Liberal Forum

All roads lead to Hunter Biden.

That is, all roads paved with (alleged) extortion, bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, prostitution, drug abuse, and, most importantly, election rigging. The roads traversed by Internal Revenue Service agents-turned-whistleblowers — whose disclosures to the House Ways and Means Committee were released as transcripts on Thursday — are no exception.

The troubled Biden son has always been at the center of concerns about the 2020 election, in the form of the infamous “Hunter Biden laptop.” When reports surfaced in October 2020 of an abandoned laptop showing the dirty details of not only Hunter’s shady business enterprises and potentially criminal conduct but also then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s knowledge of and involvement in it, the corrupt Department of Justice joined hands with Big Tech censors and media propagandists to hide the story.

This was hugely significant, not only because it exposed the depravity of federal law enforcement and America’s information gatekeepers, but also because polling showed that if voters had known the depths of Biden family filth at the time, a potentially scale-tipping number of them would have voted differently in the 2020 election.

The IRS whistleblower transcripts released on Thursday, however, add new layers to the election rigging. According to the IRS agents who came forward, federal agencies abandoned standard procedures to slow-walk investigations into Hunter Biden, ignored agents who pushed for the investigation to move forward properly, retaliated against those agents, and — crucially — interfered even further in the 2020 election by making sure not to go public with details of their investigation until Donald Trump was on his way out the door and Joe Biden was safely elected.

 
 

How It All Went Down

The second IRS whistleblower, who remained anonymous, recalled what he remembered from May 2019 to Dec. 8, 2020, the day agents went “overt” with the Hunter Biden case, immediately following the contested presidential election.

He explained that in criminal tax investigations, IRS policy dictates the “need to interview the subject within 30 days of elevating the investigation.” Though sometimes undercover investigations or ongoing criminal activity might delay interviewing a source, that just isn’t how tax crimes work, he said, because “the evidence is typically historical.” The whistleblower said he especially wanted to go overt to put the Biden son “on notice,” since Hunter apparently had unpaid taxes from 2015 and unfiled tax returns from 2016 and 2017. One can infer from the transcripts that if the IRS’s standard timeline had been followed, Hunter Biden would have been interviewed by the early summer of 2019. But he wasn’t.

According to the whistleblower, he repeatedly raised the issue of going overt but was always shot down. “I was continually being told that we had to stay covert to preserve potential evidence from the FBI side of the investigation,” he said. Assistant U.S. attorneys and the DOJ’s tax attorneys, however, told the IRS agents that prosecutors would eventually be able to move forward with hard-hitting “Spies evasion” charges, felony charges for willful tax evasion. Based on the sweetheart Hunter Biden plea deal revealed this week, those felony charges were never pursued. Instead, assuming the deal is accepted, the Biden son’s tax charges will be mere misdemeanors with probation, no jail time.

So the investigation dragged on, covertly, with electronic search warrants and time-consuming reviews. Here’s what happened, in the whistleblower’s words:
Throughout all this time we’re having biweekly meetings. At these biweekly meetings, I am continually bringing up that we need to go overt. There came a point in time to where there were some bank reports out there that were going to get released, and they were going to include potentially the names of the investigators from the IRS and the FBI who received those bank reports. So with that being released in the public, we’re like it’s going to out our investigation, so we need to come out and go overt with the tax case. And I remember there were always times to where we were always on an impending election cycle. It was always the election being brought up.

 
 

It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Any time there was reason to make the case public, “the election” was always “being brought up.”“In early 2020, it was the [primaries],” the whistleblower continued. “I think that Iowa was the very first one where we weren’t sure what we were allowed to do or we weren’t — it was always wait and see.”

Then while his team was preparing to issue search warrants — for scouring physical residences to look for evidence of a subject’s attempt to file tax returns — before going overt, the higher-ups shut them down, the whistleblower said. In early September 2020, the DOJ Tax Division and the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office halted “overt activities or any activities that could be overt whatsoever.”

Then on Oct. 20, 2020, just days after the New York Post broke the first bombshell laptop story and only two weeks before the election, the whistleblower’s team was prepping to do a covert walk-by to confirm the address of Hunter Biden’s residence for a search. But no. A DOJ tax attorney — it appears to be Mark Daly (who has no problem prosecuting tax evasion of non-Bidens), but the transcript is a bit ambiguous — said, in the whistleblower’s telling: “Tax does not approve. This will be on hold until further notice.”

“I have never in my career have had Tax Division, let alone approve us doing a walk-by or anything like this,” the whistleblower said. “…ltimately, we never were able to do the walk by the residence until after the election. And that’s ultimately when we went overt and were able to do the activities that day on December 8th.”The other IRS whistleblower, Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, shared similar concerns with the House Ways and Means Committee, alleging the DOJ “slow-walked the investigation” and denied search warrants of Hunter Biden’s quarters because of “optics.”

So What?

You might not care about the chronology or seemingly mundane details of an IRS investigation. Heck, most Americans would rather not think about the IRS ever, for any reason. But this is more than a bureaucratic timeline. It’s an account — under penalty of perjury, from two respected IRS agents who were present for these hangups — that exposes the next layer of the deep state’s proven record of interference in the 2020 election.

That matters not only because the interference has shattered Americans’ confidence in our electoral process, but because conservatives who were decried as conspiracy theorists and “election deniers” for calling foul in 2020 were right all along.

The Democrat regime interfered in the election, plain and simple. Local officials did so by unlawfully changing rules at the last minute. Big Tech did so by hiding damaging information on their preferred candidates and censoring conservatives. Billionaire activists did so by pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into government offices in the blue areas of swing states to run get-out-the-vote operations. The media did it by lying to voters, day in and day out.

But the regime’s deep-state footsoldiers are perhaps the most egregious offenders. Their censorship and legal malpractice to shield the Biden family were in-kind campaign contributions to the now-president — who likely wouldn’t hold that title without their help.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/23/wh ... -a-laptop/