The Department of Justice blocked investigators from collecting evidence relating to President Joe Biden’s alleged participation in his son Hunter’s business dealings, according to whistleblowers from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
In previous testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, whistleblower Joseph Zeigler said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and the DOJ interfered with important facets of the IRS’ investigation into Hunter Biden, including agents’ apparent refusal to look into a WhatsApp message sent by Hunter to a Chinese Communist Party-linked business man.
In the alleged message, Hunter Biden says his father, Joe Biden, is sitting next to him.
During testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Zeigler told Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) that Justice Department prosecutors questioned the WhatsApp message’s validity before investigating it.
“I recall them saying to me that ‘how do we know that he’s there? How do we know that that’s true, the statement being made there?’ And then I said ‘well, we would get the location data.’ So, as a part of my normal investigation, that’s what I would do and what I can tell you is, I know I didn’t do it, I don’t know if the FBI ever ended up doing it, it was kind of like a ‘let’s wait or I need to think about it,’” Zeigler said.
A second whistleblower, Gary Shapley, testified that investigators were blocked by prosecutors from obtaining information on Hunter Biden’s laptop – a practice Shapley described as unprecedented.
“That’s the first time I’ve experienced being limited [access] to evidence,” Shapley said, adding that there were “investigative steps that were definitely obstructed by DOJ that I’d never seen in my 14 years.”
Last week, President Biden’s Justice Department indicted whistleblower Gal Luft, who recently alleged that he gave the FBI evidence of Biden family corruption related to China in 2019. House Republicans investigating the Biden family said Luft is a critical witness to their investigation.
