by John Solomon
When the Justice Department discovered from journalists a storage locker containing evidence against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a search was executed immediately.
But when IRS agents found a similar storage area containing evidence in the Hunter Biden criminal tax probe, they were denied the right to search despite meeting the probable cause standard, then Biden’s lawyers were tipped off, according to new congressional testimony.
Likewise, when federal prosecutors believed there was evidence of crimes at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they launched an unprecedented and full scale-raid on the former president. But when agents wanted to execute a search warrant at Joe Biden’s Delaware home because they had probable cause to believe evidence of Hunter Biden tax crimes, they were turned down for a warrant to raid the guest house in which the first son was living.
And when FBI agents believed former Trump adviser Michael Flynn had committed no crime in the Russia collusion case, they nonetheless conducted an interview with him in what a supervisor concluded smacked of an effort to lure him into a lying charge. But when IRS and FBI agents wanted to interview witnesses in the Biden case, they were told most were off limits, including the Biden grandchildren whom agents believed may have unwittingly been entangled in a tax scheme.
A federal prosecutor “told us it will get us into hot water if we interview the president’s grandchildren,” IRS supervisory criminal investigative agent Gary Shapley told Congress in blockbuster testimony released last week that furthers an unmistakable portrait being painted by congressional investigators of a whole-of-government effort to preserve Joe Biden’s viability as a presidential candidate while attempting to destroy Trump’s re-election effort in 2020.
The pattern and evidence about the behavior of federal bodies – ranging from the IRS, FBI and spy agencies to the Justice Department, U.S. attorney’s office and National Archives – is enough to even convince one unabashed Joe Biden supporter there has been a scheme to administer unequal justice.
“I don’t agree that this is necessarily Republicans versus Democrats. A lot of FBI agents are Republicans. This is a separate system of justice for Donald Trump and anybody who defended him, or who was close to him and everybody else, Republicans and Democrats alike,” said Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard law professor emeritus who voted for Biden but also represented Trump at an impeachment trial.
Dershowitz wrote a whole book about the disparate system for Trump world called “Get Trump.” But it was completed before bombshell evidence began emerging that showed:
- The FBI long held evidence from a confidential source that Joe Biden was involved in a possible bribery scheme that was allegedly captured on 17 tape recordings;
- Biden’s son Hunter was engaged in a $2.2 million tax evasion-and-avoidance scheme that IRS agents were thwarted from fully investigating;
- The infamous Hunter Biden laptop had been validated by the FBI in 2019, a full year before it was falsely portrayed as Russian disinformation by intelligence professionals, Joe Biden and the news media – in a blitz that misled voters ahead of the 2020 election.
Dershowitz said the plea deal Hunter Biden reached last week on two misdemeanor charges related to tax evasion isn’t the biggest reason for concern.
“Where he may have gotten not only a sweetheart deal, but an incredibly unjust deal, is for [the government’s] failure to investigate and perhaps prosecute the laptop, Burisma, those 17 tapes,” he said
The latter two in that list refer to the Burisma Holdings Limited in Ukraine in which Hunter Biden had a questionable business dealing and audio tapes a foreign national who allegedly bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter allegedly has in connection to the alleged bribe.
Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, a House Judiciary Committee member, said the FBI is the tip of the spear of a judicial and intelligence system that has been corrupted by political bias.
“There were investigations open that should not have been opened,” he said. “There were Americans being spied on, officials of a political campaign for president were being spied on, just based on political preferences of those in charge. And we cannot have a system where political bias gets in the way of what what the head of the FBI or with the leaders of the FBI, are directing or deciding.”
That sentiment is shared by some of the federal agents who investigated both Biden and Trump dating to 2016.
“Investigators assigned to this investigation were obstructed from seeing all the available evidence,” Shapley testified in the transcript released Thursday detailing a mountain of political interference in their investigation of the Bidens.
He also said the FBI had testimony and text messages showing Joe Biden was likely involved in meeting with Hunter Biden’s Chinese partners as the family was pressing energy officials from the communist country to pay them millions but were kept from probing the 46th president’s potential culpability.
“Based on guidance provided by the prosecutors on a recurring basis to not look into anything related to President Biden, there is no way of knowing if evidence of other criminal activity existed concerning Hunter Biden or President Biden,” Shapley testified.
He and a second IRS agent, who have been granted whistleblower status by the House Ways and Means Committee, said their team had compelling evidence that Hunter Biden failed to pay taxes all the way back to some of the original monies taken from the Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma Holdings, but they were twice turned down by political appointees of Joe Biden to bring charges on those offenses and then, inexplicably, the statute of limitations was allowed to expire.
“It was a conscious decision by DOJ to let that run,” Shapley said of the statute of limitations. “They could’ve had them extend ’14 and ’15, but they said no. … Letting a statute of limitations expire in an active criminal investigation is not normal.”
Shapley was the supervisor of the IRS team investigating the Hunter Biden case.
The formal case agent for the probe backed up his whistleblowing, detailing in an anonymous interview to Congress how evidence of culpability from the Hunter Biden laptop was kept from the team and that the FBI never revealed it had a trusted informant who obtained evidence that the Burisma monies may have been part of a larger bribery scheme involving Joe Biden that were was captured on the 17 tape recordings kept by a Burisma official.
The second agent’s lawyer, Dean Zerbe, wrote a letter last week to Congress revealing his client “has stated to me that he has never seen this FBI Form 1023 and that he does not recall ever hearing about this information being turned over in any meetings with the prosecution team in Delaware.”
The agent believes “this information could have been relevant” to the Hunter Biden probe because “it related to a claim of $5 million being paid to the subject, which directly ties to email correspondence reviewed between subject and a business partner,” Zerbe wrote.
Statute of limitations expiring, evidence withheld, witnesses and searches declared off limits, and agents being warned of political consequences for normal investigative tactics are all unusual in a single case, the two agents told Congress.
But they weren’t the only aberrant behavior seen by law enforcement since Trump burst on the scene, records and testimony show.
Former Special Counsel John Durham made clear earlier this month that the FBI and DOJ opened and sustained for 2.5 years an investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion without a single shred of evidence it existed.
The agents forced to work that case also chronicled and blew the whistle on what they believed was improper conduct by DOJ and the FBI.
Agent William Barnett told the Justice Department in 2020 that “he did not see any evidence of collusion between the TRUMP campaign and the Russian government,” but that senior executives as high as then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe kept pressing investigators to charge on, according to a summary of that interview obtained by Just the News.
Barnett said he and other agents found the investigation into collusion so farcical that it could be made into a game, which they referred to as “Collusion Clue.” In the hypothetical game, investigators were able to choose any character conducting any activity in any location and pair this individual with another character and interpret it as evidence of collusion, he testified.
Likewise, former Assistant FBI Director William Priestap recounted in his notes his heartburn when the FBI and DOJ decided to interview Flynn, then-national security adviser to Trump, without a basis of evidence of a crime and after career agents had concluded the Flynn part of the probe should be closed.
Priestap’s notes fretted the bureau was “playing games” with the Flynn probe and opined whether the goal was to get the truth or simply to get Flynn to lie so he could be prosecuted and fired.
The efforts to sway the public and the investigative machinery away from Biden and toward Trump involved the intelligence community as well.
An intelligence assessment in summer 2020 suggested evidence about Joe and Hunter Biden’s wrongdoings in Ukraine was Russian disinformation, causing a part of the Hunter Biden probe to stop months before the presidential election and thwarting a probe by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley.
The false narrative of Russian disinformation persisted and expanded in October 2020 when 51 intelligence officials, including former CIA Directors John Brennan and Mike Morell, signed a letter without citing evidence declaring the Hunter Biden laptop that emerged in public in October 2020 was Russian disinformation. The letter was used by Joe Biden and the media and Big Tech to censor stories abut the Bidens before Election Day.
In fact, the FBI had already corroborated the laptop and prosecutors had concluded it had not been manipulated months before the intelligence community letter, according to a summary written by case agents.
Morell would later admit to Congress he had no evidence of Russian disinformation and simply organized the letter to help Joe Biden win the election by giving a “talking point” to blunt Trump’s arguments at the last presidential debate.
Johnson, who led a 2020 Senate investigation into the Bidens, said the all-of-government effort now exposed in recent months was backed by the legacy news media and clearly tried to protect Biden and harm Trump.
“Now, unfortunately, in our multi-tiered system of justice, this is how justice is carried out in this country, which is why so very few Americans now have faith in federal law enforcement,” Johnson told Just the News. “I mean, you you’re seeing the polls. It’s it’s sad. I mean, it would be nice if we had complete confidence in the spirit of federal agencies and federal law enforcement, but they’ve given us no reason to have confidence in them.”
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Sobia Akhtar.
