Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office Buried Biden-Bribery Allegations AG Barr Sent For Investigation
The Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office hid an FBI report that the Ukrainian oil and gas company Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million bribes, documents released by the House Ways and Means Committee reveal. That revelation eclipses the catalog of other claims of misconduct and political favoritism levied by two IRS whistleblowers, as detailed in the transcripts the House committee released Thursday — and suggests the bribery claims were never investigated.
On Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee announced its release of the transcripts of the sworn testimony of two IRS agents who had worked directly on the criminal case against Hunter Biden. According to the press release, the whistleblowers’ testimony “outlines misconduct and government abuse at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the investigation of Hunter Biden.”
While the transcripts expose several shocking details concerning the DOJ, FBI, and IRS’s handling of the Hunter Biden criminal investigation, it is the dog that didn’t bark that should sound the alarm.
Nowhere in the transcripts did the IRS whistleblowers discuss the June 30, 2020, FD-1023 report that summarized a “highly credible” confidential human source’s claims that the owner of Burisma said Hunter and Joe Biden coerced him into paying them each $5 million in bribes.
The whistleblowers made clear in supplemental statements provided to the House Ways and Means Committee why that was: because the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office did not inform them of the existence or content of the FD-1023. In fact, the June 12, 2023, affidavit that IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley signed establishes the whistleblowers only realized the FD-1023 had been held back after The Federalist exclusively reported two weeks ago that former Attorney General William Barr said he had sent the CHS’s reporting to Delaware for further investigation.
“Most recently, former Attorney General Bill Barr provided an interview in which he stated that information provided by a Confidential Human Source (‘CHS’) concerning an alleged bribery scheme by President Joe Biden was received through the Pittsburgh [U.S. Attorney Office] and was determined it was not likely to have been disinformation,” Shapley said in his affidavit. Barr noted the FD-1023 “was provided to the ongoing investigation in Delaware to follow up on and to check out,” the affidavit continued.
But according to the IRS whistleblower, the CHS information Barr referenced was never provided to Shapley, nor to any of the IRS agents acting under his supervision, nor to the FBI agents working with the IRS investigators.
Shapley added that he and other IRS criminal investigators had asked to participate in the briefings the Pittsburgh U.S. Attorney’s Office was providing Delaware, but their requests were denied. Had they participated in those briefings, Shapley stressed, they would have undertaken proper investigative steps to determine the veracity of the CHS’s claims. According to Shapley’s affidavit, however, because the information was never provided to the investigators, the agents involved took no steps to determine if the CHS’s allegations could be substantiated.
The second whistleblower, Shapley’s anonymous subordinate and the case agent on the Hunter Biden tax investigation, provided a similar statement, albeit via a letter from his attorney.
Since the second whistleblower’s testimony, the letter explained, multiple news articles reported on the existence of the June 2020 FD-1023 report of a CHS’s bribery allegations, as well as Barr’s statement that he had sent that information to Delaware for further investigation. However, according to the case agent’s attorney, “he has never seen this FBI Form 1023” and “does not recall ever hearing about this information being turned over in any meetings with the prosecution team in Delaware.”
The whistleblowers’ claims that they did not see the FD-1023 and that the investigating IRS and FBI agents with whom they worked also do not recall ever learning of the information is huge because these agents were essentially the only ones conducting any semblance of an investigation into Hunter Biden. It is inconceivable that this evidence would be withheld from the investigating agents.
Further, Shapley’s investigative team was precisely the group to investigate the allegations contained in the FD-1023, as his group is “known as the International Tax and Financial Crimes group,” and consists of “12 elite agents who were selected based on their experience and performance in the area of complex high-dollar international tax investigations.”
The question remains who within the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office withheld the FD-1023 from Shapley and his team when Barr had directed that the CHS’s reporting be sent there for further investigation. Further, Barr has recently confirmed the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office was briefed on the detailed allegations contained in the FD-1023, following then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s conclusion that the CHS’s reporting did not appear to be misinformation.
The scandal is not limited to Delaware, however. A related scandal connects to another whistleblower who claims that in “August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (‘FBI HQs’) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”
Every indication suggests it was the FD-1023 that the FBI HQ’s team falsely labeled disinformation, which raises the specter that individuals in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office were colluding with FBI HQ to protect the Biden family. It is now up to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s whistleblower to close the circle.
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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