquarters obstructed justice, but the date of the CHS’s report indicates those responsible for misbranding the intel as disinformation sought to interfere in the 2020 election.

As Grassley’s colleague in the House, James Comer, revealed, the CHS report was dated June 30, 2020, and while the allegations against candidate Biden came from a “highly credible” CHS, the FBI closed them. According to the whistleblower, FBI headquarters closed out the source even though some of the allegations had already been verified and other details could have been verified.

In contrast, when the bureau received a vague tip from an Australian diplomat of unknown veracity that a low-level Trump volunteer had claimed the Russians possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton, within days FBI headquarters opened an investigation into the Trump campaign.

John Durham’s special counsel report recently lay bare the impropriety of the FBI’s targeting of the Trump campaign based on unverified gossip from an unvetted source. Grassley is now highlighting the converse: the FBI’s improper branding of evidence from a “highly credible” CHS as disinformation to protect the Democrat candidate for president.

This evidence of continuing political bias at the FBI is Grassley’s primary concern, prompting him to call for a “change in the culture.” That change will be a long time coming, however, given that Wray resisted the subpoena and appears poised to fight Grassley and congressional oversight committees every step of the way.

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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Breadcrumbs From a Buried FBI Source May Lead to a Bigger Biden Scandal

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 31, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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ALL EMPHASIS ARE BY ME – Jerry Broussard WDYS

After a confidential human source claimed then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, FBI agents used what’s called an FD-1023 form to record the allegation. Now FBI Director Christopher Wray is defying a May 3 congressional subpoena to provide this form. On Tuesday, in response to Wray’s refusal to hand over the documents, Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer announced the House will move to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress.

It isn’t that announcement — or even the other explosive ones released over the past year by Comer’s Senate colleague, Chuck Grassley — that prove the most telling, however. Rather, it is the combination of all the details, big and small, that suggests the scandal set to unfold over the coming weeks will be bigger than anyone imagined.

The Dirt Is in the Details

Take recent big news from whistleblower disclosures revealing that the Justice Department and the FBI have the unclassified FD-1023 form spelling out Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. Then combine that with other known information to discover the bigger picture.

For instance, in response to Wray’s failure to comply with the subpoena, Grassley, who had previously noted the FD-1023 form was five or six pages long, indicated that the confidential human source (CHS) was “an apparent trusted FBI source.” This is huge because Grassley wouldn’t make that claim unless the whistleblower had. That means the source is not some random guy walking in off the street, but rather an existing “trusted” CHS, which is why the FBI used the FD-1023 form.

In response to Wray’s stonewalling, Comer likewise revealed some significant details, clarifying late last week that the CHS reporting document was dated June 30, 2020, and referenced “the amount of money the foreign national allegedly paid to receive the desired policy outcome” as “five million.” These details could only have come from a whistleblower with deep knowledge of the investigation, meaning the whistleblower’s characterization of the CHS as “trusted” carries more weight. Likewise, the whistleblower’s claim that the FD-1023 “includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” is more credible given the whistleblower’s knowledge of other details.

Comer’s reference to “five million” is also intriguing. In a letter to Wray, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley had previously revealed a promise by a Chinese communist government-connected enterprise to funnel $5 million to “Hunter and James Biden to compensate them for work done while Joe Biden was vice president.” Records released by Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., also confirmed a $5 million payment to James and Hunter Biden from another Chinese-connected business.

The date of the FD-1023 form, June 30, 2020, also proves significant when read in conjunction with Grassley’s letter to Wray in July 2022. In that letter, Grassley said the whistleblower had claimed that “the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but “that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (‘FBI HQ’) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”

The whistleblower further alleged that in September 2020, the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.

Several points merit mention here: First, Auten is the same agent responsible for some of the shenanigans in Crossfire Hurricane. Second, Grassley’s letter indicates Auten did not open the “assessment” on Hunter Biden or other members of the Biden family. The senator’s correspondence actually suggests the assessment may have been opened on the CHS.

Here’s the relevant language:

The basis for how the FBI HQ team selected the specific information for inclusion in Auten’s assessment is unknown, but in more than one instance the focus of the FBI HQ team’s attention involved derogatory information about Hunter Biden.

The whistleblower also reportedly told Grassley that FBI HQ later closed sources after branding their info as disinformation. Given the timing of the assessment (August 2020) and the date of the CHS report (June 2020), it seems likely the FBI used the CHS report as part of the “assessment” and that the “assessment” was of the CHS.

This leads to the next significant point: According to the whistleblower, Auten’s assessment led to the “improper discrediting” of the verified and verifiable derogatory information about Hunter Biden. Worse, based on several hints dropped by Grassley over the last year, FBI headquarters conducted little to no investigation on the CHS and other derogatory info before labeling it “disinformation.”

The timing of the CHS report in June 2020 also proves conveniently coincidental to the decision by Democrat Sens. Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Adam Schiff to send a letter just two weeks later, on July 13, 2020, to the FBI claiming Congress was being subjected to a foreign disinformation campaign. On July 16, 2020, the then-ranking members of two congressional committees asked the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — the same one that handled the “assessment” that branded the Hunter Biden intel as disinformation — to give the committees a defensive briefing. News of that “Russian disinformation” briefing soon leaked to the press.

What About a Recording?

Grassley’s correspondence and statements over the last year hint at one more possibility: The FBI had at least one recording that implicated members of the Biden family in a criminal enterprise and buried that evidence. Specifically, in one letter to the bureau, Grassley said other FBI records “shed light on Hunter Biden’s business and financial relationship with Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky,” and those “documents include specific details about conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden.” Grassley had previously requested interview summary forms that referenced Zlochevsky, and in seeking FBI records, the senator’s letter made clear that “records” included “recorded or graphic material,” including “recordings of verbal communications.” This possibility fits with the whistleblower’s description of “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” that FBI HQ shut down in October 2020 “in furtherance of Mr. Auten’s assessment,” even though, according to the whistleblower, the intel could have been verified by use of search warrants.

A follow-up question Grassley asked Wray further suggests the possibility of recorded conversations implicating the Bidens: “Does the Justice Department have a specific policy regarding the use of materials and information related to U.S. citizens who reside in the United States provided by foreign governments, including the fruits of surveillance carried out by a foreign state’s intelligence service?”

Whether these possibilities pan out remains to be seen, but what should be clear to all now is that the whistleblower knows where the evidence is buried — and Grassley and Comer have brought their shovels.

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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Here’s What the IRS Whistleblower Will Tell Lawmakers About the Hunter Biden Probe Behind Closed Doors

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 26, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley will appear before the House Ways and Means Committee later Friday morning to submit to questioning from both Democrats and Republicans.

Missing, however, will be any members of the Senate Finance Committee, which refused to conduct a joint interview with the House oversight committee. While Republican Rep. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, held the power to authorize Senate representatives to attend the transcribed interview of the whistleblower.

Smith inexplicably ignored Shapley’s statement that he “would welcome” the participation of designated Senate staffers in the House hearing. Thus, the House hearing will proceed, but not on a bicameral basis.

According to a person familiar with the proceedings, the House Ways and Means Committee will convene at 9:30 a.m., with Shapley appearing for questioning with his two lawyers, Mark Lytle from Nixon Peabody and Tristan Leavitt of Empower Oversight. The closed-door questioning is expected to last all day.

While the Ways and Means Committee will question Shapley in a closed session, the public can guess the content of much of his testimony given the high-profile nature of the case against Hunter Biden. In fact, neither Shapley nor his attorneys have ever publicly confirmed that Hunter Biden is the target of the Internal Revenue Service investigation, yet it is uniformly agreed that the whistleblower’s testimony concerns the handling of the tax probe into the president’s son.

Shapley, a 14-year veteran at the IRS, provided some insight into his likely testimony when he sat for an exclusive interview with CBS News on Wednesday. During that interview, Shapley explained that he was first assigned to the investigation in January 2020. “When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process,” Shapley told CBS News. “It was way outside the norm of what I’ve experienced in the past,” the whistleblower stressed.

Shapley further claimed during the interview that “there were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice.” That statement coincides with the information contained in an earlier letter sent by the whistleblower’s lawyers to the oversight committees. That letter maintained that the whistleblower has detailed “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”

“People directly familiar with the case” provided more particulars to Shapley’s claims, asserting that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” The unnamed sources also stressed that the improper politicization of the case came from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters.

When read together, these details raise a huge red flag because they mean the interference from the DOJ and FBI headquarters began under the Trump administration. So, who in the Trump administration was responsible for slow-walking the Hunter Biden investigation? What investigative steps were not taken?

In a letter from Shapley’s legal team to the congressional oversight committees, he spoke of irregularities beginning in the summer of 2020 in both the DOJ Tax Division and an unnamed U.S. attorney’s office, which CNN would later report is the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss. Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018.

Another detail from Shapley’s CBS News interview that foreshadows the content of his Friday testimony concerns his explanation of the “red line” meeting that convinced the IRS supervisory special agent his oath of office required him to come forward. According to Shapley, while he had been noticing deviations in the investigative process for a couple of years, he just couldn’t “fathom that DOJ might be acting unethically.” Then came an October 2022 meeting he had with federal prosecutors, after which Shapley told CBS News, “It just got to that point where that switch was turned on, and I just couldn’t silence my conscience anymore.”

While the CBS News interview did not air further details about the meeting, a letter from Shapley’s legal team described a “charged meetings on October 7, 2022,” during which the U.S. attorney — reportedly Weiss — “became aware that both the IRS and the FBI had longstanding concerns about the handling of the case” and that those concerns had been communicated up the chain of command. Then, after an Oct. 17, 2022, meeting at which Shapley continued to raise concerns, he and his investigative team were excluded from future meetings on the case.

Shapley seems poised to name names on Friday, and his attorney has told Just the News that “he’ll be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors.” Shapley summarized those meetings and distributed his notes to the IRS and other agents, his lawyer explained, and along with his emails, these documents will corroborate his story.

The whistleblower can also identify other IRS agents who participated in the meetings and can confirm his testimony. The DOJ’s decision earlier this month to remove Shapley’s entire investigative team from the Hunter Biden investigation may backfire, serving as a catalyst to loosen the other agents’ lips.

But in the meantime, it will be Shapley doing the talking. And while Americans won’t know at once what the IRS supervisory special agent has to say, the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to submit the information obtained from Sharpley to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, thereby making the testimony public.

Democrats used that statutory carveout to release Trump’s tax information publicly, and Republicans should follow their lead — and soon.

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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Emails Show Ron Wyden’s Office Lied About IRS Whistleblower ‘Backing Out’ Of Senate Meeting

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 25, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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A spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., falsely claimed the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower had “backed out” of an agreement to meet with the Senate Finance Committee next week, the whistleblower’s attorneys told The Federalist.

“It’s disappointing Senator Wyden’s staff is playing partisan games by releasing inaccurate information,” said the legal team representing the whistleblower, who was identified as Gary Shapley during a CBS interview Wednesday. “As emails show, our client didn’t ‘back out’ of anything because there was never anything to back out of.”

On Wednesday, CNN reported the Senate Finance Committee’s claims, quoting Wyden’s spokesman, Ryan Carey, saying, “Committee staff on both sides agreed with counsel to meet directly with the whistleblower next week, however the whistleblower has since backed out of that agreement and declined an attempt to reschedule.” Carey added that “Chairman Wyden’s staff stand ready to arrange a meeting on terms that comply with laws protecting taxpayer data and ensure a fair and rigorous investigation.”

CNN later updated the article to include a detailed denial of the staffer’s claim by Shapley’s legal team.

Emails obtained by The Federalist between Shapley’s lawyers and Wyden’s staff confirm the whistleblower’s version of events.

On Friday, May 19, 2023, Mark Lytle, Shapley’s Nixon Peabody lawyer, arranged for a conference call between the whistleblower’s legal team and Wyden’s office to discuss logistics for their client to sit for a transcribed deposition. The next email in the thread came from a Wyden staffer the day after Lytle and his co-counsel Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight, had dispatched their May 22 letter to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Finance Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, as well as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office.

In their May 22 letter, the whistleblower’s legal team summarized their version of what had transpired. They also noted that they had informed the Senate Finance Committee’s staff that Shapley would testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, May 26, and reiterated their preference for a single joint interview or, at minimum, an interview the previous day, May 25.

“Unfortunately, the Finance Committee would not commit to a date consecutive to the House interview as an accommodation to our client’s concerns, as the staff had previously offered,” the letter stressed. Wyden’s staffers also refused to commit to an interview the Tuesday after the long Memorial Day weekend. The Senate Finance Committee’s political game-playing prompted the whistleblower’s attorneys to move forward with the House interview.

It was only then that Wyden’s office attempted to commit to an interview with the whistleblower before the Senate Finance Committee. In doing so, the staffer sent an email that both ignored Shapley’s letter and misrepresented the prior communications, the whistleblower’s legal team confirmed. The email communications back up those claims, with the whistleblower’s legal team writing that during their Friday call, Wyden’s office “would not commit to *either* Thursday or the following Tuesday after the holiday.”

“We asked you to reconsider Thursday and you offered to check on logistics for Tuesday, expressing doubt that you could get a court reporter,” the email continued. “We did not hear from you over the weekend or Monday, and thus sent the letter articulating our position and the reasons for it.”

In response, Wyden’s staffer did not dispute that sequence of events, but instead wrote that since Tuesday was represented as a “‘distant third’ option, it was an option”: “In line with that agreement, Tuesday the 30th is the date the Committee is available to meet. Please let us know how you’d like to proceed by the end of the day.”

That final email confirms there was no agreement between the Senate Finance Committee and the whistleblower, as Wyden’s spokesman had told CNN, but only continued efforts to reach an agreement.

The Federalist requested clarification from Daniel Goshorn, the Wyden staffer on the email exchanges, asking whether the senator’s spokesman had misspoken when he said there was an “agreement” for Shapley to testify. The Federalist also asked whether Wyden’s office on Friday had been unwilling to commit to either a Thursday or a Tuesday interview. Finally, The Federalist queried Wyden’s office on why they won’t agree to a joint interview.

Goshorn did not respond with a comment by press time.

However, no matter the reason Wyden and the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee have for refusing to conduct a joint interview with the House, that may be their only option at this point. The whistleblower is poised to appear on Friday before the Ways and Means Committee and indicated an unwillingness to testify again later before the Senate.

Rep. Jason Smith, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, shouldn’t leave the decision up to Wyden, though, because the Senate Democrat has proven himself to be putting politics above the public interest. Smith should sidestep the political posturing and, as I explained on Tuesday, use Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code to open the House Ways and Means’ interview of the whistleblower to the relevant Democrat and Republican members from both the House and Senate.

If Smith refuses to do so, that will be as inexplicable as Wyden refusing to participate in a joint hearing — leaving one to wonder if the House Republican is playing politics as well.

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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Here’s How House Republicans Could Block Senate Democrats’ Efforts To Thwart IRS Whistleblower

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 23, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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The Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee is playing politics with the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblower, a letter sent Monday to the heads of the congressional oversight committees charges. But besides outing the partisan gamesmanship of the Senate committee, the whistleblower’s attorneys signal a solution to House Republicans: Use Section 6103(f)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code to sidestep Senate Democrats’ efforts to thwart the IRS whistleblower.

According to Monday’s letter, obtained by The Federalist, while attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) supervisory special agent have been working diligently for the last month to arrange for their client to testify on a bipartisan, bicameral basis to the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, “the Senate Finance Committee leadership has been unwilling to even consider a joint interview.” Nonetheless, the whistleblower remained committed to working with the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee since it had indicated a willingness to coordinate scheduling to allow the whistleblower to testify on two consecutive days.

But then, after scheduling their client’s private testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee for Friday, May 26, the Senate Finance Committee refused to commit to interviewing the whistleblower the prior day to allow the questioning to take place on two consecutive days. Thus, on Monday, the whistleblower’s attorneys declared, in essence, enough is enough, in their dispatch to the Senate and House: “Our client intends to appear on Friday, May 26th for the scheduled testimony agreed to by the House Ways and Means Committee,” the letter declared, then stressing that the whistleblower is unlikely to agree to testify separately before the Senate on another date.

Significantly, the letter from the IRS supervisory special agent’s attorneys added that their “client would welcome appropriately designated Senate staff to join and participate” in the House hearing. This invitation is huge because Section 6103(f)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code authorizes the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee to “designate or appoint” an agent to receive confidential tax information.

Because Republicans control the House Ways and Means Committee, its chair, Jason Smith, could designate Senate staffers to “join and participate” in the whistleblower’s House-transcribed interview. If Smith is wise, he will take the hint and designate as agents under Section 6103(f)(4) multiple Senate staffers for both Democrat and Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee.

This would allow the whistleblower to achieve what he wanted: to be questioned on a bipartisan and bicameral basis. Additionally, by designating multiple Senate staffers, not merely staffers for the chair and ranking member, the House Ways and Means Committee can ensure Sen. Chuck Grassley’s top investigator participates in the transcribed interview — something Democrat Ron Wyden, the Senate Finance Committee chair, was blocking.

As the Washington Examiner reported Monday, the IRS whistleblower had included Grassley in his various correspondence to the committees because the Iowa senator is co-chair of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus and is “more trusted than any other public official by whistleblowers.” Grassley and his investigators are also “subject matter experts on both whistleblower protections and the Biden family business controversies,” as well as “very familiar with the specific statutes protecting sensitive tax information.”

Yet Wyden, who also serves as a co-chair with Grassley on the Whistleblower Protection Caucus, has refused to allow Grassley to participate in the Senate’s probe of the whistleblower’s claims.

But now, unless the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee quickly reverses course and agrees to a joint — or, at minimum, consecutive — interview of the whistleblower, it won’t be Wyden deciding anything. It will be the Republican House Ways and Means chair.

Whether the whistleblower’s Monday letter jolts Wyden and his fellow Democrats into action remains to be seen. Either way, Smith should designate Senate staffers, including Grassley’s lead investigator, as agents for the House Ways and Means Committee to ensure the fullest exposure possible for the IRS whistleblower’s testimony.

That move might also teach Democrats not to play political games with whistleblowers who go to great lengths to ensure bipartisanship — as was done in mid-April when the IRS whistleblower’s attorneys first reached out to both Republican and Democrat leaders with their client’s offer to provide testimony of detailed “examples of preferential treatment” “improperly infecting decisions and protocols” applied during the investigation of a “high-profile,” “politically connected” individual. Unnamed sources later identified the IRS target as Hunter Biden and claimed that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.”

The whistleblower’s bipartisan pledge was then put into action when his attorneys, Tristan Leavitt of Empower Oversight and Mark Lytle of Nixon Peabody, LLP, worked with both the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee and the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee to be designated the respective committee’s agents with authority to inspect Hunter Biden’s tax returns and related information under Section 6103(f)(4).

After learning the extent of their client’s evidence concerning the alleged misconduct involved in the Hunter Biden investigation, Leavitt and Peabody on May 5, 2023, provided separate “proffers” to both the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. In those proffers, the attorneys summarized the substance of their client’s disclosures, paving the way for the client to testify before both committees.

But while the whistleblower remains committed to bipartisanship, Monday’s letter to the committees’ chairs and ranking members, as well as the heads of the Judiciary Committees and Grassley, exposed the delays and other disconcerting tactics undertaken by the Democrat-led Senate Finance Committee. And while the whistleblower lacks the power to force the Senate Democrats to play fair, as his attorneys highlighted in their letter, Chairman Smith of the House Ways and Means Committee is not so constrained.

Let’s hope Smith takes the hint.

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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Whistleblowers Expose FBI’s Corruption And Ongoing Persecution Of Political Opponents In Damning New Testimony

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD| MAY 18, 2023

FBI Whistleblower Friend testifying before the House Judiciary Committee

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In an explosive House committee hearing on Thursday, several whistleblowers accused the FBI of engaging in a bevy of highly corrupt and partisan activity, including manipulation of statistics, targeting political opponents, and retaliating against whistleblowers seeking to expose the agency’s corruption. The revelations come days after a report from U.S. Attorney John Durham revealed the FBI had no evidence then-candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Russians when it launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the former president’s 2016 campaign.

While speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, former FBI special agent Steve Friend said he filed protected whistleblower disclosures in August 2022 over concerns he had regarding investigations assigned to his office over the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. More specifically, Friend was concerned the conduction of these inquiries represented a departure from proper “case management rules established in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” and that such actions “could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI’s statistics on domestic extremism.”

“I also voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects who were accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors, represented by counsel, and who pledged to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety,” Friend said. “At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.”

Despite purportedly following proper whistleblower protocol, Friend said the FBI quickly retaliated against him by weaponizing the security clearance process to remove him from active duty “within one month” of filing his disclosures. According to Friend, the agency then orchestrated a “campaign of humiliation and intimidation” designed to “punish and pressure [him] to resign,” which included leaking his private medical information to The New York Times, refusing to “furnish [his] training records for several months,” and imposing an “illegal gag order” to prevent him from “communicating with [his] family and attorneys.”

In addition to retaliation, Friend went on to accuse the FBI of weaponizing process crimes and reinterpreting laws in order to “initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies.” He also asserted the agency actively colludes with Big Tech platforms to censor political speech the regime disagrees with, gather intelligence on Americans, and “target citizens for malicious prosecution.”

.@RepGregSteube: "Director Wray and AG Garland have…testified that they would not retaliate against whistleblowers…You followed inside protocol for the FBI utilizing whistleblower statute protection…to make your complaints…be known?"

FRIEND: "Yes."

STEUBE: "The response… pic.twitter.com/KRtnACBznm
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 18, 2023

During his testimony, Garret O’Boyle, a U.S. Army combat veteran and former FBI special agent, chronicled his own experience with the FBI’s disdain for whistleblowers. At some point after filing a whistleblower disclosure over concerns the agency was being used to go after the regime’s political opponents, O’Boyle sought another position within the country, which the FBI approved of. According to O’Boyle, it was only after he had sold his home and moved his family “halfway across the country” did the FBI then suspend him.

“They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was only two weeks old. Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,” O’Boyle said.

[READ: The Durham Report Leaves No Doubt: The FBI Is A Mortal Threat To Democracy]

Marcus Allen, a former Marine and FBI staff operations specialist, also testified about his experience with the FBI’s politicization, particularly its attempts to destroy the lives and careers of those within its ranks with dissenting views. As part of his position, Allen was tasked with providing situational awareness and information regarding the Jan. 6 riot. After submitting information to his superiors and others that questioned “the narrative” of Jan. 6, however, Allen was accused of pushing “conspiratorial views” and “unreliable information.” The FBI subsequently suspended Allen in January 2022 and questioned his allegiance to the United States.

According to Allen, it wasn’t until five months later, after a congressional member “made statements indicating the FBI was conducting a purge of employees with conservative viewpoints,” did the FBI reach out seeking an interview. Much like Friend, Allen claims his security clearance was revoked after he filed his whistleblower complaint.

“It has been more than a year since the FBI took my paycheck from me. My family and I have been surviving on early withdrawals from our retirement accounts while the FBI has ignored my request for approval to obtain outside employment during the review of my security clearance,” Allen said. “We have lost our federal health insurance coverage. There is apparently no end in sight.”

.@RepMattGaetz: "Is it your belief that you were retaliated against because you shared an email that questioned the truthfulness of FBI Director Christopher Wray."

ALLEN: "Yes." pic.twitter.com/fwylf74XqM
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) May 18, 2023

Predictably, House Democrats used Thursday’s hearing to slander the whistleblowers to cover for the FBI’s authoritarianism. In one instance, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., attempted to equate Friend’s calls to “defund the FBI” due to its weaponized behavior with support for defunding law enforcement. The Florida Democrat also accused Friend of using Thursday’s hearing to promote his upcoming book — which Friend never mentioned — and attacked the former agent for his concerns over the FBI’s use of excessive force during certain arrests.

In his prior testimony, Friend detailed a case where the FBI planned to use a SWAT team to carry out an arrest warrant on a Jan. 6 “subject.” According to Friend, he was concerned over the use of such tactics because “the subject of the arrest warrant had been in communication with the FBI at that point and had expressed a willingness to cooperate.”

“[I]n my experience in dealing with subjects of crimes and bringing them into custody, the FBI tends to use the least amount of force necessary to do that safely, and I felt that the use of SWAT … was an unnecessary tool to use for that particular individual,” Friend said. Of course, Wasserman Schultz misconstrued Friend’s testimony to make it sound as if he sympathized with the Jan. 6 subject and other suspected criminals upon whom arrest warrants are issued.

A House Judiciary Committee report containing the whistleblowers’ aforementioned allegations and prior testimony can be found here.

If you did not know these were FBI agents, and only heard their testimony, you might conclude this was testimony of people in communist nations, or Hitler’s Germany. I don’t know about you folks, this is frightenly madding. we’ve got to vote these socialists out as soon as possible.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Whistleblower Warns: ‘The FBI Will Crush You’

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Thursday, 18 May 2023 01:41 PM EDT

FBI whistleblower Garret O’Boyle, one of three testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Thursday, had a warning for any of his former colleagues who may be thinking about testifying against the agency: Don’t do it.

“The FBI will crush you,” O’Boyle warned, when committee member Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., asked him what he’d advise. “This government will crush you and your family if you try to expose the truth about things that they are doing are wrong, and we are all examples of that.”

O’Boyle said he would tell colleagues that he would take their complaints to Congress for them or put them in touch with Congress, “but I would advise them not to do it.” He admitted that not testifying would not solve the issues the FBI has, or shine light on corruption, but based on his experience, he’d still urge them to turn away.

O’Boyle’s words came at the end of a lengthy, often-heated hearing in which he joined two other FBI whistleblowers, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, to testify about the retribution they experienced for coming forward with statements on several issues. This included the investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol, the investigations of parents speaking out at school board meetings, and other instances that the Republicans on the committee say show the weaponization of the government against the American people.

In O’Boyle’s case, he told the committee that he was forced to rely on charity after the FBI moved him and his family from Kansas to Virginia, but soon ended his assignment. He claimed the bureau blocked him for six weeks from getting his family’s personal property back.

Chairman Jim Jordan asked all three men for their reactions to the FBI’s activities against them, and all insisted they followed the oaths they had taken when they went to work with the agency. They agreed with Jordan that they felt the “full weight of the federal government” come down on them, particularly when the FBI sent a letter to members of the committee to inform them that the agents’ security clearances had been revoked.

“Of course, they timed it perfectly,” said Jordan. “It’s in the letter to us yesterday. We knew they would. We knew it was going to happen that way.”

They also testified that their former colleagues have not reached out to them to support them after they found themselves put out.

“I know for a fact that my former supervisor had a meeting with my squad shortly after I was suspended, and he told them that I was going to be arrested, fired, and charged. So if that’s not chilling, I don’t know what it is,” said O’Boyle.

Friend agreed, commenting that those who have reached out to him “have used encrypted ways to do it because they fear retribution.”

Allen added that he’s been “ghosted by everybody.”

Earlier in the hearing, Allen testified that he was targeted based on “unsubstantiated accusations that I hold ‘conspiratorial views’ regarding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and that I allegedly sympathize with criminal conduct. I do not.”

O’Boyle said the actions against him came after his testimony in another proceeding that the FBI prioritized investigations of anti-abortion activiy after the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on legal abortion.

He said Thursday that he was forced to accept a new position in another state and that the FBI ordered him to report when his family’s youngest child was only two weeks old.

Friend, meanwhile, said he has filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel saying he was suspended after he raised concerns about the FBI’s manipulation of crime statistics, the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants, and the agency’s use of SWAT teams.

“The FBI weaponized the security clearance processes to facilitate my removal from active duty within one month of my disclosures,” he said, also alleging the agency “initiated a campaign of humiliation and intimidation to punish and pressure me to resign” and refused his request for records so he could get another job “in an obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family.”

He also accused the FBI’s Inspection Division of having “imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys.”

The hearing was organized by Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and comes after the release publication of Special Counsel John Durham’s report that revealed the FBI lacked evidence to open its investigation on former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The hearing also comes after the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans released a 1,000-page report with the allegations of the politicization of the FBI and Justice Department politicization.

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Huge Development Means IRS Whistleblower Can Soon Explode Biden Family Scandals

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 01, 2023

Although unraveling the scandal will start with the tax case against Hunter Biden, it won’t end there.

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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The House Ways and Means Committee granted two attorneys representing the Internal Revenue Service whistleblower authority to inspect Hunter Biden’s tax returns and related information. This development promises to accelerate the unraveling of the Justice Department’s Biden family protection racket.

Understanding why requires a fuller understanding of IRS privacy law, so here’s your “lawsplainer.”

A Look at the Law

Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that federal tax returns and “return information” “shall be confidential” and makes it illegal for an IRS “officer or employee” to disclose such tax information. In fact, many view Section 6103’s confidentiality mandate as even precluding a government employee from revealing the existence of an investigation into a taxpayer. However, because in December of 2020, Hunter Biden publicly acknowledged the existence of an investigation into his tax matters after federal prosecutors subpoenaed his business records, the public has long known of the investigation into the president’s son.

Several exceptions to the confidentiality provisions of Section 6103 exist, though. Relevant here is the statutory exception authorizing whistleblowers to disclose confidential information to the House Committee on Ways and Means or the Senate Committee on Finance. That exception guarantees whistleblower protection to government agents who reveal confidential information concerning tax issues to either of those committees.

But because the Section 6103 exception does not also allow a whistleblower the right to disclose the information to his attorney, the whistleblower would be forced to face the committees without the benefit of legal counsel. Further, because Section 6103 defines “return information” broadly to include the nature and sources of income, data collected by the IRS, and “any background file document” or “written determination” prepared by the IRS, the whistleblower also could not legally discuss with his attorney many aspects of an investigation to prepare to testify before the congressional committees.

This backdrop explains the purpose of the letter Mark Lytle, one of the lawyers representing the IRS whistleblower, sent to the chairs and ranking members of several congressional committees. In that letter, Lytle conveyed his client’s offer to share information establishing that politics improperly infected the criminal investigation of a “high-profile, controversial subject” — again, widely believed to be Hunter Biden because of the Biden son’s confirmation in 2020 of an ongoing federal investigation into his tax matters.

The letter stressed that because of tax privacy laws, the IRS whistleblower, “out of an abundance of caution,” had “refrained from sharing certain information” with Lytle while seeking his legal advice. Lytle then explained that lacking a full understanding of the situation made it “challenging” for him “to make fully informed judgments about how to best proceed.”

Lytle closed his letter by asking the committees to work with him so his client could share the “information with Congress legally and with the fully informed advice of counsel,” adding: “With the appropriate legal protections and in the appropriate setting, I would be happy to meet with you and provide a more detailed proffer of the testimony my client could provide to Congress.”

Again, to grasp the significance of both this language and last week’s development, it is imperative to understand Section 6103.

The Workaround

As explained above, while Section 6103 authorized the whistleblower to share confidential taxpayer information with two specific committees, he or she could not give that information to Lytle or any other attorney. Section 6103(f)(4), however, provides an important workaround by allowing the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Finance Committee to “designate or appoint” an “agent” to inspect the tax returns and return information.

In other words, the committees could appoint the whistleblower’s attorneys as their “agents,” which would allow the whistleblower to discuss freely and fully the tax information with his lawyers. In turn, the whistleblower’s lawyers could brief the committees on those details, albeit in a closed session, which is precisely what Lytle suggested when he wrote that “with the appropriate legal protections and in the appropriate setting,” he would “provide a more detailed proffer of the testimony my client could provide to Congress.”

Thus, that last week the Ways and Means Committee authorized two of the whistleblower’s attorneys to inspect the tax material is huge: It sidestepped a protracted battle over the circumstances under which the whistleblower would testify. It also ensures the House committee can learn, on an expedited basis, the whistleblower’s accusations.

Given that the Republican-controlled House granted the whistleblower’s lawyers authority to access and discuss the tax returns and tax information, authorization by the Democrat-controlled Senate Finance Committee would not be needed. It seems likely, however, that the Finance Committee followed suit to ensure a role in the investigation. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has yet to state whether he granted the whistleblower’s attorneys Section 6103 authority.

What’s Next?

No timetable has been announced for the next steps, but a source familiar with the investigation indicated a proffer by the whistleblower’s attorneys to the House Ways and Means Committee could occur as early as this week, with the whistleblower testifying soon after. The closed-door testimony could then become public, either because the House Committee concludes it is not confidential information under Section 6103 or because it votes to release it publicly, as allowed by statute.

Likely sensing the inevitable public airing of the purported political protection racket that allegedly saw two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declining to seek a grand jury indictment against the president’s son, lawyers for Hunter Biden reportedly met with federal prosecutors last Wednesday. Whether they were on a fishing expedition or attempting to hurriedly negotiate a plea agreement to short-circuit the scandal is unclear, but cutting a deal is unlikely to cap the fallout for two reasons.

First, it seems likely the statute of limitations will have run on some of the tax claims, in which case the congressional oversight committees will probably seek to understand whether politics resulted in lost opportunities to prosecute potentially more serious crimes. Second, the whistleblower’s claims reach beyond the tax case against Hunter Biden.

Specifically, Lytle’s letter states the whistleblower has detailed “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.” “People directly familiar with the case” provided more texture to this accusation, stating that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” The unnamed sources also stressed the improper politicization of the case came from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters.

The whistleblower’s accusations thus extend far beyond the tax case against Hunter Biden. Although unraveling the scandal will start there, it won’t end there. With the whistleblower’s attorneys now able to coordinate directly with the House Ways and Means Committee, the timeframe for exposing those complicit in covering for the Bidens just shrunk substantially.

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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Grassley Corroborates Whistleblower Claim: FBI Labeled Damning Evidence ‘Russian Disinfo’ To Protect Bidens

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 26, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed in a floor speech on Tuesday that material reviewed by his investigative staff supported whistleblower allegations that the FBI falsely labeled evidence of potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family “Russian disinformation.” While Grassley had previously discussed the whistleblower allegations, he now confirmed for the first time that an independent review of the pertinent records supported the accusations.

In response to last week’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he planned to offer a resolution denouncing former President Donald Trump’s call to defund the FBI, Grassley excoriated Democrats for remaining silent while the country faced an uptick in violence against law enforcement officers and the radical left pushed to defund the police. The Iowa senator then chastised Democrats for offering a political resolution that ignored the weaponization of the FBI, proceeding then to catalog the DOJ and FBI’s many abuses.

[READ: Think The FBI Deserves The Benefit Of The Doubt? This Laundry List Of Corruption Should Make You Think Again]

Here, Grassley stressed that protected whistleblower disclosures made “clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, very impactful, and very voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family.”

“I know the FBI falsely labeled that evidence as Russian disinformation to bury it,” Grassley continued, revealing that his staff had “independently reviewed records” that support the whistleblower allegations.

Tuesday’s comments came some six months after Grassley revealed that the FBI had possession of “a series of documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations with Hunter Biden.” According to an October 2022 news release and an accompanying letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley said:

The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.

At the time, Grassley noted it was “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election…” The senator also expressed concern over whether Weiss had independently evaluated the evidence.

Grassley concluded his October 2022 letter by requesting from the DOJ and FBI all records from Jan. 1, 2014, forward “that reference Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.” While his letter sought “all records,” Grassley explicitly highlighted several forms including, among others, FD-209a, which is used to record an “asset contract”; FD-794b, which is used to request a payment; FD-1023, which is used for a source report; and FD-1040a, which is used to close a source.

The specific documents requested suggest the whistleblower had claimed the FBI had a source that provided information on the Burisma owner and the Biden family.

While it is unclear whether the DOJ and FBI provided the documents, Grassley’s floor statement on Tuesday shows his office had access to records corroborating the whistleblower claims that the FBI buried evidence derogatory to the Biden family by framing it as Russian disinformation.

This latest revelation follows last week’s news that an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower claimed FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declined to file tax charges against the president’s son, against the recommendation of career prosecutors.

Yet Garland and Wray remain silent. If it weren’t for Grassley’s various letters and floor statements, Americans would know little about the FBI’s political favoritism and the “get out of jail free card” they seem to be handing out to Hunter Biden at every opportunity.

But now that we know that evidence, likely including a confidential human source, was buried under the guise that it was Russian disinformation, will anything change?

Sadly, for all of Grassley’s efforts to expose the scandal, the last seven years suggest not.

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 Reasons The IRS Whistleblower Will Blow Open DOJ’s Biden Family Protection Racket

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 24, 2023

Joe and Hunter Biden — The IRS whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower hinted to congressional leaders last week that the FBI improperly blocked aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation and that Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys blocked an indictment against the president’s son on tax charges. The carefully worded letter also indicated Attorney General Merrick Garland had testified inaccurately when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney had the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions.

Here are six reasons this whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.

1. Whistleblower Has Corroborating Evidence

While Wednesday’s letter from the whistleblower’s attorney to the congressional oversight chairs spoke only in cryptic terms, as I detailed on Friday, individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” revealed the whistleblower had accused two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys of refusing “to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.”

The sources also claimed the whistleblower’s disclosures establish that Garland refused Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s request for special counsel protection and that Garland testified inaccurately when he represented to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had full authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.”

It isn’t merely the seriousness of the whistleblower’s accusations that should shake those sheltering Hunter Biden, however, but the promise of corroborating evidence.

The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, reportedly maintains his client can “identify contemporaneous witnesses to corroborate his claims of political interference.” The whistleblower will “be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors … and how he summarized those meetings and put it in writing and distributed those to folks within the IRS and sometimes other agents,” Lytle claims, adding that those contemporaneous memoranda and emails will “end up corroborating his credibility.”

Sources also maintain DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has already begun reviewing documents that purportedly corroborate the whistleblower’s claims. They say he has sought out both IRS and FBI witnesses, indicating several paths exist to confirm the accusations of political bias.

2. IRS Agent Is Nonpartisan and Credentialed

The whistleblower’s apparent nonpartisan pedigree is another reason for participants in the Biden protection racket to be afraid. The whistleblower is “not a political person” and does not have a “political agenda,” Lytle told Fox News last week. He “is a career law enforcement official who hasn’t made any political donations and doesn’t even use social media,” the IRS agent’s attorney told Just the News.

“He is just a guy who likes his job as a law enforcement officer, as an investigator, and he takes it seriously, and he’s dedicated,” Lytle explained, adding, “And when he sees something that is not routine and doesn’t follow the rules, or … something maybe is affected by politics — that’s what made him come forward.”

“My client wrestled with whether or not to come forward,” the whistleblower’s attorney told Fox News. He had “sleepless nights. He decided he could not live with himself if he stayed quiet and said nothing.”

Also strengthening the whistleblower’s claims of a nonpartisan motivation is his insistence that “when he comes forward, this is not to talk to just one party or the other party.” Lytle stressed his client wants both sides of the political aisle to “ask him questions and cross-examine him.”

That Lytle is one of the whistleblower’s attorneys will also negate concerns of partisanship, given the attorney previously represented Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, during the heated Republican-controlled weaponization hearings. Lytle is also “currently defending a former FBI supervisor named Timothy Thibault who has been accused of pro-Biden political bias.” Before retaining Lytle, the whistleblower hired “prominent Democrat lawyer Mark Zaid, who previously represented clients whose allegations about a call with the Ukrainian president led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.”

His dedicated service at the IRS will likewise bolster the whistleblower’s credibility. As an IRS special agent for more than 10 years, the whistleblower reportedly has been “trusted with international investigations,” received several commendations, and taught “other agents how to properly do investigations.” His lengthy experience will strengthen his claims that “protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances” were not followed in the case of the politically connected Hunter Biden.

3. Dual Authorization Was Required

The IRS whistleblower’s claims that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys inappropriately, and for political reasons, “declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden” carry more weight given the dual-authorization procedures required by the DOJ for criminal tax cases.

The Department of Justice Manual provides that the tax division oversees federal criminal tax enforcement. Thus, while a grand jury is empowered to investigate tax crimes, “the Tax Division must first approve and authorize the United States Attorney’s Office’s use of a grand jury to investigate criminal tax violations.” Accordingly, in tax cases, prosecutions generally require two independent assessments that criminal prosecution is appropriate.

In the case of Hunter Biden, both career investigators and career prosecutors in the DOJ tax division signed off on the recommended charges, the whistleblower maintains. That dual approval suggests the evidence underlying the proposed charges was strong. It also pits the two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, who allegedly declined to seek charges against the president’s son, against the recommendations of two distinct sets of career employees.

4. Criminal Violations Seem Obvious

“Of course, Biden officials are interfering in his son’s case — why else has Hunter skated for five years?”

That title from former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s Friday New York Post article capsulizes perfectly another reason those running the Biden family protection racket should be shaking: The political favoritism shown Hunter Biden is obvious.

Who else could lie on a federal firearm form to purchase a handgun — only to lose physical possession of the gun and have it turn up across the street from a school — without getting charged with a federal crime?

As McCarthy wrote, “The gun offenses are so straightforward that they’d take a competent investigator five days, not five years, to wrap into a prosecutable case.” Likewise, “[s]ome of the tax offenses, which stretch back seven years or more, are so undeniable that liens were placed on Hunter’s properties…”

A public that for years has witnessed the president’s son escape any consequence for his clearly criminal conduct will easily nod along to the whistleblower’s claims of political favoritism: The IRS agent’s accusations aren’t just believable — they are self-evident.

5. The Timing Is Suspect

The timing also renders the whistleblower’s claims believable. Recall that in March of 2022, The New York Times began prepping the country for an indictment of Hunter Biden by soft-peddling his criminal conduct. The Times even previewed several potential defenses the president’s son could assert to counter the series of predicted criminal charges.

The Times article was a transparent attempt to get ahead of an anticipated story, namely that a grand jury had indicted Hunter Biden. But a grand jury indictment never dropped. Instead, about six months later, the whistleblower reportedly filed complaints related to the investigation with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General. The whistleblower’s complaints indicated charges had been recommended and approved by the tax division but never materialized because the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys did not seek grand jury indictments as recommended.

The New York Times’ efforts to groom Americans to discount the seriousness of the expected criminal charges wasn’t needed because the DOJ and FBI already had the president’s son covered.

6. The Scandal Reaches the FBI and POTUS

The Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys who allegedly declined to seek grand jury indictments against the president’s son are not the only ones implicated, however. The whistleblower’s allegations reportedly also reach FBI headquarters, although that does not necessarily mean Director Christopher Wray.

The unnamed sources further maintain the whistleblower’s disclosures claim that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” This accusation suggests political corruption beyond the refusal of the DOJ to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes.

Whether the “specific DOJ employees” refers to individuals working at FBI headquarters or elsewhere with the DOJ is unclear. Either way, the whistleblower’s claim conflicts with Garland’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had left the matter of Hunter Biden to the Delaware “U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI squad working with him.”

Garland’s testimony suggests that whoever instituted those “strictures” acted without the authority to do so. That is bad enough, but the implication is worse: namely that either FBI headquarters or other DOJ employees have kept the president from being incriminated during the multi-year unraveling of Hunter Biden’s complicated “business” ventures.

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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EXPLOSIVE: Whistleblower Points to Biden Admin Obstructing Hunter Biden Tax Probe

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 21, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?

Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.

A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.

In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.

First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”

Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.

The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.

During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.

Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.

It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”

Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.

Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.

Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.

Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.

The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.

Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.

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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FBI’s False Labeling of Biden Laptop as Disinformation Is Even Worse Than It Seems. Here’s Why

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2022

This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it’s about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.

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FBI whistleblowers claim that agents opened a sham investigation into Hunter Biden to brand reliable and verifiable derogatory evidence as “disinformation,” according to an explosive news release issued yesterday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

If true, beyond exposing the FBI’s role in running cover for the Biden family, the whistleblowers’ claims prove significant for a second reason: By failing to thoroughly vet the evidence in its possession related to Hunter Biden — which included the hard drive for the MacBook Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop — the intelligence community ignored a momentous national security threat, namely that the Russians potentially possessed a second Hunter Biden laptop.

Late Monday, Grassley issued a news release citing “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” who raised “the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations,” including “investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities.” According to the Iowa Republican, the whistleblowers alleged that Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy “Thibault and other FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”

The news release added that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.

The Iowa senator claimed that “Thibault also reportedly ordered the closure of a stream of information related to Hunter Biden and sought to improperly mark the matter within FBI systems in a way that would prevent it from being re-opened in the future.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly claimed that reporting from the stream was at risk of disinformation,” but the whistleblowers told Grassley, “that all of the information obtained through that stream was already verified or verifiable.”

The FBI whistleblowers’ charges, if accurate, are devastating and mean that at a time that Hunter Biden was already reportedly under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, rather than work with the agents already investigating then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, FBI headquarters initiated its own “assessment.” Then, according to the whistleblowers, agents improperly shut down sources, falsely framed evidence as disinformation, and hid the reasoning for that determination from other FBI agents behind restricted areas.

The press release also suggests that the FBI’s “assessment” served to frame the investigation Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., were conducting into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing as tainted by Russian disinformation. As part of that investigation, in May 2020, “Senate Republicans issued a subpoena seeking documents from the younger Biden and asked for information related to more than two dozen entities, including Burisma,” which was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter nearly $1 million a year to sit on its board.

With the Trump-Biden presidential contest in full force, Grassley and Johnson’s investigation into Hunter prompted pushback from Democrats, with Democrat members of the Gang of Eight sending a letter and classified addendum in July 2020 to FBI Director Christopher Wray “specifically citing the Johnson-Grassley probe into Hunter Biden as reason for an urgent briefing for Congress about foreign ‘disinformation.’”

The following month, Democrat Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote Grassley and Johnson and requested that members of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance committees, which they chaired, “receive a briefing from the FBI’s foreign influence task force related to their ongoing Biden investigations.”

According to an August 5, 2020, Washington Post article, “the Democrats have requested the member briefing for months, and the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies have previously briefed committee staff on possible foreign disinformation.” The FBI later briefed both Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, but according to the senators, that briefing was both “unsolicited and unnecessary” and failed to provide any new information to the senators or any specific allegations that they had received “disinformation” as part of their Hunter Biden investigation.

Given that FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, according to whistleblowers, opened his assessment into Hunter in August, the whistleblowers’ allegations raise serious questions concerning whether Democrats pressured the FBI into launching an investigation into Hunter as a pretext to provide the desired “disinformation briefing.”

Further, in April of 2021, someone leaked the fact that the FBI had briefed Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, with the Washington Post running a story painting the senators as reckless in their investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings by suggesting they “ignored FBI warnings and thus may have been manipulated by the Kremlin.” As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, it seems possible that “the FBI set up two Members of Congress for political attack under the guise of a ‘defensive briefing.’”

The whistleblowers’ accusations then, when coupled with the media coverage, suggest that an agent from FBI headquarters opened an assessment to provide cover to Hunter Biden, to eliminate source trails for the investigation into then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, and to taint the legitimate inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. That scandal, however, represents but half the issue because the whistleblowers’ statements, if true, suggest the assessment of Hunter was a sham. And as a sham, the agents would not vet the evidence available to them, which would have included the MacBook laptop Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.

The FBI seized that laptop in December of 2019, after being alerted to its existence in October. At that time, FBI agents were reportedly told that in addition to pornography, the computer had information “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money.”

What the FBI did after seizing the laptop in December of 2019 is unknown. However, given that the FBI was reportedly told it contained “a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money,” any legitimate investigation would have involved reviewing the laptop for information relevant to Grassley and Johnson’s investigations. And had the FBI reviewed the laptop, agents would have discovered a video recording capturing Hunter Biden saying that in 2018, another laptop went missing when he was “partying in Las Vegas,” and that Hunter believed it was stolen by a group of Russians.

The video then showed a prostitute asking Hunter if he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him. “Yeah, in some way, yeah,” Hunter replied, noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.” Hunter had also noted that the computer had “tons” of compromising videos on it.

But it was not just the compromising videos of Hunter of concern, but the financial information likely on that laptop that could implicate his father in the pay-to-play scandal. If that information were in the hands of “the Russians,” as Hunter believed, the national security risk was huge and demanded the intelligence community conduct a defensive briefing of Joe Biden.

Instead, it appears from the whistleblowers’ comments that a non-investigation took place, with legitimate sources and evidence falsely categorized as disinformation, and then rather than provide Biden a defensive briefing, the senators received one.

This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it is about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.

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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Watch Live: Press Conference with Whistleblowers Giving ‘Eyewitness Accounts of Suspected Voter Fraud’

Reported by HANNAH BLEAU | 1 Dec 2020

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society is holding a press conference featuring three whistleblowers who are expected to give “eyewitness accounts of suspected voter fraud.”

The press conference, slated to begin at 2 p.m. in Arlington, Virginia, will feature three whistleblowers who are expected to provide what has been described as “personal eyewitness accounts demonstrating significant potential election fraud, some of which affects hundreds of thousands of ballots.”

The witnesses are also expected to reveal evidence of “unlawful actions made by election officials,” as well as “widespread illegal efforts by USPS workers to influence the outcome of the election.”

Per the release:

The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society embarked on a multistate effort in 2019 to ensure election integrity in the 2020 elections. Rigorous on-the-ground investigations have uncovered extensive evidence of fraud affecting hundreds of thousands of ballots that is being used in litigation across five states. These investigations have led to the discovery of the whistleblowers coming forth in the press conference today. Each of the whistleblowers will make a publish statement about their eyewitness observations that may prove malfeasance on the part of election officials and USPS officials. Amistad Project Director Phill Kline will lead today’s press conference.

The witnesses’ affidavits are reportedly being used as evidence in election integrity lawsuits in key swing states.

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Whistleblower had ‘professional’ tie to 2020 Democratic candidate

Written by Byron York | October 08, 2019 03:04 PM

URL of the original posting site: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/whistleblower-had-professional-tie-to-2020-democratic-candidate

In an Aug. 26 letter, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, wrote that the anonymous whistleblower who set off the Trump-Ukraine impeachment fight showed “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate.”

A few weeks later, news reports said the whistleblower’s possible bias was that he is a registered Democrat. That was all. Incredulous commentary suggested that Republicans who were pushing the bias talking point were so blinded by their own partisanship that they saw simple registration with the Democratic Party as evidence of wrongdoing.

“Give me a break!” tweeted whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid. “Bias? Seriously?”

Now, however, there is word of more evidence of possible bias on the whistleblower’s part. Under questioning from Republicans during last Friday’s impeachment inquiry interview with Atkinson, the inspector general revealed that the whistleblower’s possible bias was not that he was simply a registered Democrat. It was that he had a significant tie to one of the Democratic presidential candidates currently vying to challenge President Trump in next year’s election.

“The IG said [the whistleblower] worked or had some type of professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates,” said one person with knowledge of what was said.

“The IG said the whistleblower had a professional relationship with one of the 2020 candidates,” said another person with knowledge of what was said.

“What [Atkinson] said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate,” said a third person with knowledge of what was said.

All three sources said Atkinson did not identify the Democratic candidate with whom the whistleblower had a connection. It is unclear what the working or professional relationship between the two was.

In the Aug. 26 letter, Atkinson said that even though there was evidence of possible bias on the whistleblower’s part, “such evidence did not change my determination that the complaint relating to the urgent concern ‘appears credible,’ particularly given the other information the ICIG obtained during its preliminary review.”

Democrats are certain to take that position when Republicans allege that the whistleblower acted out of bias. Indeed, the transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a public document, for all to see. One can read it regardless of the whistleblower’s purported bias.

Nevertheless, Republicans will want to know more about the origins of the whistleblower complaint, especially given the unorthodox use of whistleblower law involved. There is more to learn — like who the Democratic candidate is — before Republicans will say they know enough about what happened.

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Julian Assange Releases Statement on U.S. Election

Written by Philip Hodges

URL of the original posting site: http://eaglerising.com/38280/julian-assange-releases-statement-on-u-s-election/

Depending on what political party you identify with, you’ll either love WikiLeaks or abhor them. And people’s opinions of the organization changes depending on which political leaders are getting exposed. If the Bush administration is getting exposed, then liberals champion the group and whistleblowers in general, and conservatives decry the group as a terrorist organization and label the whistleblowers “traitors.”

But if WikiLeaks exposes the Obama administration, or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, it’s the other way around. All of a sudden the liberals who had previously championed the group, hate the group and want Assange “brought to justice” for crimes against humanity. And predictably, conservatives cheer his cause.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand that Assange doesn’t identify with any major U.S. political party. He’s not American. He’s an outsider. His goal has always been to expose top-level corruption, regardless of which countries or political parties are involved. And he’s had to pay a price for that.

As a publishing organization, they don’t hire hackers to steal other people’s computer documents and emails. WikiLeaks is a place for whistleblowers. They publish only what they’re given.

In other words, if someone inside the Trump campaign wanted to expose the campaign’s corruption and send a ton of emails to WikiLeaks, they would have published it. The only reason WikiLeaks published Podesta’s emails and the DNC emails was that someone felt the need to blow the whistle anonymously. So far, no one’s felt the need to do the same thing with the RNC or the Trump campaign. That doesn’t mean that Julian Assange must be pro-Trump. It just means that no one’s come forward seeking to out Trump.

It’s important to keep in mind that if our media networks truly were “fair and balanced” and objective and unbiased, there would be no need for a group like WikiLeaks.

Here’s a statement on the U.S. election released by Julian Assange:

In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected US President.

On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have.

The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed.

This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work.

The US public has thoroughly engaged with WikiLeaks’ election related publications which number more than one hundred thousand documents. Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.

We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election.

At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or Jill Stein’s campaign, or Gary Johnson’s campaign or any of the other candidates that fulfills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton’s cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us.

We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it.

That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public.

This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election. The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers. I spoke at the launch of the campaign for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because her platform addresses the need to protect them. This is an issue that is close to my heart because of the Obama administration’s inhuman and degrading treatment of one of our alleged sources, Chelsea Manning. But WikiLeaks publications are not an attempt to get Jill Stein elected or to take revenge over Ms Manning’s treatment either.

Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know.

This is after all what happened when the New York Times withheld evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the US population for a year until after the 2004 election, denying the public a critical understanding of the incumbent president George W Bush, which probably secured his reelection. The current editor of the New York Times has distanced himself from that decision and rightly so.

The US public defends free speech more passionately, but the First Amendment only truly lives through its repeated exercise. The First Amendment explicitly prevents the executive from attempting to restrict anyone’s ability to speak and publish freely. The First Amendment does not privilege old media, with its corporate advertisers and dependencies on incumbent power factions, over WikiLeaks’ model of scientific journalism or an individual’s decision to inform their friends on social media. The First Amendment unapologetically nurtures the democratization of knowledge. With the Internet, it has reached its full potential.

Yet, some weeks ago, in a tactic reminiscent of Senator McCarthy and the red scare, Wikileaks, Green Party candidate Stein, Glenn Greenwald and Clinton’s main opponent were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications—because none exists.

In the end, those who have attempted to malign our groundbreaking work over the past four months seek to inhibit public understanding perhaps because it is embarrassing to them – a reason for censorship the First Amendment cannot tolerate. Only unsuccessfully do they try to claim that our publications are inaccurate.

WikiLeaks’ decade-long pristine record for authentication remains. Our key publications this round have even been proven through the cryptographic signatures of the companies they passed through, such as Google. It is not every day you can mathematically prove that your publications are perfect but this day is one of them.

We have endured intense criticism, primarily from Clinton supporters, for our publications. Many long-term supporters have been frustrated because we have not addressed this criticism in a systematic way or responded to a number of false narratives about Wikileaks’ motivation or sources. Ultimately, however, if WL reacted to every false claim, we would have to divert resources from our primary work.

WikiLeaks, like all publishers, is ultimately accountable to its funders. Those funders are you. Our resources are entirely made up of contributions from the public and our book sales. This allows us to be principled, independent and free in a way no other influential media organization is. But it also means that we do not have the resources of CNN, MSNBC or the Clinton campaign to constantly rebuff criticism.

Yet if the press obeys considerations above informing the public, we are no longer talking about a free press, and we are no longer talking about an informed public.

Wikileaks remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it. WikiLeaks must publish. It must publish and be damned.

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Posts tagged ‘whistleblowers’

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 05, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 31, 2023

The Dirt Is in the Details

What About a Recording?

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 26, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 25, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 23, 2023

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD| MAY 18, 2023

If you did not know these were FBI agents, and only heard their testimony, you might conclude this was testimony of people in communist nations, or Hitler’s Germany. I don’t know about you folks, this is frightenly madding. we’ve got to vote these socialists out as soon as possible.

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By Sandy Fitzgerald | Thursday, 18 May 2023 01:41 PM EDT

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 01, 2023

A Look at the Law

The Workaround

What’s Next?

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 26, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 24, 2023

1. Whistleblower Has Corroborating Evidence

2. IRS Agent Is Nonpartisan and Credentialed

3. Dual Authorization Was Required

4. Criminal Violations Seem Obvious

Who else could lie on a federal firearm form to purchase a handgun — only to lose physical possession of the gun and have it turn up across the street from a school — without getting charged with a federal crime?

5. The Timing Is Suspect

6. The Scandal Reaches the FBI and POTUS

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 21, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2022

This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it is about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.

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Written by Byron York | October 08, 2019 03:04 PM

“The IG said [the whistleblower] worked or had some type of professional relationship with one of the Democratic candidates,” said one person with knowledge of what was said.

“The IG said the whistleblower had a professional relationship with one of the 2020 candidates,” said another person with knowledge of what was said.

“What [Atkinson] said was that the whistleblower self-disclosed that he was a registered Democrat and that he had a prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate,” said a third person with knowledge of what was said.

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Written by Philip Hodges

Here’s a statement on the U.S. election released by Julian Assange:

On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have.

The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed.

This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work.

We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it.

That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public.

Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know.

Yet if the press obeys considerations above informing the public, we are no longer talking about a free press, and we are no longer talking about an informed public.

Wikileaks remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it. WikiLeaks must publish. It must publish and be damned.

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