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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