The House Oversight and Accountability Committee will, for the first time in an open hearing, listen to statements on Wednesday from two IRS whistleblowers who probed Hunter Biden. Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., asserts that these statements contribute to his broader investigation into corruption allegations against President Joe Biden.
Gary Shapley, a supervisory agent with 14 years of service at the IRS, and an IRS criminal investigator, whose identity has been concealed till now, will be the ones testifying.
The Washington Examiner reports that the unnamed investigator, often referred to as “Agent X,” decided to testify publicly out of frustration with how the Democrats, including Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin [D-Md.], and others have misrepresented their integrity.
Initially assigned to look into Hunter Biden, Shapley and Agent X had earlier presented their statements before the House Ways and Means Committee in June, making their allegations public. They asserted that the Department of Justice’s decisions to delay and obscure the case were driven by political motives. They also revealed being barred from interrogating Hunter Biden, and that U.S. attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, was forbidden from pressing charges in his preferred jurisdiction. Weiss’ bid for special counsel status was also declined.
Dubbed a “court of public opinion,” the six-hour hearing aims, as per Chairman Comer, to expose to the public how the Bidens were involved in money laundering and set up shell companies for secretive operations.
Comer noted that many people in the media fail to comprehend the issue at hand, explaining, “[The Bidens] established firms that aren’t genuine businesses. They neither manufacture nor sell anything. They don’t offer any goods or services. The sole purpose of these companies appears to be to launder money to obscure the source of income, which came from foreign individuals.”
The chairman of the Oversight Committee further said, “We will have some pointed questions about certain matters that we believe broke the law, and these two witnesses will respond to that. I believe these two individuals may provide some insight and potentially clarify some points for the puzzled media.”
Additional topics likely to surface in the testimony include Hunter Biden’s failure to register as a foreign agent during his tenure as a board member with Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings LLC and with CEFC, a Chinese energy company linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
The hearing is also expected to address potential retaliatory actions against the two whistleblowers. Once it was disclosed that the whistleblowers were speaking to Congress, they were taken off the Biden investigation. Furthermore, Shapley reported that he was passed over for a promotion during that time.
This prompted Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, who will be attending the hearing, to ask the Office of Special Counsel to initiate an investigation into retaliation allegations.
In a July 5 letter to the OSC, the chairpersons of the House Ways and Means, Judiciary, and Oversight Committees wrote, “The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reportedly engaged in unlawful whistleblower retaliation against long-standing IRS employees.” They further noted that news reports “suggest that the whistleblower and the investigative team were dismissed from the Hunter Biden investigation by the IRS at the DOJ’s behest in retaliation for making protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.”
