I have serious reservations about most claims of "white privilege," but the plea agreement arrived at by the DOJ and the president’s son on Tuesday might cause me to reassess.
Hunter received little more than a stern "Naughty Boy" from the DOJ and was allowed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors for “failure” to pay taxes, and a pretrial “diversion” agreement to avoid a felony firearms charge, the very same charge for which many black men are currently serving jail time.
So how did Hunter Biden get off so lightly? Strassel's column lays out some very ugly facts. She writes:
House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith on Thursday released the testimony of Gary Shapley and another, anonymous IRS whistleblower. They tell a story of blocked search warrants, tip-offs to Mr. Biden’s team, squelched avenues of investigation, downgraded charges, and interference by Joe Biden’s appointees.How, exactly, did all this happen?
Mr. Shapley, a 14-year IRS veteran, said the Justice Department, its Tax Division and the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office “provided preferential treatment and unchecked conflicts of interest.”
Mr. Shapley, leader of an elite team of agents specializing in international tax investigations, was brought in as supervisor of the Hunter case in January 2020. He says he quickly was stopped from taking normal investigatory steps.That's interesting. There was no reluctance in the DOJ to get a search warrant for Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. Why balk at searching Hunter's property?
One example: He says his team was told in September 2020 by Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf that they couldn’t pursue a search warrant of Joe Biden’s guest house (Hunter’s onetime residence) because of the “optics” and because “there is no way we will get that approved.”
In December 2020 the team wanted to search a storage unit in Virginia where Hunter had moved business documents. Ms. Wolf again objected, then tipped off Hunter’s defense counsel, “ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed,” Mr. Shapley said.The ever-vigilant Ms. Wolf also intervened to protect the Bidens in other ways:
Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters also tipped Hunter’s Secret Service team to a proposed “day of action” in which members of U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team intended to conduct surprise interviews of witnesses—including Hunter. This gave a group “close to Hunter” the opportunity to “obstruct the approach,” and of the “12 interviews we hoped to conduct on our day of action, we only got one substantive interview.” Hunter lawyered up.
Along the way, according to Mr. Shapley’s testimony, Ms. Wolf told investigators not to ask any questions about “dad” or “the big guy.” They were blocked from pursuing leads about the financial transactions of Hunter’s children, since she said they’d get “into hot water if we interview the president’s grandchildren.”According to Mr. Shapley, his team was prepared to pursue these charges but was blocked by Biden appointees—despite Attorney General Merrick Garland’s public claim that the investigating team had complete independence.
They were ordered not to look into evidence of campaign-finance violations. They were told to take Hunter’s name off official document requests, which Mr. Shapley said was “absolutely absurd.” The second whistleblower told the committee that he became “sick of fighting to do what’s right.”
The IRS team nonetheless prepared a document in late 2021 covering tax years 2014-19, in which it recommended charging Hunter with felony tax evasion, felony false tax returns, and failures to pay tax. Mr. Shapley says this was partially based on Hunter’s “textbook” tax evasion of declaring his income from the Ukrainian firm Burisma as a “loan.”
Mr. Shapley says the team was also looking into a Foreign Agents Registration Act case.
Mr. Shapley notes that the proper venue for a tax case is where a subject resides or a return is filed; in Hunter’s case, the District of Columbia or California. But he says the U.S. attorney in the capital, Matthew Graves, refused to bring charges, and when Mr. Weiss asked for authority to bring charges there, he “was denied.” Mr. Shapley said U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada of California’s Central District, similarly declined to bring charges. Messrs. Graves and Estrada were both appointed by Joe Biden.When those whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law fail to do so they need to be removed from office. A country that has one legal standard for ordinary people and Republicans and another standard for Democrat elites is a country that is in an advanced state of cultural putrefaction and dissolution.
There's more on the government's stonewalling of the investigation in Strassel's column, but the worst part of her report is this:
Mr. Shapley provided further evidence of influence peddling. He gave the committee a 2017 WhatsApp message in which Hunter tells a Chinese businessman “I am sitting here with my father” and pushes the businessman to fulfill a “commitment.” He warns the businessman to personally resolve the issue that night, or “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”Ms. Strassel assures us that there's plenty more, including Mr. Shapley’s evidence of intimidation and retaliation against his team, so I'd like to know how much interest there is in the liberal media in Mr. Shapley's testimony? After all, one can be sure that if this were Donald Trump or his son involved in these crimes the media would be howling so loud you wouldn't need to have the television on to hear them.
Mr. Shapley also says that Hunter’s partner, Rob Walker, admitted to investigators that a Joe Biden appearance (while out of office) at a Hunter business meeting with the Chinese was “orchestrated” to “bolster” the “chances at making a deal work out.”
Mr. Shapley says Hunter’s attorney warned prosecutors that any charges would be “career suicide.”
Their reaction to Mr. Shapley's allegations will tell us a lot about their own integrity and trustworthiness.
