A second Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower has emerged alleging "retaliation" for having raised concerns about the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Hunter Biden for tax fraud and related crimes, according to a US media report citing documents sent to Congress.
The agent in question is on the task force of the IRS’ international tax and financial crimes group. The whistleblower is said to have been part of the probe into the son of US President Joe Biden since it was launched in 2018. However, he was taken off the case last week, with no explanation offered. Like his supervisor, also part of the IRS investigative team removed from their protracted probe of Hunter Biden, he allegedly repeatedly expressed concerns about the case being swept under the carpet. The individual in question is believed to have written an email to senior IRS officials, including Commissioner Daniel Werfel, deploring the fact that he was removed for doing the “right thing”.
“As I’m sure you were aware, I was removed this week from a highly sensitive case … after nearly five 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,” the new whistleblower is cited as writing.
The agency veteran wrote that after having spent “thousands of hours on the case, worked to complete 95 percent of the investigation,” being removed was “unacceptable in my opinion”.
“For the past couple years, my [supervisor] and I have tried to gain the attention of our senior leadership about certain issues prevalent regarding the investigation ... The lack of IRS-[Criminal Investigation] senior leadership involvement in this investigation is deeply troubling and unacceptable,” the agent said.
The whistleblower added that the decision to remove the investigative team was "a decision made not to side with the investigators but to side with the US Attorney’s office and Department of Justice who we have been saying for some time has been acting inappropriately”.
The disbandment of the entire investigative team came despite IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel appearing before the House Committee on Ways and Means on 27 April 2023, to testify "without any hesitation there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation or a call to a whistleblower hotline".
Furthermore, the IRS assistant special agent in charge of DC field office Lola Watson is cited as reprimanding the second whistleblower, writing on Friday:
“You have been told several times that you need to follow your chain of command. IRS-CI maintains a chain of command for numerous reasons to include trying to stop unauthorized disclosures. Your email yesterday may have included potential grand jury [aka 6e material] in the subject line and contents of the email, and you included recipients that are not on the 6e list.”
The IRS supervisor who oversaw the investigation since January 2020, along with 12 subordinates, was sidelined allegedly on orders of the Justice Department. The decision was said to have been made after the first whistleblower contacted Congress with allegations of “preferential treatment” and false testimony to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The first whistleblower’s lawyers Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt are cited as writing to Congress that the IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent they represent "was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress. He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice."
The move targeting the IRS case team came in the wake of a report from the House Judiciary Committee, which concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency colluded with Joe Biden's 2020 election campaign to help suppress reports about the contents of Hunter's abandoned "laptop from hell'.
"Evidence suggests that senior Biden campaign officials, including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, and now Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, took active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials," the committee said in a press release coinciding with the release of the report.
The Oversight panel chairman also revealed that Biden family members, business associates or related companies received more than $10Mln from companies run by foreign nationals. This came as part of a sprawling investigation into the Biden family rolled out by Oversight chairman James Comer (R-Ky) and GOP members on his panel.
The federal investigation into Hunter Biden's "tax affairs" has been underway since 2018, based, in part, on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regarding dubious foreign transactions, ostensibly linked to money exchanges with "China and other foreign nations". The probe was launched by the US Attorney's Office in Delaware, led by David Weiss, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump. Hunter Biden himself confirmed the investigation into his tax dealings in December 2020. By then his father had won the presidency. Prosecutors have also looked into allegations that Hunter Biden lied about his drug use on a gun application form in 2018.
In 2020, it was revealed that the FBI had subpoenaed the so-called "laptop from Hell" belonging to Hunter Biden in the course of the ongoing money-laundering probe. However, the US intelligence community' sought to suppress the laptop story in 2020, as revealed by Elon Musk's Twitter Files. Furthermore, as House lawmakers recently revealed, 51 former top intelligence officials falsely branded the laptop bombshell dropped by the New York Post at the time as "Russian disinformation" - a claim that was subsequently debunked.