There’s a line in Whistleblower X’s testimony that hasn’t gotten enough attention amid the uncritical treatment of Gary Shapley’s media tour claiming improper political interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden.

Whistleblower X described that when investigators asked late last year why prosecutors hadn’t yet charged Hunter Biden, they learned that the attorneys had “found some emails” that made them question whether “they could actually charge the case.”

So we found out through talking with our SAC that the attorneys had found — we were always asking for updates on charging. When are we going to charge? When are we going to charge? We were told that the prosecutors had found some emails that concerned them if they could actually charge the case. That’s what they said to us.

This explanation — that prosecutors had discovered emails that made them question whether they could charge the case, at all — would present an entirely different explanation for the delayed (and seemingly softball) charging decision with regards to Hunter Biden, one for which there is abundant evidence in the two transcripts, yet one that has been ignored by lazy journalists.

It suggests there may be evidence of past misconduct that, if shared with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in discovery, would lead to dismissal of the entire case, or at least an acquittal.

Non-Virgin Birth

Start with how the investigation was set up. Shapley described that the investigation into Hunter Biden was spun off of an investigation into what he called a “foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

The investigation into Hunter Biden, code name Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.

Whistleblower X, who opened the case immediately after joining the International Tax and Financial Crimes group, described that “amateur online pornography platform” differently; he described it as a “social media company” that may have hosted a prostitution ring.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

Also included in those bank reports was evidence that Hunter Biden was living lavishly through his corporate bank account. This is a typical thing that we look for in tax cases — criminal tax cases, I should say.

Remember that Whistleblower X has a habit of seeing sex workers everywhere he looks.

Whistleblower X then went from there to look for evidence of crime in public reporting on Hunter Biden’s divorce proceedings.

In addition, there was media reporting related to Hunter Biden’s wife, ex-wife, divorce proceedings basically talking about his tax issues. And I wanted to quote some of the things that were said in her divorce filing which was public record.

“Throughout the parties’ separation, Mr. Biden” — referring to Hunter Biden — “has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, gifts for women with whom he had sexual relationships with, while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

“The parties’ outstanding debts are shocking and overwhelming. The parties have maxed-out credit card debt, double mortgages on both real properties they own, and a tax debt of at least $300,000.” [my emphasis]

Then, in response to questioning from Minority Counsel, Whistleblower X described how, on his third attempt to open the investigation, he ran bank reports for Burisma, which is what convinced his supervisor to permit him to open the investigation.

Mr. X. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation. My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

So I kept digging for more and more. And even after that point, he goes: You haven’t found enough. So I ended up searching bank reports that [I] ran on the periphery of what we were looking at.

So I ran bank reports for Burisma, and in those bank reports I had found additional payments that Hunter had received. And then at that point I had found that Hunter did not report the income for 2014 related to Burisma.

So now I had a false return year. So that alone — it was basically so much evidence that I put in there — allowed us to elevate the case.

A potentially “amateur” sex worker site, to divorce proceedings, to Burisma. It all sounds like an effort to find a crime, and finding that crime has been a significant focus of a 12-person international tax group supposedly tasked to find much more significant tax crime ever since.

I don’t think anyone asked how long this process of making three bids to open an investigation into Hunter Biden took. So it’s actually unclear how the timing works with the investigation in Delaware opened in January 2019.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax. And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

Likewise, there has never been an explanation for what predicated the separate investigation in Delaware opened in 2019, though NYT describes that an existing civil review of Hunter Biden’s tax problems became a criminal investigation that also included the foreign influence peddling, largely, Burisma, that appears to have since been dropped.

Then, we learn, that shortly after Barr was confirmed, and in a period when he was trying to reverse the prosecution of Michael Cohen, sustaining investigations into Greg Craig and Andrew McCabe, perpetuating efforts to seed an investigation into John Kerry, and launching a four year witch hunt based off fabricated claims about Hillary Clinton, the Attorney General consolidated everything in Delaware — the perfect venue if Joe Biden is your target but (as Whistleblower X noted), the wrong place for Joe Biden’s son, who lived in LA or DC during the alleged crimes in question.

Documented Sixth Amendment Concerns

How all this got started matters, because this early period may be when adverse emails that could make it impossible to prosecute Hunter Biden at trial got put into the record.

That’s because Whistleblower X’s supervisor for the first period of the investigation — for a period that may have spanned over 14 months — believed there were Sixth Amendment and political influence problems with the investigation.

When describing how this perturbed him, Whistleblower X freely admitted that he was reading everything in the press about Hunter Biden (that detail will become important later) and that he went to his supervisor’s boss to get his boss to stop raising concerns about Trump’s tweets.

Whistleblower X described his supervisor Matt Kutz’ concern about Trump’s tweets — a direct example of precisely what Republicans are searching for, inappropriate Presidential interference!! — as exhibiting a liberal viewpoint.

From what I was told by various people in my agency, my IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

I recall that at one point I had to go around my supervisor and ask his boss, ASAC George Murphy, to tell him to stop sending me and the Hunter Biden prosecution team these emails and that I was searching media articles on a weekly basis and was aware of everything being written in the media regarding the case.

[snip]

A So it was actually Matthew Kutz. He was my supervisor at the time and from the articles that he was sending me, I would say he had more of a liberal view than I had and it was pretty obvious from the things he would send me and discuss. And that’s just me making an observation.

So I later found out about these memos that were put in the file regarding the issues that he saw with the investigation, the fact that we even had it opened. So I only learned about those after.

And then it came to a point to where he’s sending us so many media articles about different issues that I had to tell him stop, please. And I had to go around him. And that’s when I went to my ASAC at the time, George Murphy, who was above him. [my emphasis]

After learning of an example of Presidential interference, but from Trump, GOP staffers in the interview interrupted the Minority’s questioning by going off the record about something, as if they were the witness.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. On the record.

That off the record discussion appears to have discussed why Whistleblower X believed that his supervisor’s concerns about the Sixth Amendment were proof of liberal bias, because that’s what Whistleblower X explained immediately after going back on the record. And then, Whistleblower X explained to Minority Counsel, that Matt Kutz raised concerns four years ago about whether this could ever be prosecuted.

Mr. X. So these articles were a lot about — were a lot of articles regarding Trump and getting a fair investigation and things related to that, Trump’s tweets and stuff like that. So, that’s what drew me to my conclusion.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q What was the purpose behind him sending you the Trump tweets? What was he trying to get at, or was he trying to give you more information for your case? Why would he send those, or do you know?

A Yeah, I think he was bringing up concerns with potentially us prosecuting the case down the road, potential issues we’re going to incur. I don’t remember the exact email that he sent that caused me to be — that he had to stop sending me some of the news articles, because it wasn’t even the fact that he was sending me these news articles.

It was the opinion he was providing in those emails that I did not agree or that I did not — not agree with but did not think was appropriate. [my emphasis]

Whistleblower X told us in one part of the interview that prosecutors had found something in the email record that led them to worry they could not prosecute this case at all, and then in another part of the interview he told us that the supervisor for the first year or so of this investigation believed they would have problems prosecuting it down the road because of Trump’s constant badgering for precisely this investigation.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason no US Attorney’s Office wanted to take this to trial is because this investigation was plagued by inappropriate tampering from the other President from the start?

Gary Shapley’s Involvement

In January 2020, in the same period when Bill Barr was setting up an alternative channel via which DOJ could ingest dirt about Hunter Biden that Russian spies shared with Rudy Giuliani, Gary Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor, overseeing the 12-person International Tax group that would hunt Hunter Biden for five years.

Now is probably a good time to note that Shapley — who splits his time between Baltimore and DC — seems to have a good relationship with Rod Rosenstein, a Maryland AUSA who went on to become US Attorney and then Deputy Attorney General during a period when DOJ was launching politicized investigations into Trump’s enemies.

Mr. Shapley. No. I think I’ve said it, that this is not the norm. This is — I’ve worked with some great guys, some great prosecutors that went on to be U.S. attorneys and went on to be the deputy attorney general and, I think I have experience enough to where it means something.

As noted, Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor just as Barr was setting up a protected means to ingest dirt pertaining to Burisma. But by his own description, Shapley didn’t start liaising more closely with David Weiss until later….

… Until Rudy Giuliani released the laptop.

From around October 2020 through October 2022, I was the IRS CI manager who interacted directly with the United States Attorney, David Weiss, and individuals at DOJ Tax Division the most.

This coincidence — that Shapley became more involved just after Rudy disclosed that a blind computer repairman had shared a laptop with the FBI before he himself, the President’s personal lawyer, got a copy — may be significant.

The Really Really Really Dated Claim about the Laptop

By Shapley’s description, he contacted the AUSA on the case, Lesley Wolf, and not only complained that the FBI was misrepresenting the laptop (when in fact they were mostly no-commenting), but also raised the possibility that John Durham may have searched the laptop.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can be briefed on this issue.”

In his congressional testimony Durham specified that Hunter was the one Trump enemy he hadn’t been ordered to investigate — but remember that there were reports Ukrainians brought dirt to him.

In his testimony, Shapley admitted that the investigative team called this meeting because, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.” But he emphasized Whistleblower X’s complaints that parts of the laptop had been withheld from investigators.

As I noted in this post, per Shapley’s own notes, that’s not what the bulk of the meeting was about.

Of 43 numbered entries, just eight deal in part or in whole with access Whistleblower X had, and some of that is conflicting [note that Shapley misspells Cellebrite “cellabright” throughout]. Here’s what those eight numbered entries describe:

• 14a. Describing that the John Paul Mac Isaac 302 about what he saw on the laptop was being withheld from the prosecution team (as a whole), even though the taint team had found no privileged items discussed in it
• 25. Describing that Whistleblower X had never seen a PDF version of the Cellebrite report from the drive, but instead had to look at the device itself
• 29. Describing Whistleblower X asking whether all the iMessages that were relevant and non-privileged had been reviewed, the answer to which the team didn’t know immediately [this seems to confirm the IRS was not doing the scope review of the laptop]
• 30. Describing that all messages from the hard drive had been shared in the third disclosure to investigators in February 2020, which seems to partially address item 29
• 33. Discussing a March 2020 email describing limits on the quality and completeness of the recovery of the hard drive; in response to Whistleblower X’s complaint that he hadn’t seen it, an AUSA (probably Wolf) said they would eventually see a redacted version of the report
• 40c. Quoting Whistleblower X complaining [it’s unclear whether this is in an April 2020 email or live] that he never saw the Cellebrite file
• 41. Describing that the Cellebrite file was uploaded sometime in May [which may refute 40c]
• 42. Describing Whistleblower X stating that if they’re going to testify, they need to see everything, in response to which Lesley Wolf said they would return to that issue

Most of the report seems to be an effort to ascertain legal chain of custody, given the discovery that the original source of the laptop had just spent the last few months turning it into a campaign season political hit job. But amid that discussion, Whistleblower X appears to have aired a series of complaints about decisions DOJ made about access in the interim year.

In his testimony, Shapley also made much of the final bullet point in his notes — the only part of the memo, aside from Whistleblower X’s complaints, that memorializes contemporaneous discussion. In his testimony, Shapley quoted AUSA Lesley Wolf stating, just over a week after NYPost released their first story on the laptop, that there was no reason to think anything had been added to the laptop.

We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.

Shapley repeated that judgment from October 2020 in May 2023 uncritically, as if it is remotely definitive.

AUSA Wolf acknowledged that there was no reason to believe that any data was manipulated on devices by any third party. She further supported this belief by mentioning that they corroborated the data with other sources of information received.

Right wingers are predictably going nuts over this, claiming it proves something it does not.

Even ignoring the timing of Wolf’s comment, just days after the initial disclosure of the laptop, this comment falls far short of validating authenticity of the laptop. Wolf was only validating the laptop — all of it!! — by matching data points. Importantly, “the computer guy” at the meeting (who could probably spell Cellebrite correctly) proposed doing a report showing document creation date.

If the FBI did that after that meeting, Shapley chose not to disclose the outcome. Given what we know about Mac Isaac’s treatment of the laptop, such a step might have showed whether the blind computer repairman’s failure to airgap the machine resulted in email updates — including from the recently hacked Burisma — being loaded to the laptop.

More importantly, the discussion shows that a year after the government obtained the laptop, no one had yet done this kind of validation of the laptop (and given the recovery problems with it, it’s not entirely clear they could).  A year after obtaining the laptop, the government was still just working off trust in Mac Isaac’s sketchy and changing story.

Plus, it’s one thing to say the laptop as Mac Isaac delivered it to the FBI had nothing added, if that’s true, but we know that the laptop as released by Rudy did have alterations. And the fact that Rudy altered the laptop in the midst of launching an election-year attack discredits any claim that anyone makes about the laptop as released by him.

Whistleblower X’s Hot and Cold Affection for Forensic Reports

One of Whistleblower X’s serial complaints about the laptop — that he couldn’t get the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself, items 25, 40c, and 41, above — is of particular interest: That’s because the WhatsApp messages that Shapley shared with the Committee, showing Hunter Biden invoking his father in an attempt to get business in China, also did not come from the forensic format in which they’d be received from Apple.

In fact, they’re not even direct copies of the report from Apple — they are summaries, as Shapley admitted to the Committee. Shapley doesn’t even know who did the summary.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

Q Okay. Who was it provided to?

A The — the investigative team from —

Q Okay. A It would go through all the same processes of — since it’s electronic, it would go to one of the computer analysis folks, and then they would put it in a readable format, and then it would go through filter review.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [redacted, probably Whistleblower X], one or the other

This is the content that the Committee tried to recreate to look like real messages, only to mix message type and appearance.

Here’s what an FBI production from WhatsApp messages obtained from an iCloud warrant would look like in official admissible form, from an exhibit in Vladislav Klyushin’s trial.

It is also a reconstruction (and includes translations), but one that has enough information to afford reliability. It’s also entirely readable.

There’s simply no reason to further summarize from there, much less to do so without all the metadata included, as the IRS reportedly did. It’s not the Committee that first did sketchy reconstructions. Shapley, or Whistleblower X, did, off material they claimed to obtain directly from a warrant return.

These WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s iCloud are important for several reasons: notably, that investigators reportedly had them in hand, directly from Apple, by August 2020, possibly relying on the laptop they had not yet fully validated to get them, then using them to validate the laptop content, the kind of investigative bellybutton that can get a case thrown out.

Further, when discussing them, Whistleblower X makes much of the fact that he wasn’t able to get location data to see whether Hunter was with his father when he sent these emails.

They had just served a search warrant on Apple, which should have gotten a good deal about Hunter Biden’s data — at the very least, the IP from which he was logging in. But given that they had an Apple return in hand, Whistleblower X’s complaint that they weren’t able to get it … almost certainly means he’s complaining that they weren’t able to get Joe Biden’s location data.

In 2020.

During the election.

Taint

With that in mind, go back to Whistleblower X’s complaints, over and over, that he didn’t have all the content from the laptop.

As Shapley explained in response to questioning, the investigative team was instructed not to look at anything from the Internet that was otherwise available, including — especially — the laptop.

Q Now, was your team, were they permitted to use open-source methods for looking at the materials for this case? Like, if materials were published on the internet related to Hunter Biden or related to Hunter Biden’s business concerns, were you allowed to consult that?

A No. We were directed that if there’s anything from the laptop from other sources to not look at it because then it’s potential for it to be tainted.

Q Okay. So if it’s posted on the internet, if it’s written about in the newspaper, you were not allowed to consult that open source method?

A Yeah. We were directed not to.

Q Is that customary?

A I would say yes. Yes.

Whistleblower X, however — after describing that the case predication itself came from press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy divorce and that he was referencing press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy life on a weekly basis — described seeing videos on Twitter that he had not received from the laptop.

And one thing that I want to be clear on, that there was information — and I don’t know the detail of that information that was withheld from us — but there was information withheld from the investigators.

And some of that was withheld for privilege. But there was other things — we went out and talked to one of the potential prostitutes. And there were videos that I’ve seen out there on Twitter, on the internet, and information related to that person that I had never seen before.

And I brought this up as an issue. I’m like: I’m seeing things here. Why am I not seeing that from you guys? And when I say “you guys,” the prosecutors. And there was a notion that some information was being held back from us, and I don’t know what that information was.

Whistleblower X, who chased down every one of Hunter Biden’s known sex partners for interviews, complained there were videos online — videos that would have come from a laptop that had been altered — that he had never seen.

Attorney-Client Taint

Whistleblower X risked tainting the investigation by reviewing material released on a laptop that had been altered.

That wasn’t the only taint concern though.

Twice in the interview, Congressional investigators introduced exhibits that Shapley hadn’t seen before: first an email from Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden, which Shapley explained that he “ha[d]n’t seen it in this form, but I’ve seen excerpts of this document.” Then they showed Shapley an email involving — in addition to Schwerin and Hunter Biden — George Mesires, an email clearly marked as “Re: Tax Analysis — Attorney Communication.”

When Majority Counsel asked Shapley if he has seen that email, he and his attorney went off the record.

Have you seen this document before?

Mr. Lytle. Can we talk to our client just briefly.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Of course. We can go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. We’re back on the record.

Having had to consult his attorney about what the simple yes or no response was, Shapley came back to note that this was privileged.

BY MAJORITY COUNSEL 2: Q The question is whether you’ve seen this document before.

A No. Anything from George Mesires was considered privileged —

Q Okay.

A — attorney-client privilege and was not provided to us.

Q Okay. And so that was kept from you by the FBI?

A No. It would be a filter team.

Q Okay.

A When we get any information, and even from the laptop and hard drive, it went through filter reviews, and we only saw what came back as nonprivileged.

A long discussion ensued in which Republican lawyers complained that DOJ conducted privilege reviews for lawyers and accountants working for lawyers. It was immediately after that discussion that Majority Counsel asked whether the investigative team could review material made public from the laptop, as described above.

No, they couldn’t, Shapley explained, because they might see something that would taint the prosecution.

In response to a later question from the Minority, Shapley admitted that if he remained on the prosecution team, reviewing the Mesires letter would amount to taint.

In his response, he referred to Mesires as a “quote-unquote” attorney.

Q Okay. And this was back in 2017. Okay. And then on exhibit 5, it’s the same question, George Mesires, and I think you might have mentioned him earlier, do you know his relationship?

A Yeah. I know him to be a personal, quote, unquote attorney to Hunter Biden. And if I wasn’t taken off the case, I would have been tainted by this document

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on. [my emphasis]

That’s how Shapley “quote-unquote” dealt with Mesires.

Whistleblower X, who admitted seeing videos online he hadn’t seen in material shared from the filter team, was different though.

As he was reading from an email that, he said, showed Lesley Wolf refusing to get approval for interviews, Whistleblower X stopped himself from reading one particular name.

Lesley Wolf says to me on September 9th, 2021: “I do not think that you are going to be able to do these interviews as planned. The document requests require approval from Tax Division. At present, Jack and Mark are racing to get the EWC motion on Stuart’s desk” — so Stuart was the [Acting] Deputy [Assistant] Attorney General, Stuart Goldberg at Tax Division — “Stuart’s desk for approval before he leaves town for a week. “Along with the approval for the” — and I’m going to leave the name out of that — “both of these items are higher priority and we can’t pull time and attention away to move these subpoenas through. [my emphasis]

In follow-up, Minority counsel asked Whistleblower X what name he had asked to leave out.

It was George Mesires.

Q Okay. You mentioned — this is a little ways later — I believe on September the 9th of 2021 that you had an email. You were reading through it, and you had mentioned that Stuart Goldberg was leaving town. You said there was a name that you wanted to leave out when you were reading the email. What was that name?

A So it was the name of Hunter’s personal counsel, George Mesires.

A year after complaining loudly that he hadn’t been provided stuff he saw on Twitter, he tried to subpoena Hunter Biden’s “quote unquote attorney.”

Whistleblower X’s Unclean Dirt

There’s one more detail that suggests whatever prosecutors found in email could have made the case unsustainable — and also makes Whistleblower X’s urgent concerns, in a meeting just over a week after NYPost reported on Rudy’s version of the laptop — far more suspect.

In what appears to be the last of his complaints about not getting information on the laptop (item 42), he said, as recorded by Shapley,

42 SA [redacted, probably X] — For items not seen by agents shouldn’t they see everything because if they have to testify to it they need to see it

a. Lesley response is that this is a historical review and we can discuss that later.

To get access to the entirety of the laptop, Whistleblower X made an argument about what he would need to do to prepare to be the key witness against Hunter Biden at trial.

That argument is 180 degrees the reverse from what he explained over and over in his testimony, about how he was avoiding anything that might taint him as a witness.

For example, he said he had been avoiding testimony to Congress to preserve his ability to testify.

I’d like to note that I wasn’t present at the leadership meeting on October 7th, 2022, that Mr. Shapley and leaders from the IRS were a part of with U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the meeting where he made the statements about not being in charge.

I also wanted to continue to protect the record and my ability to testify as the case agent in the future, which is also a part of the reason I didn’t come forward to you.

[snip]

I was interviewed by an investigator — I think they were with TIGTA. I told them, I didn’t leak anything. I thought that the leak might have come from either defense counsel, or from DOJ like the other ones came. But what I can tell you, and I’ve told this to the prosecution team, I’ve done everything that I can to keep my record clean and to keep my ability to testify as the case agent as clean as I possibly can.

He explained that he purposely wouldn’t write stuff down to preserve his ability to be summary witness.

Mr. X. On the record.

I just want to say that I made every effort to — when we work these cases, you have to be careful of what you might say that could be used against you if you were to go to trial or if you were to go in front of a grand jury. Usually, the IRS special agent is the final witness, the summary witness. So things that you put out there in emails, they can attack you at a later date.

So I did everything that I could to possibly make the record as clean as it possibly could, investigated the case, but in doing that, here’s all the things that happened because of that.

Shapley, on the other hand, did put all that in writing. When Minority Counsel pressed him on the fact that he really hadn’t disclosed any of this to supervisors, he described that he kept taking notes of bitch sessions so that the others could testify.

Q No one at IRS above — other than CI, no deputy commissioners, no commissioner? A That is correct. And, there was a common theme that and the co-case agent Christine Puglisi would — after all these pros team calls we would have a follow-up call. And sometimes FBI agents would be on there as well. And it was basically talking about the strategy and it often became like, Wow, they are not letting us do this. Can you believe they said that? Like that type of thing.

And we — in order to protect the record of the investigation basically it was me that could only document that, right? Because we wanted to make sure that the agents weren’t documenting things that would eventually be turned over in discovery and could somehow affect the viability of the case.

So that is something that I documented moving forward. And each time we were, like, Wow, they didn’t let us do the search warrant. Like she said — to overcome probable cause with a search warrant is, like, that is it, right? That is really, like, okay, well, you are going to go do it, because we want evidence that is unfiltered, right? But the whole point is we were like, well, there is no way they are not going to charge us. The evidence is there. They say the evidence is there. And we just really couldn’t believe that they would be doing something wrong. It was a very heavy burden to overcome from my experience and training to be, like, wow, there is something going on here.

[snip]

Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct. [my emphasis]

Effectively, what Shapley and Whistleblower X described to Congress is that the IRS investigators were keeping a double set of books regarding the investigation.

To be fair, I think many — perhaps most! — government investigative teams do this. Short of that, they get an agent who investigated just a small corner of the whole, shielded from any ongoing investigation. Or a paralegal.

But if an investigator really really wants to take the stand against they guy they’ve been investigating for five years, they have to be sure to keep their books clean.

Reviewing the full Hunter Biden laptop would have tainted Whistleblower X as a witness, though. Even ignoring probable chain of custody problems with the laptop, reviewing the laptop as reviewed with a search warrant would have made Whistleblower X a tainted witness. Reviewing the laptop as Rudy released it after altering it, all the more so.

Plus, some of the details in the IRS’ double set of books about the Hunter Biden investigation raise questions not about DOJ approval processes, but about integrity of evidence, including the laptop and everything that came after that.

For example, because in September 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf raised the possibility (and then debunked) that the investigation would shut down after the election, as this double set of books recorded, it raises real concerns about whether this investigation was nothing more than an election stunt, whether Bill Barr’s DOJ was simply investigating Hunter Biden for a campaign ploy. When Wolf described that DOJ was under fire for self-inflicted reasons, it’s unclear whether she was talking about past disclosures, like the Carter Page IG Report that focused on FBI’s conduct, or whether she was talking about Barr’s tampering in ongoing investigations, something that was quite pressing in September 2020.

Gary Shapley created a double set of books in the Hunter Biden investigation and described it as such. That double set of books raises ample questions about whether this investigation was about Hunter Biden … or his father.

Cleanup on Aisle Nine

The press release from Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office announcing two Informations as part of a plea deal stated the investigation into Hunter Biden was “ongoing.”

The team assigned to the plea deal includes two Special AUSAs, Leo Wise (who has been brought into troubled cases in the past) and Derek Hines, and includes Benjamin Wallace from DE USAO rather than the AUSA at the center of allegations of abuse, Lesley Wolf.

Whistleblower X — a big fan of hearsay — told the House Ways and Means Committee that FBI Agents were being treated the same way IRS Agents are: requiring that they report through their Special Agent in Charge to Weiss.

A I did hear from FBI that they were being treated the exact same way — that they had to communicate through their SAC to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware.

So in spite of Gary Shapley’s wails that his team got cut off as retaliation, there’s some reason to believe everyone did.

Whistleblower X also referenced two topics into which there might be an ongoing investigation. The first was a CEFC deal with Hunter Biden in 2017 and 2018.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Can I go off the record? Mr. X. Yeah. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Back on the record?

Mr. X. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing anything further on that issue.

The other involves the circumstances of how Kevin Morris paid off Hunter Biden’s tax debt in 2000.

A So on his 2020 tax return, personal tax return, Hunter stated: “See statement in 2020. The taxpayer received financial support from a personal friend totaling approximately $1.4 million. The parties agreed in 2020 to treat the support as a loan and later documented their agreement in a promissory note in the amount of $1.4 million, 5 percent interest. “The promissory note requires periodic payments between 2025 and 2027. The promissory note was executed by both parties on October 13th, 2021. “The taxpayer is treating this amount as a loan for tax purposes. The balance of the financial support is treated as a gift. No amount of the support is treated as a reported taxable event on this tax return.” So that’s what was filed with the return.

Q And has that transaction been investigated or —

A I’m no longer a part of an investigation related to that.

[snip]

Q It’s a voluntary interview. If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to answer the question, any of our questions.

A It goes back to one of my — if there is potentially a current investigation that’s out there to —

Mr. Zerbe. Let’s go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Go back on the record?

Statutes of limitation on the latter event would not expire until at least 2025 (though, as noted, the terms of the loan only require that the President’s son start repaying the loan in 2025). It could well be that Hunter Biden, or his benefactor, will eventually be charged with a serious felony — potentially include campaign finance violations — for the way Joe Biden’s son eliminated some of his past tax exposure (though this post-dated the election).

So I think it very possible that Weiss effectively reset the Hunter Biden investigation as a way to move past a great deal of dodgy shit that went down in the last five years.

But amid the media attention Shapley has generated, there are signs that something else — not lefty political bias — undermined the case against Hunter Biden, potentially up to and including outright misconduct. There is a whole range of communications that may have made a prosecution of Hunter Biden unsustainable: documentation of political pressure from Trump, concerns about the sources of leads, evidence of potential taint, and a clear obsession with investigating Joe, not just Hunter.

Those thing should make a Hunter Biden prosecution unsustainable. And the people who kept a double set of books recording some of it are now wailing as if someone else blew the case.

When they may have.

The leaks that seem to have been the proximate cause of the turmoil may make — may already have made — such misconduct more apparent.

Update, July 10: In a letter to Lindsey Graham, David Weiss has even more explicitly debunked Gary Shapley’s claims. (Jordain Carney first reported the letter.)

To clarify an apparent misperception and to avoid future confusion, I wish to make one point clear: in this case, I have not requested Special Counsel designation pursuant to 28 CFR § 600 et seq. Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment under 28 U.S.C. § 515, which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney. I was assured that I would be granted this authority if it proved necessary. And this assurance came months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations. In this case, I’ve followed the process outlined in my June 30 letter and have never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.

It was over four-fifths of the way through the interview of purported IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley — at least four hours in, if you include lunch — before the discussion turned to the October 6, 2022 leak about the investigation to Devlin Barrett.

Q In No. 1 on this email you prepared, says: “Discussion about the agent leak — requested the sphere stay as small as possible…DOJ IG will be notified. FBI — HQ is notified.” What was the specific leak?

A So there was a leak, I’m not sure what outlet, on October 6th of 2022 — it appeared to come from the agent’s level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not charging the case.

Q Okay. Talking about the Hunter Biden case?

A Yes, not charging the Hunter Biden case. So, obviously that was part of the discussion at the beginning. And there have been multiple leaks in this case going back, and this one was handled a lot differently because I guess it was purportedly from the agent’s level. So this drastic — you know, they used that as an excuse to kind of — to do what they were doing to us after this meeting on the 7th, they kind of used that leak as an excuse to exclude us.

The October 7 meeting, at which the leak was agenda item number one, was mentioned during the interview as Shapley’s line in the sand with what he claimed was DOJ misconduct over twenty times before anyone discussed the leak.

The reverse order congressional interview

And so before the actual leak was discussed, Shapley described two different instances where DOJ asked for his emails, as discovery in advance of trial, he described.

The first was in March 2022, the same month as details of the Hunter Biden investigation — including a discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop — appeared in this NYT story.

But, even though he was one of two people who had attempted to interview Hunter Biden in December 2020, Shapley didn’t provide his emails, because — he said — managers’ emails aren’t discoverable to a defendant.

It is common practice for DOJ to ask for the case agents’ communications in discovery, as they might have to testify in court. However, it’s much more unusual to ask for management communications, because it is simply not discoverable.

In March of 2022, DOJ requested of the IRS and FBI all management-level emails and documents on this case. I didn’t produce my emails, but I provided them with my sensitive case reports and memorandums that included contemporaneous documentation of DOJ’s continued unethical conduct. [my emphasis]

Shapley’s discussion of the second request that he turn over his emails appears in conjunction with a discussion of an email he sent in December 2022, which I’ll get to in a sec.

That request for his emails was in October, like the March request, in the same month as a major leak.

[T]his was the culmination of an October 24th communication from Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office and — well, it was really Lesley Wolf and Mark Daly who called the case agent, [redacted], on the telephone and said, hey, we need — we need Shapley’s emails and his — these sensitive case reports that he’s authored back to May.

And they didn’t ask for discovery for anybody else. They didn’t ask for, from the — mind you, the agents had provided discovery March-April timeframe, so there was 6 months or so of additional discovery, and they’re not asking for that, right? They’re only asking for mine.

So [redacted] sends me an email with Wolf and Daly on it that says, hey, you know, they asked for this, you got to talk to Shapley. I respond, hey, yeah, I’m available 9:15, let’s chat. And she sends that, she forwards my email to Shawn Weede, number [two] — a senior level at Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And then he contacts me about this discovery, and he’s kind of putting a lot of pressure on me. So even Weiss called up, the deputy chief, to complain about timing of the emails that got turned over from me at that request.

Presented this way, before any discussion of the October 6 leak (to say nothing of the March 2022 leak, which was never explicitly mentioned), Shapley explained that DOJ was only asking for his email because in March he had shared memos critical of their actions, and they wanted to see all the criticism he had memorialized.

That’s important theater behind the way he was able to appear before the House Ways and Means Committee as someone making protected disclosures. DOJ was retaliating against him, he claimed, because he had documented misconduct about the investigation.

Shapley’s thin protected disclosures

There’s something funny about Shapley’s claim to be making protected disclosures, though, and about the documents he shared with the committee that he claimed documented misconduct.

A few things, actually.

You’d think that if his memorialization of misconduct were so damning that DOJ was retaliating against him, he’d have some pretty damning documents to share with Congress.

But none of the documents he shared about the investigation were documents from 2021, and no document memorializing misconduct from 2022 predated October 7:

• September 3, 2020 cease and desist meeting
• October 22, 2020 meeting about the Hunter Biden laptop
• January 27, 2022 prosecution memo
• October 11, 2022 memorandum of  October 7 meeting
• December 13, 2022 email cced to Michael Batdorf
• April 19, 2023 letter to Congress

Even recreated versions of some WhatsApp messages obtained in August 2020– the big GOP takeaway of the interview — investigatively date to Bill Barr’s tenure at DOJ, as does the transcript excerpt from the December 2020 interview of a Hunter Biden business associate, another complaint about 2020 that Shapley was making.

Crazier still, when Minority Counsel asked Shapley for details of whether he had shared some of the exhibits he presented in the hearing as protected disclosures, he admitted he didn’t share them.

Okay. Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct.

[snip]

Now I’m going to look at exhibit 7. And the question is the same as the one before it. Was this memorandum provided to anyone or copied to anybody?

A It was not. Just to reiterate again, that this was discussed right after — I can’t even think of a time when we didn’t have a discussion immediately after these meetings with just me, case agent, co-case agent, and sometimes with FBI agents on the phone to discuss this.

I’ll return to the document about the laptop, but it doesn’t really document misconduct; it documents investigators trying to cover their ass after they discovered that a problematic piece of evidence that they had spent a year reviewing got turned into an election season political hit job. All the more so given that both so-called whistleblowers made clear they replicated the evidence with an August 2020 warrant for Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, obtaining the WhatsApp messages mentioned above.

That said, the document about the laptop would be useful proof for journalists for stories like the March 2022 one.

Minority Counsel asked why Shapley didn’t share his 2020 complaints — the only documents that he claimed described misconduct shared in the interview that predate his October 7 email — during Bill Barr’s tenure.

Q Okay. When we were talking about this exhibit 7, you mentioned that, at the time, Bill Barr was the AG. Why did you not take your concerns up the chain in 2020 at that time?

A Well, as I said before, there is a healthy tension between investigators and prosecutors, right? And there are sometimes when I don’t agree with a prosecutor, but every time I don’t agree with a prosecutor, I’m not going to run to Bill Barr or to senior leadership to — to blow the whistle or make a protected disclosure. The whole focus was to do what we had to do, even if it meant dealing with obstructions from prosecutors to get this case across the finish line, if it was worthy of it. And, that’s what we did. Every single time something happened wrong in this investigation, I couldn’t bring it to Bill Barr or anyone else, so —

Q And did you think about, in 2020 at all, coming to the committee at that point in time? Because I know that you mentioned that there were irregularities that you saw in the summer of 2020. Did you think about coming to the committee or coming forward at that time or making a report to TIGTA in 2020?

A Like I said, we are trained and we work with these prosecutors hours and hours, trips, and spend all this time. We are just trained to trust them, and it was an incredibly high burden. If I wasn’t in the October 7th meeting, my red line might not have been crossed. [my emphasis]

All that led to this weird exchange with Majority Counsel. Shapley claimed to have made protected disclosures without making protected disclosures.

Q Okay. And would it be correct to say that you sought to state your opinion and impact decision making short of protected disclosures before the October 7th meeting?

A Well, I think I reached a level of protected disclosure internally to IRS senior leadership before that.

Q And at what point was that first protected disclosure?

A I believe it was June of 2020. You got to understand, at the time, I wasn’t making a protected disclosure. I was just working a case raising issues, right? It’s not until we’re down the road a hundred miles that that was a protect[ed disclosure] — you know?

Q Yeah. Understood

A But it seems like the October 7th meeting, after that, after I raised issues directly to them, I explained to them the risk of not charging ’14, ’15. I explained to them how we had no mechanism to ever recoup that money, and I went like kind of like point by point how the elements were met.

And, it was that meeting where I think DOJ started to look into the discovery that I had provided back to March, because I was like, this is not right, there’s a big, huge problem here. And it switched from me raising just concerns, hoping that they’d be remedied, to now I’m like, no, this is a problem. And I think because of that, they went and looked at all my documents that I contemporaneously documented over the years. And then I think they started attacking me. And I think I read a part in my opening statement, the email that I sent to my director of field operations exactly on that topic. [my emphasis]

This is what led me to look back at the letter Shapley’s lawyer sent to Congress in April, which was the subject of a great deal of press attention at the time. It explained that his client — Shapley — had already made protected disclosures.

My client has already made legally protected disclosures internally at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.

I remember at the time thinking that the Inspectors General must not have been very impressed with those disclosures, if the anonymous whistleblower — who we now know was Shapley — was going to Congress with them.

And when Minority Counsel invited him to explain why he hadn’t brought his concerns to Treasury’s Inspector General, his attorney piped in to say that his attorneys have made such disclosures.

MINORITY COUNSEL 1. But if you’d like to answer about the inspector general that is fine, too, but I was asking about Main Treasury.

Mr. Lytle. Just to clarify, his attorneys have made some disclosures to all of these entities so —

MINORITY COUNSEL 1. That is fine. But I am not asking about those. I was asking more at the time —

Mr. Lytle. Got it.

But by timeline, none of these occurred before DOJ was already demanding his emails in the wake of a second major leak about the investigation (because he didn’t lawyer up until still later).

All of which suggests that Gary Shapley didn’t start claiming to be making protected disclosures of any substance until after he started worrying he was under investigation for leaks, and his lawyers’ contact, by that point, would have been with two Inspectors General investigating those leaks.

Gary Shapley’s Investigative Priorities

Which is why some of Shapley’s purported protected disclosures are so interesting. He complains, over and over, that his team wasn’t permitted to take steps that might leak or would be really showy. IRS wasn’t permitted to send out subpoenas using Hunter Biden’s own name in advance of the election because those might leak. IRS wasn’t permitted to interview Hunter Biden’s children. IRS wasn’t permitted to conduct physical surveillance — 14 days before a Presidential election!! — of Hunter Biden.

Shapley was really angry, in fact, that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss congratulated the team in December 2020, as they prepared to take their first overt steps, that the investigation had remained secret up to that point (though the very next day, a December 9, 2020 story confirming the investigation, which included Barrett’s byline, did provide non-public details about the investigation).

A I think that she wasn’t worried about that part. She was worried about blow-back from doing a search warrant that was related to Hunter Biden. I think all of these things that they didn’t allow us to do, even back in June of 2020, was because their primary goal was to keep this investigation secret, right?

And even on December 3rd of 2020, when we’re in Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office prepping for the day of action on December 8, Weiss came in and was like — congratulations for keeping it secret. And I was like, well, I thought that we were conducting an investigation here. I didn’t think that what we were doing was trying to keep a secret.

But Shapley’s complaint about emphasizing secrecy, which in addition to avoiding political blowback would have protected the investigation, is wholly inconsistent with his claimed reason to be concerned that the Secret Service got tipped off the day before he tried to interview Hunter Biden on December 8, 2020, or that, days later, Hunter Biden’s lawyers were asked to comply with a subpoena of a storage facility rather than permitting a search.

On December 10th, 2020, the prosecutorial team met again to discuss the next steps. One piece of information that came out of the day of action was that Hunter Biden vacated the Washington, D.C., office of Owasco. His documents all went into a storage unit in northern Virginia. The IRS prepared an affidavit in support of a search warrant for the unit, but AUSA Wolf once again objected.

My special agent in charge and I scheduled a call with United States Attorney Weiss on December 14th just to talk about that specific issue. United States Attorney Weiss agreed that if the storage unit wasn’t accessed for 30 days we could execute a search warrant on it.

No sooner had we gotten off the call then we heard AUSA Wolf had simply reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit, once again ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed.

Gary Shapley didn’t want any of the subjects of the investigation to get advance notice, because they might obstruct the investigation.

However, the night before, December 7th, 2020, I was informed that FBI headquarters had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day. This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses.

It’s a fair consideration! Most investigators are going to feel the same!

But that’s why that December 2022 Shapley email sent to FBI Special Agent Darrell Waldon and cc’ed to Michael Bartoff is so interesting.

Waldon was part of the case team, but also the guy who referred the Barrett leak to IRS’ Inspector General. Bartoff is the guy to whom Shapley claimed to have made protected disclosures.

It turns out that Shapley was on vacation as DOJ was reviewing his emails. He sent the email to ask Waldon to let him explain any emails before they got shared with anyone else.

If you have questions about any emails I would ask you share it in advance so I can look at them and be prepared to put them into context. The USAO was so eager to got my emails (which they already had 95% of) … then surprise … they “might” have a problem with a few of them that memorialized their conduct. If the content of what I documented, in report or email is the cause of their consternation I would direct them to consider their actions instead of who documented them.

I have done nothing wrong. Instead of constant battles with the USAO/DOJ Tax, I chose to be politically savvy. I documented issues, that I would have normally addressed as they occurred, because of the USAO and DOJ Tax’s continued visceral reactions to any dissenting opinions or ideas. Every single day was a battle to do our job. I continually reported these issues up to IRS-CI leadership beginning in the summer of 2020. Now, because they realized I documented their conduct they separate me out, cease all communication and are not attempting to salvage their own conduct by attacking mind. This is an attempt by the USAO to tarnish my good standing and position within IRS-CI … and I expect IRS-CI leadership to understand that. As recent as the October 7 meeting, the Delaware USAO had nothing but good things to say about me/us. Then they finally read “discovery” items (provided 6 months previous — that are not discoverable) and they are beginning to defend their own unethical actions.

Consider the below:

1. I am not a witness — therefor Jencks/impeachment is not an issue.
2. I am not the receiver of original evidence nor engaged i any negative exculpatory language against the subject … My documentation only shows the USAO/DOJ Tax’s preferential treatment of this subject. [bold underline original, italics mine]

This was an email asking — at a minimum — for the kind of advance notice that Shapley believed Hunter Biden should not get. And given that Shapley’s other testimony (in which he said he didn’t turn over any of his email) seems to conflict with his claim here that DOJ already had 95% of them, it might be more than that.

Just before the end of the interview, Shapely implored the committee to help him, because, “My life’s on the line here, so do what you can.” He repeated Whistleblower X’s complaint that the IRS and DOJ aren’t considering the human cost of their actions after the October 2022 leak.

But the document which Shapley points to as documentation that he raised such concerns made a request — an opportunity to participate in an investigation — that he himself complains Hunter Biden started getting over two years into the investigation. That’s his complaint: That Hunter Biden got to look at stuff in advance, starting two years into an investigation.

And in response to that, he ran to Congress and, with Whistleblower X, made disclosures that didn’t consider the impact they’d have on the equally human life of Hunter Biden.

Timeline

2007: Shapley at NSA IG

2010: Whistleblower X starts at IRS

July 2009: Shapley starts at IRS

April 12, 2016: Mesires email (from laptop)

January 16, 2017: Schwerin email to Hunter

July 30, 2017: Date of suspect WhatsApp message

November 2018: Whistleblower X moves to International Tax and Financial Crimes; opens criminal investigation into Hunter Biden (after prior civil action)

March to April 2019: DOJ Tax reviews Whistleblower X’s lead

2019: IRS supervisor documents Sixth Amendment problems with case, collects Trump’s tweets

October 16, 2019: First lead on laptop

December 9, 2019: FBI takes property of laptop

December 13, 2019: Search warrant for laptop

January 2020: Shapley becomes supervisor over Sportsman Case

March 6, 2020: Request for physical search warrants in CA, AR, NY, DC

April 2020: Latest date on laptop timeline

June 16, 2020: Call about search warrants

June 16, 2020: Meeting with DFO about foot-dragging

August 2020: iCloud returns with WhatsApp messages

September 3, 2020: Donoghoe imposes halt on pre-election activities (Lesly Wolf denies SW, also warrant for Blue Star Strategies — but it was OEO that denied that)

September 21, 2020: FBI tries to limit number of interviews

October 19, 2020: We need to talk about the computer (mention of Durham)

October 22, 2020: Meeting about laptop

October 2020: Shapley IRS CI Manager interacting with Weiss’ office

November 17, 2020: Original plan to go overt delayed

December 3, 2020: Wolf objects to questions about Joe Biden; Weiss congratulates on keeping investigation secret

December 7, 2020: Notice to Secret Service and transition team

December 8, 2020: Day of action, attempted interview of Hunter Biden, interview of Rob Walker

December 9, 2020: Article confirming investigation includes inside details

December 31, 2020: Don Fort leaves as Chief of CI, replaced by Jim Lee

March 2, 2021: Mention of blowing whistle about DOJ handling of the case

May 3, 2021: Wolf chooses not to examine campaign finance (loan to Hunter), which Shapley documents to chain of command (not shared in interview)

August 18, 2021: Plan to interview Hunter’s children

October 21, 2021: Wolf nixes plan to interview Hunter’s children

January 27, 2022: Prosecution memo

February 9, 2022: Christy Steinbrunner sends prosecution plan forward with concur

February 11, 2022: CT responds with non-concur

March 2022: DOJ presents prosecution plan to DC USAO, DC rejects prosecution, Hunter Biden extends SOLs first of two times

March 16, 2022: NYT story including inside information

March 2022: DOJ asks for all management-level emails (Shapley doesn’t produce)

May 2022: Joe Gordon asks why IRS doesn’t ask for Special Counsel

April 26, 2022: Garland response to Bill Hagerty promises independence

June 15, 2022: Bigger meeting at DOJ, explaining why they couldn’t charge the case

July 29, 2022: Wolf says Weiss sets September as indictment for 2014, 2015 charges

August 12, 2022: Prosecutors claim Chris Clark said charging Hunter Biden would be career suicide

August 16, 2022: Prosecutorial meeting, discussion of CT’s nonconcur memo

August 25, 2022: FBI Supervisor Curley complains about missed communication between meetings

September 2022: IRS presents case in CDCA

September 22, 2022: Wolf says no action until after midterms

October 6, 2022: Devlin Barrett leak

October 7, 2022: Meeting about leak, and DC approval

October 12, 2022: Final interview in case

October 17, 2022: Investigators told no grand jury available

October 24, 2022: DOJ renews request for Shapley emails

November 2022: DOJ lets statutes of limitation on 2014, 2015 expire

November 7, 2022: SA Mike Dzielak says DOJ requests management and senior management documents pertaining to case

December 8, 2022: Waldon and Weiss cancel meeting about case

December 12, 2022: Claims concern about emails about documentation of misconduct

February 2023: Batdorf pauses ongoing investigation

March 1, 2023: Grassley asks Garland about case

March 16, 2023: DOJ Tax Mark Daley stated they would give approvals for charge (overheard)

April 13, 2023: Whistleblower X emails Lola Watson

April 19, 2023: Mark Lytle letter to Congress

May 15, 2023: DOJ requests new IRS team

As a number of people have noted, the second so-called IRS whistleblower on the Hunter Biden case pointed to the official release of the documents Trump stole as an example of another high profile case where (he claimed, incorrectly), like the Hunter Biden one, there were leaks.

Q What’s an example of another high-profile case that we’re comparing that to?

A So some of the information that was released — or some of the information that was leaked related to the Trump classified documents. So that case. So there were actual pictures that were leaked from inside the search warrant. And this is what my memory of seeing things in the media. So that’s something that I remember. But, I mean — yeah.

It’s a testament to the way he has internalized Trump propaganda. It is one indicator of his unreliability.

There are more.

Far more.

The man should not be treated as credible.

All Whistleblower X’s International Tax Experience Has Been Milking Hunter Biden

Start with his own description of his work experience.

While he has been with the IRS for 13 years, it’s actually not clear how experienced he is in this kind of investigation. As he described, until just before he personally predicated the Hunter Biden investigation in 2018, he was a Public Information Officer, seemingly in both a public-facing role and working investigations.

Literally his first investigation on IRS’ International Tax and Financial Crimes group was into Hunter Biden.

And that’s important because he seems to struggle with due process. Throughout his presentation, for example, he seems to have little understanding of FBI guidelines, including least intrusive means and required approvals for Sensitive Investigative Matters. Many of his complaints amount to a complaint that he wasn’t permitted to violate rules that FBI has re-emphasized in the wake of the Carter Page IG Report.

So in a sense, Republicans are wailing because FBI wouldn’t violate rules the FBI didn’t even violate with Carter Page, such as doing physical surveillance of a candidate’s son 14 days before the election.

Q Why did you have to get approval for that?

A Because we were in a posture at that point that we couldn’t do anything that appeared — any investigative activities pretty much whatsoever.

Q But you weren’t wearing an IRS windbreaker, and you weren’t driving a car marked with IRS letters on it. So how would anyone possibly know? It’s a free country. You’re allowed to drive by any house you want.

A Yeah, I didn’t want it — because I think at that time we were trying to do surveillance of pretty much everyone we were going to potentially interview. So he was just another one of the people that we wanted to do that for. I guess I don’t know —

[snip]

Q What is that email in reference to?

A This is in reference — this is October 20th, 2020, walk-by of possible residence. And Mark Daly says: Tax does not approve. This will be on hold until further notice.

He also seems to have assumed that decisions were made to protect Hunter when many of his complaints seem to pertain to efforts to protect the investigation (for example, in addition to the above complaint that he wasn’t able to physically surveil Hunter Biden solely to make sure he was living where they believed him to live; another objected to making a data request without using his name, something that would prevent leaks).

But particularly given his own description of his career track, it’s not clear how many successful investigations he has had.

Over the course of his testimony, he described two other cases he worked about which there were substantive disagreements. The first was one he apparently worked while also an Public Information Officer. There, after the AUSA cycled off of the case, a new one declined to prosecute.

Prior to joining the case, DOJ Tax had approved tax charges for the case and the case was in the process of progressing towards indictment. Our assigned Assistant United States Attorney was promoted to judge, and DOJ Tax had made the decision to reinvestigate the case.

After working thousands of hours on that captive case, poring over evidence, interviewing witnesses all over the U.S., the decision was made by DOJ Tax to change the approval to a declination and not charge the case.

I was devastated when I found that out, but at the end of the day I understood.

We did everything we could to try to work through the issues and get the captive case ready for indictment. I fought hard, having meetings with the leaders of my agency and DOJ Tax to try and get it charged. But at the end of the day it was a difference in opinion, and DOJ Tax didn’t want to set precedence.

I’m bringing this up to show you an example of difference in opinion between the investigators and prosecutors when it came to charging. The captive case and the steps taken were significantly different than what happened with the Hunter Biden investigation, and hopefully I can show you that with my testimony here today.

Without distinguishing the difference, Whistleblower X claimed he wasn’t much bothered by the declination in that case.

Much later in his interview, he was asked why he didn’t approach IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf after he was removed from the Hunter Biden case, when in 2021 Batdorf had invited him to do.

Whistleblower X described that in mid-October 2022, shortly after the big pre-election leak about the case to Devlin Barrett, Batdorf put a hold on another of his cases.

Q So you mentioned Michael Batdorf and that he had told you previously that you could go directly to him. Is that right?

A Yes.

Q Did you do that at the stage where you learned that you were removed?

A I did not.

Q Okay. Did you feel like you could talk to him about this issue?

A No, because I’ve been having other issues with him on another case I’m working that is — I felt like that chain of — that that relationship was broken.

Q When did that relationship start to break down?

A Probably since mid-October, maybe, would be my guess. I mean, it’s — yeah. It’s definitely —

Q Mid-October 2022?

A Yes.

Q And you mentioned issues you were having with him on another case. It’s totally fine if you don’t want to get into the specifics of that particular case, but can you generally describe the issues that you’re referring to?

A Yeah. I need to stay very, very high level on this. I had received approval with a strategy related to this case. And they backtracked that approval a couple weeks later and said to me that we need to put this on pause and that we’ll get back to you on what strategy we’re going to do moving forward. And we’re still on a pause right now.

[snip]

Q We were talking about the approval on the strategy for this other case. And just to clarify, this is a totally unrelated matter?

A Unrelated matter, yes.

Q Okay. And can you describe more about what happened to that strategy?

A It felt like it was — all along, we had been — for the past probably year, we had been communicating a strategy on this case that is tackling a big problem and trying to tackle it efficiently, okay? And it’s a compliance issue in this area. So we were briefing our [IRS] leaders and constantly having meetings about what we’re planning on doing, and they were on all [of] these phone calls, and we were sending emails of our strategy. And very recently, one of those strategies was moving forward on this compliance issue, and we were a go on it. And a few weeks later, I receive[d] a phone call that basically says, you’re being paused, and we’re having to relook at what you were doing, and we will make a determination moving forward.

So now, to all my peers and the different people, I was the one pushing the strategy, and it got halted in place, and now I have to go back to [these] people and explain to them why — it was just a mess. It was an absolute mess.

Q When did you get that phone call saying that you were being paused?

A It was in February of 2023. It was either a phone call or an email. [Inline brackets original]

Perhaps this was a response to the investigation into the leak, but Whistleblower X suggested that on a second case, he had had serious disagreements with management.

And yet, per a later answer, Hunter Biden and its offshoots were his only case.

Q Okay. I want to get some sense generally of your caseload and what you work. How many cases do you currently have? How many cases did you have back in 2018 when this case was assigned to you?

A I was new to the group. So this was one of two cases that I was working at the time. And then moving forward to right now, I have one large case. But it includes probably 80 tangential cases — or 80 sort of spinoff cases that I’m trying to manage and work, as well.

That’s abnormal. Normally for an IRS special agent, normally it’s one or two cases that they’re working a year because of how much work goes into them.

Q You mentioned that one of your other cases is paused. How many cases do you have that are paused? I don’t know how you count the one large one with the 80 tangentials. But how many of those are paused?

A Probably 20-ish. Let me rephrase that. I would say 10 to 15.

Mr. Zerbe. Why are they paused? You might expand on that.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q I was going ask that question. So, yeah, go ahead.

A They are second-guessing the strategy that we’re putting forward on those.

[snip]

Q In your cases that you’ve had, first starting back since November of 2018, coming forward, have you had disagreements in other cases that you’ve been working?

A Yeah, yes.

Q How did that play out? How do your disagreements play out generally?

A I can give you an example of in another situation I was working, we also had a person who had failed to file returns and they earned a significant amount of money and they went out into — I need to be — so they had that situation at hand. I went to the prosecutors on the case. And I said, hey, this person has these unfiled returns. I’m thinking that specifically with what has happened — and specifically with what has happened in news reporting related to them, I think we need to go talk to them

Not only don’t these answers make sense, but even if they’re true, Whistleblower X has had problems with every major case he has worked for the last five years.

That wasn’t the only way Whistleblower X damaged his credibility.

On the Third Try He Admits He Listened into a Meeting Uninvited

Take his belated admission to listening in on a phone conversation involving his chain of command covertly.

Whistleblower X provided three different accounts of how he learned he had been removed from the Hunter Biden investigation.

His first description of how he learned he had been removed came as he was reading from an email he sent to much of the IRS chain of command. Either in that email or an aside he made as he read (note the quotation marks; this transcript was reviewed and revised by Whistleblower X and his attorney, who has very close ties to Chuck Grassley), he claimed he never got a phone call informing he had been removed.

It says, “My respective IRS leadership, first off, I apologize for breaking the managerial chain of command, but the reason I am doing this is because I don’t think my concerns and/or words are being relayed to your respective offices. I am requesting that you consider some of the issues at hand. I’m sure you are aware I was removed this week from a highly sensitive case out of the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office after nearly 5 years of work. I was not afforded the opportunity of a phone call directly from my special agent in charge or assistant special agent in charge, even though this had been my investigation since the start.”

And outside, I still have not received a phone call from my assistant special agent in charge or anyone in my IRS CI leadership other than my supervisor.

Later Chairman Jason Smith asked him how he found out. Whistleblower X implied that Gary Shapley told him.

Chairman Smith. Who informed you that you were being removed from the investigation?

Mr. X. I learned through my supervisor, Gary Shapley.

Chairman Smith. How were you informed that you were being removed from this investigation?

Mr. X. He told me — Gary Shapley told me that he was removed and I was removed.

Chairman Smith. So it was by phone call?

Mr. X. Yes.

The implication from this exchange was that after he learned of it, Gary Shapley picked up the phone and called Whistleblower X to tell them the entire team had been removed from the case.

Shortly after that exchange, Whistleblower X and his attorney went off the record, after which he offered a third version: He sat in, uninvited, on a call that Shapley was asked to attend.

Mr. X. So I want to be clear with this. Can I explain what happened?

The assistant special agent in charge, Lola Watson, sent Gary an email — not me, Gary Shapley — my supervisor an email saying that they want to have a call regarding Sportsman. So a Sportsman update call. Gary, not feeling comfortable with our leadership, asked me to be on that call as a witness. I was not invited on that call, but I participated via phone on that phone call.

And it was during that call that — I overheard it, and they said that essentially the ITFC — so our group was removed from the investigation, and they were going to replace us with some other agents within the D.C. Field Office that they didn’t know the names of yet. There was no mention of, we need you to tell X. No mention of me whatsoever. It was just that we were removed from the case.

So, after telling two entirely different stories, Whistleblower X admitted he had basically listened in, uninvited, to an official government call.

And Republicans on the committee were not much bothered by that.

When Prostitutes Turn Girlfriends Turn Baby Mommas

Whistleblower X described starting the investigation into Hunter Biden off a sex worker site.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

I genuinely wonder whether this entire investigation is Elliott Spitzer 2.0, a highly politicized case out of someone arranging for sex work, especially given later references to the Mann Act.

And then there were — and I know that my counsel brought this up earlier. There were some flying people across State lines, paying for their travel, paying for their hotels. They were what we call Mann Act violations.

Even by Whistleblower X’s description, this investigation started off almost nothing.

Mr. X. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation. My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

All the more so given Whistleblower X’s problems with sex workers.

He talked about women he claimed to be prostitutes a lot.

At one point he bragged about how, in spite colleagues’ dismissals of the import of sex workers, he hunted down every sex worker with a tie to Hunter Biden and wowed his colleagues about them.

There was a lot of different investigative steps that we took, that even going and talking to the prostitutes, we found multiple people that he called his employees that were also prostitutes, and that he would have them clean his hotel room or — there were a lot of these interviews that we ended up going and doing and talking to people that were so worth it, even though someone might — we were always being told by the prosecutors, you guys are wasting your time going and doing that. It’s not worth it. And literally, I would surprise them every time and find everyone.

Later, Whistleblower X turned to the woman whose child support payments Hunter Biden just settled, Lunden Roberts, and claimed she didn’t work for Hunter Biden (Abbe Lowell complained when Shapley made this same claim).

So in addition to some of this stuff that we’ve been talking about, he also had members of his family, including Lunden Roberts, on his payroll. We know that during the time period she was paid, she did not work for him. So he was deducting things for salary for employees that were his family members. A lot of those witnesses are people we would go and talk to.

Still later, one of the majority counsels tried to get Whistleblower X to confirm he caught Hunter Biden paying health insurance for his sex workers, only to have him raise Roberts, the mother of the child he fathered.

Q During our discussion of the 2018 tax year, you mentioned that Hunter Biden was making business expenses for prostitutes?

A Yes, in some circumstances.

Q Could you give us a little bit more information on that? What was the nature of the — was he paying for — were they on the payroll? Was he paying for travel?

A In some situations, they were on payroll, and that was to get them health insurance in certain situations. There was —

Q So he’s paying for health insurance for his prostitutes?

A Not necessarily for — so let me go back and — so one of his girlfriends was on the payroll and — Mr. . Off the record, please, for a second. [Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Back on the record.

Mr. X. So Lunden Roberts, she was on his payroll. She was not working. She was actually living in Arkansas pregnant with his child, and she was on his payroll.

There were expenditures for one of — he called it his West Coast assistant, but we knew her to also be in the prostitution world or believed to be in the prostitution world. And he deducted expenses related to her. She relates to the sex club issue.

Particularly given how much of this case relied on leads obtained from and tax returns updated in response to the paternity suit here, it is fairly remarkable that Whistleblower X raises Roberts in response to a question about prostitutes (though he quickly promoted her to being a girlfriend), particularly given corroboration for the claim that she was a personal assistant.

To be clear: I’m not saying she was anything but a personal assistant. Whistleblower X, however, raised her as an example in response to a question about prostitutes, and only later called her a girlfriend.

According to the NYT, Roberts’ father hunts with Don Jr, and Whistleblower X raised her in response to a question about sex workers.

But maybe Whistleblower X’s treatment of all these women as sex workers is not an accident.

Steve Bannon has been involved in this operation for years. I’ve heard a propagandist close to Bannon has been a source of leads for the investigation.

What if any ties to sex work among his personal assistants was not Hunter’s doing?

Whistleblower X Retreats from Hearsay … But Only His Bill Barr Hearsay

Whistleblower X’s presentation was riddled with hearsay (so much so, it raises real questions about his integrity as an investigator — in congressional testimony he proved unable to distinguish between rumor and fact). He repeatedly made claims about things that transpired with the investigation about which he has no firsthand knowledge.

That includes a claim he made about Bill Barr: Throughout Whistleblower X’s presentation, he claimed Bill Barr made the decision to send this tax investigation to Delaware.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax. And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

He didn’t change his story on follow-up from Minority Counsel.

Q Shortly after that, you talked about in March and April of 2018 that Attorney General Barr had made a decision to join the cases. And then you said that Delaware had opened the case. You said January of — is that 2019 or 2018 or 2020? I didn’t get the year.

A It was January of 2019 —

Q Okay.

A — that Delaware, U.S. Attorney’s Office, and FBI had opened up the investigation. They wouldn’t have been able to see in our IRS system that we had a case open.

Or another follow-up from Minority Counsel.

Q Okay. I wanted to go back to something that you mentioned earlier. You said that in March/April — and I think you meant 2018, but I’m not sure — that Bill Barr made the decision to join these cases together.

A So that would have been 2019.

Q 2019. And then you said that the case in Delaware was opened January of 2019? Is that correct?

A Yep.

Q Okay. And then this case was opened May of 2019?

A So the cases were joined May of 2019.

Q How was it communicated to you that Bill Barr joined these cases together?

A I believe it was my manager that told me. My manager would have been Matt Kutz.

Q How would he have known? Would that have come from Justice somewhere or where does that come from —

A From his leadership, most likely, when we were told — we were essentially told that we had go up to Delaware to meet them. And the decision was made at his direction, from what I recall.

Q “His” being Bill Barr?

A Yes.

Q Okay. Was there any other discussion of Bill Barr taking interest in this case that you heard of beyond it being joined?

A Not at all.

Q Was there any reporting up the chain that you know of to Bill Barr?

A No, not that I know of.

As noted, Whistleblower X attributed this claim to his then-supervisor Matt Kutz.

Curiously, Republican Chairs chose not to demand testimony from Kutz — who might explain why he understood the decision to consolidate the cases in Delaware came from the Attorney General — among the 12 from whom they’re demanding impossible testimony.

• Lesley Wolf, DOJ
• Jack Morgan, DOJ
• Mark Daly, DOJ
• Matthew Graves, DOJ
• Martin Estrada, DOJ
• David Weiss, DOJ
• Stuart Goldberg, DOJ
• Shawn Weede, DOJ
• Shannon Hudson, DOJ
• Tom Sobocinski, FBI
• Ryeshia Holley, FBI
• Michael T. Batdorf, IRS
• Darrell J. Waldon, IRS
• Secret Service employees who received the December 7, 2020, tip-off from FBI and all Secret Service employees who may have passed this information along to the Biden family or presidential transition team.

Anyway, Whistleblower X’s attorney, Dean Zerbe, began to cop on to how problematic it was that Barr had intervened the third time the Minority Counsel followed up about this.

MINORITY COUNSEL 2. How unusual, or in your experience, how frequently have you seen cases merged from the DOJ and IRS?

Mr. Zerbe. Let’s go off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 3. Off the record. [Discussion off the record.]

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 2: Q That’s what I’m asking. How common is that circumstance? Sorry. Back on the record.

A I have never had that happen in my career.

Q Would you say it was something of an unusual occurrence for the Attorney General himself to order that?

A Looking back at it, I think he was trying to utilize the resources that he had. And I recall doing venue analyses for them to determine where proper venue was, to see if — but everything that I did said that we were — there’s no residence of Hunter other than his dad’s residence, his dad, President Biden, in Delaware. So his return preparers are in, I think it’s Maryland, his — at the time were in Maryland. So everything was pointing to outside of Delaware.

Q Well, when you say utilize his resources, is it usual for the Attorney General to take a specific interest in a case that maybe conservatively would be of, you know, $1 million in value to the U.S. Government, which, although obviously is a lot of money to the folks sitting here, is pretty small, small dollars relative to the entirety of the fiscal —

A Can ask you your question again? I apologize.

Q Does the Attorney General usually weigh in on cases where you’re talking about $1 million?

A I’ve never had that happen before.

Q To your knowledge, did Attorney General Barr weigh in, or seek updates on the investigation after those cases were joined?

A Not to my knowledge.

By this point, the Majority Counsel seems to have sussed out the problem with Billy Barr’s personal involvement in this. Because then that lawyer weighed in to cue up a response that maybe Barr was just approving high level prosecutions.

Q Okay. The discussion last round about the Attorney General Barr’s involvement, are you aware of the Justice Department policies and procedures that relate to sensitive investigative matters and political matters?

A I am not.

Q And do you know if the Attorney General, under the DOJ rules and procedures, has to make some of these decisions?

A I did not.

Q Would it surprise you if, in fact, the Attorney General does have to sign off on certain things when it relates to the son of a Presidential candidate or an incoming President-elect?

A It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Now, it is totally plausible that Bill Barr was personally involved in sending a tax investigation to Delaware on which to hang foreign influence allegations that — thus far at least — have amounted to nothing. After all, Barr’s DOJ ordered up an investigation into John Kerry in SDNY. He ordered DC USAO to take a second stab at the Greg Craig prosecution, which flopped. He made John Durham Special Counsel so he could take two flimsy conspiracy theories to trial.

And he personally set up a parallel channel via which information channeled through Rudy Giuliani from known Russian spies could be ingested through the Pittsburgh US Attorney Office and sent on to the Delaware office.

That’s why Whistleblower X’s “supplement” is so interesting.

Both Shapley and Whistleblower X sent supplements complaining that they didn’t get to see the FD-1023 that Barr weighed in publicly to claim was totally reliable even though it came via Russian spy channels. That is, both used Barr’s public comments to intervene in the investigation from which they’ve already been removed.

In addition to doing that, though, Whistleblower X admitted — alone among all the unsubstantiated rumors he shared in his testimony — that after standing by his claim that it was Bill Barr who consolidated the cases in Delaware in four different exchanges, he was no longer sure that was the case.

After having been given an opportunity to review the transcript of his interview, Mr. X thought it would be helpful for the work of the Committee to clarify and update the transcript through this letter.

The clarification: Mr. X recalls in his testimony that he was told (roughly five years ago) by a supervisor that it was then-Attorney General William Barr who directed that the proposed case be merged with an ongoing case in Delaware. Mr. X is confident he was told by his supervisor that the merging of the cases was at the direction of an official at the Department of Justice. However, on further reflection, Mr. X cannot definitively state that his then-supervisor said that that the Department of Justice official directing the merger of the cases was AG Barr. Separate from that conversation with his supervisor, Mr. X has no independent knowledge of who at the Department of Justice directed that the cases be merged.

Someone decided that it is not helpful to the Republican cause — or to Whistleblower X’s role as nascent hero of the far right — for Bill Barr to have intervened so directly in this case.

And, as noted, Republican Chairs are making sure they don’t learn anymore details about Barr’s role either.

Republicans think they’ve got a great scandal going here. But Whistleblower X’s testimony inadvertently makes the whole thing sound like a rebirth of the manufactured Eliot Spitzer scandal, only this time with the direct involvement of the Attorney General.

Even before Abbe Lowell wrote a long letter trying to make this plain for obtuse journalists, it was clear to me that Republican House Chairmen are resorting to immunizing crimes in an attempt to gin up scandals to use against Joe Biden.

It’s right there at the start of Gary Shapley’s testimony.

IRS agents are prohibited from leaking details from private tax returns.

To permit Shapley to do so, the (unnamed) House Ways and Means Majority Counsel first laid out that Shapley was sharing information as a whistleblower, effectively waving a magic wand to let Shapley ignore this prohibition.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Finally, I’d like to note the information discussed here today is confidential. As an IRS agent, I know you understand the significance of our tax privacy laws. Chairman Smith takes our tax privacy laws extremely seriously, and we have worked diligently to make sure that you can provide your disclosures to Congress in a legal manner and with the assistance of counsel.

As I’m sure you know, 26 U.S.C. Section 6103 makes tax returns and return information confidential, subject to specific authorizations or exceptions in the statute.

The statute anticipates and provides for whistleblowers like yourself to come forward and share information with Congress under Section 6103(f)(5).

Specifically, that statute permits a person with access to returns or return information to disclose it to a committee referred to in subsection (f)(1) or any individual authorized to receive or inspect information under paragraph (4)(A) if the whistleblower believes such return or return information may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse In your position at the IRS, do you or did you have access to return or return information covered by Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code?

Mr. Shapley. Yes.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Have you had access to return information that you believe may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse?

Mr. Shapley. Yes.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Do you wish to disclose such information to the committee today?

Mr. Shapley. Yes, I do.

And, as Lowell noted, Shapley then answered a bunch of questions, some of which were unrelated to his core allegations. Then, days after the Hunter Biden settlement was out, House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith released Shapley’s transcript, after which Shapley has run to the right wing media to repeat his allegations.

Shapley’s media appearances might constitute a crime. But how is Merrick Garland’s DOJ going to prosecute it, now that the right wing has made Shapley a hero for floating the latest manufactured scandal about Hunter Biden? Hell, Shapley is going to be the cornerstone of an attempt to impeach Garland, not for prosecuting Shapley for breaking the law, but because Garland let a Trump appointee prosecute the President’s son unimpeded.

That’s Garland’s sin: Letting a US Attorney appointed by Donald Trump prosecute the son of the most powerful man in the world, something that should be a remarkable, however sober, feat of due process, but which Republicans want to undermine because a Republican US Attorney didn’t find enough crime for their needs, because they need this story to go on and on and on.

In his letter, which was addressed to Chairman Smith, Lowell also pointed out what was clear to both me and Andrew Prokop: One or both of these IRS so-called whistleblowers may be source(s) for the biennial right wing leak to Devlin Barrett, leaks that always appear just before and are intended to influence an election, leaks that in this case got the IRS team removed from the investigation.

Right wingers seem to like Devlin because he can be trusted to write down what they tell him to write, rather than write what the evidence they describe would indicate. In 2020, for example, Devlin read an interview report, which was improperly redacted, and which made it clear that a right winger on the Mike Flynn case bullied a woman at work and was willing to make claims about which he had no first hand knowledge, and instead of reporting that, Devlin claimed that it indicated misconduct in the Mueller investigation. Last fall, Devlin took evidence that some investigators who were either ignorant of or ignoring known details about the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago and instead tried to preempt investigative conclusions by proclaiming that Trump didn’t exploit the documents he stole for personal gain. In 2016, Devlin wrote the story that would eventually get Andy McCabe fired — yet another scandal that fed itself for years — because he deigned to correct the false claims of people trying to impugn Hillary before the election.

In the case of investigators on the Hunter Biden team, the pre-election leak at issue here, Devlin took a report making clear that investigators had not substantiated any of the foreign influence peddling claims about Hunter Biden and instead let agents use him to pressure David Weiss to charge Hunter in a certain way and do so before the election.

Regurgitating right wing law enforcement claims of scandal credulously is what Devlin seems to do best. “If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the campaign season,” seems to be Devlin’s journalistic ethos.

And it’s not just tax law that Devlin’s sources violated by leaking details about the Hunter Biden investigation. As Lowell notes, it may well be grand jury information — something Lowell alleges was also included in Shapley’s disclosures (though about this I’m less convinced).

As I said, if one or both of these men do turn out to be Devlin’s source, then the scandal created here will make it far harder to prosecute them, just as Jim Jordan has been trying to reward several other people — FBI agents — suspected of leaks politicizing the FBI by retroactively claiming they’re whistleblowers after a disciplinary process began.

Then, Republicans are using the confidentiality guaranteed as part of due process to create more scandal. In the wake of the transcript release, Republicans released a letter demanding more testimony from people who would not normally, and won’t now, be able to comply, especially given that this is an active prosecution. The WaPo, which played a central role in this false scandal in the first place, reported that as “news,” without explaining to readers that of course the recipients won’t comply and won’t be able to and shouldn’t be able to, in the same way people investigating Donald Trump should not be and are not running to Congress to describe what they discovered in Melania’s underwear drawer.

This is a stunt. It should be reported as a stunt. Until it is reported as a stunt, Republicans will continue to corrode democracy, using their majority to do nothing but manufacture political dirt.

WaPo offered no context in their report on this manufactured story (including noting that Trump was accorded the same treatment as some of the things being spun as distinct). It’s just pure pavlovian reaction, taking dogshit from Republicans who have made it crystal clear for six months they plan to do nothing — nothing!! — else with their majority than simply manufacture scandals, and packaging up obvious dogshit as if it were news. Notably, there’s also no update (why update a story manufactured for a pre-holiday Friday release?) to note that US Attorney David Weiss (originally identified as an AUSA, which betrays ignorance about a key detail of the way DOJ guards independence and took special measures to do so here) did respond to the letter, predictably saying that he can’t violate the confidentiality that Shapley did, but also reiterating his past claims that he was in charge of the decisions on this case.

Why ruin the clickbait scandal with actual facts?

Then, finally, this manufactured scandal moves onto the next step, in which WaPo claims to be helpless to assess these contested claims — in which several US Attorneys have repeatedly debunked claims about topics that Shapley was not in a position to know — so instead suggests that Lowell’s letter will instead just create a difference of opinion.

Here’s how the WaPo — again, which is one key reason there is a scandal here in the first place — described the manufactured scandal that Republicans have not hid was a manufactured scandal, at all.

Lowell’s letter battling with Congress illustrated that while the president’s son appears close to resolving the federal misdemeanor charges — and this week also settled a separate child support case — he still faces a number of challenges that could yield further headlines. The action is set to move from the courthouse to Capitol Hill, as Republicans delve into Biden’s business dealings and scrutinize the Justice Department’s handling of the criminal investigation.

[snip]

Lowell’s salvo signaled the beginning of what could be a newly intense phase of the battle for public opinion between the president’s son and congressional Republicans.

It’s all about the headlines to the WaPo that wittingly made it headlines in the first place.

Lowell’s letter is not “battling with Congress.” Lowell’s letter is not “battl[ing] for public opinion.

He’s laying out some basic facts, not only answering some questions that have floated for months about Hunter Biden’s conduct, but also pointing out the crime that WaPo of course is not going to report on, because of course they cannot.

Rather than assess the facts, WaPo instead resorts to both-sides glee — this scandal, the one they kicked off, will continue forever!!!

I don’t know what kind of person goes into journalism only to profess utter helplessness to weigh the credibility of various sources, or even whether someone was in a place to know what he is claiming he knows. I don’t know why someone would go into journalism only to willingly treat people like James Comer and Jim Jordan as credible, when even Steve Doocy keeps mocking them for their flimsy claims, when they don’t even try to hide what they’re up to! I don’t know what kind of credulity you would need to immediately treat a request for testimony designed to be impossible as big breaking news.

I do know this: in 2014, some corrupt oligarchs decided to put Joe Biden’s son in a place where, no matter what he did, they could use it to their future advantage. It was stupid for him to take that offer, but let’s all acknowledge it was a set-up from the start. I know that no later than 2018, other corrupt oligarchs, some with clear ties to Russian spooks, started pitching Hunter Biden as a scandal, all wrapped up for Donald Trump’s personal consumption. I know that ever since, Republicans have been milking the addiction recovery of a private citizen relentlessly. I’m not sure a private figure has ever been scrutinized so closely and relentlessly by Congress, including past mob or union corruption investigations that actually served the public interest. I know that Trump’s own tax scandals, Ivanka and Jared’s influence peddling, Trump’s corrupt oligarch ties, Trump’s pardons — including of far bigger tax cheats than Hunter Biden — have gotten nowhere near this level of scrutiny, and almost no one is making the GOP’s base hypocrisy here the story.

I know that Hunter Biden has made a ton of mistakes in his life, and I admire that he is doing the hard work to turn his life around. I can’t imagine trying to do it at a time when millions of people have made him their personal plaything for scandal.

What I don’t understand is how self-respecting people can so willingly play a part of the effort to rip Hunter Biden to shreds solely because Republicans choose to run on wildly hypocritical scandal-mongering rather than policy. You’re letting half-wit bozos manipulate you like children, and you’re positively gleeful about it! Do you not understand — or care — what a grotesque project you’re playing useful idiots for?

Back in 2020, Zeynep Tukfeci wrote what remains one of the most insightful pieces on the way that Republicans have milked Hunter Biden’s legal challenges and addiction for their political ends.

[T]raditional media is, still, terrible at recognizing how these hack-and-leaks are, in fact, as much about blackmailing political candidates as they are about politically relevant allegations.

That’s right, there’s a blatant blackmail attempt right in front of our eyes, and we’re not recognizing it for what it is.

[snip]

Is the Hunter story newsworthy, in the sense that it should be reported on? Yes, of course. Should Joe Biden be asked about some of the allegations? Yes, of course. (Note the some).

But the real questions we need to ask of ourselves are these: what should be asked of Biden? How much media attention should be given, to what parts of the story? What parts of the story are very important,, and not being covered?

This has been an ongoing theme in my work: In the 21st century, it is attention, not speech, that is restricted and of limited quantity that the gatekeepers can control and allocate. In the digital age, especially in countries like ours, there is no effective way of stopping people from publishing or talking about this story through traditional censorship—but there are many ways to regulate how much attention it gets.

[snip]

In 2016, the media got hacked—not in the sense of a computer breach, but that their unreflective habits allowed them to be played. They spent their time giving disproportionate attention to gossip and privacy violations that were illegitimate—ironic, in my view, since they barely covered the newsworthy aspects of that hack.

Before the 2016, election, in a New York Times op-ed, I called this whistle-drowning. Whistle-blowing is designed to focus our attention on something that is being kept from the public, something that is in the public’s interest to know and evaluate. Whistle-drowning is designed to flood the public a flurry of allegations that make it very difficult to concentrate on the important questions facing us.

[snip]

If a story about Hunter Biden deserves attention and not getting it yet, it is this: the Hunter Biden story, as it has happened, is a blatant attempt to blackmail and rattle his father, who is, of course, concerned over his son’s struggles with drug addiction. In that context, and with appropriate diligence, allegations of influence-peddling should be investigated, with proper reporting, not innuendo.

[snip]

The media is still under some illusion that fairness and balance means devoting equal attention to allegations about, and stories potentially damaging to, both candidates–rather than devoting proportional attention to allegations and stories according to their credibility, scale, scope and importance.

She calls this a hack-and-leak (this was before it became clear that the “laptop” was instead an alleged theft and leak), but a better description is just trolling. Indeed, what Comer and Jordan — and now Smith — are using their gavels for is no different than what Microchip, one of the trolls who played an instrumental role in getting people to care about John Podesta’s risotto recipe rather than Donald Trump’s racism and emotional instability in the 2016 election, testified he succeeded in doing in 2016.

Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?

A That’s a good question.

So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.

T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.

Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.

A That’s right.

Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?

A No, and I didn’t care.

Q Did you fact- check any of it?

A No.

Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?

A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.

It’s about chaos, not facts. Manufactured conspiracy can and is designed to distract from the fact that there’s no there there. It is designed to make voters irrational. It is designed to make democracy fail.

Over time, Shapley’s claims, as well as any misconduct allegations about Devlin’s sources, will be reviewed — but anyone with the most basic understanding of how due process works in the country knows that that’s not going to happen immediately, also knows that Jim Jordan and James Comer are the last people you’d ask to conduct a competent review of anything.

And so the willingness to bow to Comer and Jordan and Smith’s demands that it be immediate and relentless is just willingness to be used, manipulated, to perpetuate the kind of manufactured conspiracy that is designed to kill democracy.

I haven’t had the time to dig into Gary Shapley’s purported whistleblower claims about the case against Hunter Biden, which several US Attorneys have already disputed.

My read, thus far, matches Andrew Prokop’s: after IRS investigators tried to take steps during a pre-election prohibition period last year, someone in their vicinity leaked to Devlin Barrett, as right-wingers do every pre-election period. That led Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to (justifiably) remove the suspected leakers from the case. As other right wing officials have before, they then ran to Congress and belatedly claimed whistleblower status.

The purported whistleblowers claim that investigative steps — pertaining to allegations about conduct after Biden left the Obama White House — were slow-walked in 2020, during Bill Barr’s tenure as Attorney General. The most serious claim made by the purported whistleblowers is that US Attorneys appointed by Joe Biden refused to file charges against Hunter in the venues where they occurred — MDCA and DC. Merrick Garland, David Weiss, and Matthew Graves have all denied that.

But even if that allegation is true, even if Weiss continues to investigate and substantiates some foreign influence peddling (at this point, limited to 2017, a time when Biden was not in office), the allegations against Hunter Biden would still be far less scandalous than the Paul Manafort case. That’s true because the scale of Manafort’s tax crimes were far worse. That’s true because Manafort has confessed to his foreign influence crime. And that’s true because Trump pardoned Manafort after his former campaign manager lied to investigators about what he did with (since confirmed) Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, during and after the 2016 campaign.

Here’s my understanding of the comparison. The claims against Hunter, in bold, reflect the two Informations docketed as part of the plea deal. All but the pardon TBDs in his case reflect allegations from the so-called whistleblowers that remain unresolved.

Note: I have not listed “lied to protect the president” for Hunter because, as far as I am aware, the President’s son has not made sworn statements to law enforcement — true or false — about matters affecting his father. Manafort did make false statements about matters implicating Trump during his breached cooperation with Robert Mueller’s prosecutors.

A whole pack of DC journalists have chased the IRS allegations, like six year olds do a soccer ball, but with perhaps less consideration of what they’re chasing. They’re doing that even as Trump’s pardons remain largely unreviewed since he announced his run. This manic response to contested IRS claims reflects a choice. Just not a justifiable journalistic one, given the contested allegations to date.

Paul Manafort sources

Millions in tax avoidance: On August 21, 2018, an EDVA jury convicted Manafort of filing false tax returns each year from 2010 to 2014. On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to tax crimes spanning from 2006 through 2015. Between 2010 and 2014, he failed to report over $15M in income on FBAR.

FARA component: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to serving as an unregistered foreign agent from 2006 through 2015.

Money laundering: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to laundering over $6.5M in payments, from 2006 through 2016, as part of his FARA scheme.

Bank fraud: In August 21, 2018, an EDVA jury convicted Manafort of two counts of bank fraud, totalling $4.4M. On September 14, 2018, Manafort admitted to over $25M more in bank fraud.

Conspiracy with foreign spy: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to a conspiracy to witness tamper with Konstantin Kilimnik. In a 2021 sanctions filing, Treasury stated as fact that Kilimnik is a Russian Intelligence Services agent.

Joint Defense Agreement with President: Before Manafort pled guilty, Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Manafort was part of a Joint Defense Agreement with the President.

Lied to protect President: On February 13, 2019, Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had breached his plea agreement by — among other things — lying about what he did in an August 2, 2016 meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik at which he described how the campaign planned to win swing states.

Intervention from Attorney General: On May 13, 2020, Manafort was given COVID release to home confinement, even though his prison was at that point low risk and his case did not meet the criteria laid out by Bureau of Prisons. He served less than two years of an over seven year sentence in prison.

Pardoned: On December 23, 2020, Trump pardoned Manafort.

Hunter Biden sources

Hundreds of thousands in tax avoidance: In both 2017 and 2018, Hunter failed to pay full taxes on $1.5M in income ($3M total).

Gun possession: For 11 days in 2018, Hunter possessed a gun in violation of a prohibition on gun ownership by an addict.

Update: Just to give a sense of scale, in his Ways and Means interview, Whistleblower X tried to explain how big the scale of Hunter Biden’s graft was by noting that he and his associates, over five years, got $17.3M.

But Manafort was doing more than that himself.

The Democrats on Jim Jordan’s insurrection protection committee were really unprepared for Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger yesterday, failing to call out their repeated false claims.

One of the most interesting details came when Taibbi described that someone besides Elon Musk invited him to have unfettered access to a company under a consent decree. Given the likelihood that this person was not even a Twitter employee, it gives the FTC far more reason to want to know why a company under a consent decree made information on individual users available to journalists.

But the hearing was nevertheless useful for the way it revealed that Taibbi doesn’t know the difference between “authentic” and “true.” In an exchange with Stephen Lynch about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election (in which Lynch falsely claimed that the intelligence report attributing the Russian campaign to Russia involved 18 intelligence agencies, instead of three, and mispronounced both Shellenberger’s and Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s name), Taibbi professed to be uncertain whether Russia conducted a hack-and-dump campaign.

Lynch: Do you believe that Russia engaged in a hack-and-release campaign damaging to the Clinton campaign, back in 2016?

Taibbi: I don’t know and I would say it’s irrelevant.

[snip]

Lynch: Mr. Shellenbech [sic] do you believe that the Russians engaged in a hack-and-release campaign with respect to the damaging information they released regarding the Clinton campaign?

Shellenberger: To the best of my awareness, that is what happened, yes.

Lynch: Okay, fair enough.

Shellenberger: That’s not the same thing as influence campaign.

Lynch: I understand.

Taibbi: Also that material was true. That is not a legitimate predicate for censorship.

Taibbi obviously thought he was being very clever, justifying publishing material stolen from an American because it was “true.” (And Shellenberger was being equally clever, not understanding that a hack-and-leak campaign is, indeed, part of an information operation.)

But instead, he betrayed something that is obvious from his propaganda efforts: Taibbi doesn’t understand the difference between “authentic” and “true.” When someone makes false claims about authentic material, it is a lie.

For example, Taibbi has repeatedly claimed that the FBI was not building cases on the suspected voter suppression accounts they turned over to Twitter, even though he included a screen cap showing the FBI taking steps — asking in what venue they needed to serve legal process and seeking a preservation order — that allows them to conduct an investigation.

The email is authentic. His claims about FBI’s efforts to investigate voter suppression are — he himself proved — a lie.

He also betrays that he doesn’t understand some of the material released in 2016 was neither “true” nor “authentic.” Not only were the Guccifer 2.0 documents altered, but the persona repeatedly falsely claimed they were something they were not, most obviously when the persona claimed he was releasing Clinton Foundation documents and I had to explain that that’s not what they were to Glenn Greenwald.

That persona did just what Taibbi has done with the Twitter files, wow credulous people (like Greenwald) with “authentic” files, while making false claims about them.

#MattyDickPic’s confusion about the difference between “true” and “authentic” became more obvious later in the hearing.

Goldman: Are you aware that there was an analysis of the hard drive that was done by the Washington Post at a later date?

Shellenberger: My awareness is that multiple media organizations have done an analyses, including CBS, and found that it was indeed, the laptop was authentic, and that nothing had been changed on it.

Goldman: Let’s just get something clear. The laptop that the FBI had is different than the hard drive that Rudy Giuliani gave to the New York Post. A hard drive, you will agree with this, is a copy of a laptop, right?

Shellenberger: Yes.

Goldman: And you are aware that hard drives can be altered, are you not?

Shellenberger: Of course.

Goldman: So are you aware that the Washington Post analysis of the hard drive showed that it had been altered?

Shellenberger: I have heard that, but I’m also saying that CBS verified —

Taibbi: Politico …

Shellenberger: and other media organizations have verified…

Never mind that Shellenberger seems to have no fucking clue that the laptop CBS analyzed is not the same hard drive that Rudy gave to the Post, and therefore is not the “laptop” on which the story that Twitter throttled was based. Never mind that CBS’ analysis is inconsistent with John Paul Mac Isaac’s claims that the process by which he made his own copy of the laptop was repeatedly interrupted, a problem that would make it difficult to distinguish from an iCloud hack and a real laptop (who puts voice mail messages on a laptop hard drive, for example?), a detail consistent with what I know of the Washington Post analysis (which was conducted by two different people).

But the cutest was little #MattyDickPics chiming in to claim that Politico had authenticated “the laptop.”

They claim no such thing! They authenticated some files (and not forensically, but instead by a witness who couldn’t even confirm the emails hadn’t been altered).

Shreckinger’s source remembered viewing both emails but was not able to compare the text leaked to the Post with the original emails. Other emails from the leaked files matched a cache of emails released by a Swedish government agency, two people who communicated with Hunter Biden said.

This kind of “authentication,” when the claims of someone with a bias like Tony Bobulinski can supplant forensic authentication, is precisely the problem with hack-and-leak reporting, regardless of whether Russian hackers or Matt Taibbi’s buddies do the hacking.

And neither Michael Shellenberger nor Matt Taibbi understand that.

Matt Taibbi does not know the difference between “true” and “authentic,” and it shows in his propaganda.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the first thing that James Comer chose to do after becoming Chair of the House Oversight Committee was to schedule a hearing about why he can’t look at non-consensually posted pictures of Hunter Biden’s dick on Twitter.

In letters asking former Twitter executives Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, and Vijaya Gadde to testify next week, Comer described the substance of the hearing to be about their, “role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election.” As Matt #MattyDickPics Taibbi has helpfully revealed, some of the “information about the Biden family” that Twitter suppressed Americans’ access to before the election were nonconsensual dick pics, including a number posted as part of a campaign led by Steve Bannon’s buddy Guo Wengui.

Certainly, the Twitter witnesses, who themselves have been dangerously harassed as the result of #MattyDickPics’ sloppy propaganda, would be within the scope of Comer’s stated inquiry to explain why a private company doesn’t want to be part of an organized revenge porn campaign, even if a Congressman from Kentucky wants to see those dick pics.

But Comer’s campaign also just became about something else: Twitter’s decision to suppress a story based off a laptop that its purported owner claims was unlawfully obtained.

As several outlets have reported (WaPo, CNN, NBC, ABC), Hunter Biden has hired Abbe Lowell, who has written letters to DOJ, Delaware authorities, and the IRS, asking for investigations into those who have disseminated the materials from the alleged laptop (though Lowell made clear that no one is confirming any of the versions of the laptop). Those included in the letters are:

• John Paul Mac Isaac (whom a prior lawyer, Chris Clark, had already referred to SDNY)
• Robert Costello, who first obtained the laptop from Mac Isaac
• Rudy Giuliani
• Steve Bannon
• Garrett Ziegler (who plays a key role in the January 6 investigation but who now hosts the content as part of a non-profit)
• Jack Maxey (who provided the “laptop” to multiple outlets)
• Yaacov Apelbaum (whom Mac Isaac claimed had helped to create a “forensic” image of the laptop)

The lawyers also sent a defamation letter to Tucker Carlson for a story since proven to be false.

These letters aren’t likely to change what DOJ, at least, will do about the laptop. They’ve had the Mac Isaac copy in hand for some time, and the earlier SDNY referral would likely go to the same people already investigating the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary.

Ziegler may be an exception. DOJ likely already has interest for his role in January 6, the invitation to conduct an investigation may give reason to look more closely.

Eric Herschmann is not, according to reports, on these letters but he was even pitching “laptop” content while working at the White House.

But the public coverage of this will undoubtedly change the tenor of next week’s hearing. At the very least, it will validate Yoel Roth’s concerns in real time that the NYPost story was based on stolen data. It will, retroactively, mean that the NYPost story was a violation of Twitter’s terms of service agreement.

None of (the coverage of) these letters describes a key detail: How the Oversight Committee got the copy of the laptop they claim they have. These criminal complaints are broad enough that they likely include at least a few people involved in the channel via which the Committee obtained the laptop, meaning that the Committee would be — is — harboring data from a private citizen that he claims was illegally obtained.

Significantly, the letters include false statements to Congress among the crimes raised (probably with respect to Mac Isaac). Given that Comer’s actions are premised on what Mac Isaac has claimed (and as several of these stories note, Mac Isaac’s story has changed in significant ways, and never made sense in the first place), the allegation may give the Committee further reason to exercise caution.

At the very least, it’ll give Democrats on the Committee plenty to talk about in next week’s hearing.

I thought it would take some doing to top kicking off one’s chairmanship by having a hearing to complain about non-consensual dick pics. But having a hearing to complain that stolen private information wasn’t more widely disseminated may top that.