The latest Hunter Biden controversy, explained

The Hunter Biden saga has taken a new twist with the emergence of an IRS whistleblower, Gary Shapley.

Shapley’s testimony to lawyers from the House Ways and Means Committee became public last week.

Everything that revolves around President Biden’s son tends to get pulled into partisan dogfights, with Republicans alleging grave and nefarious deeds and Democrats complaining that the controversies are being grossly exaggerated for political reasons.

Here are the key points in the latest development.

What is the core allegation?

Shapley alleges that there was serious interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden that began in late 2018.

This interference, he alleges, blunted the force of that investigation, left key questions unanswered and, at crucial moments, gave the younger Biden’s team advance warning of what was about to happen.

Shapley’s testimony was extensive. The transcript runs to 180 pages. The interview was conducted May 26 but remained under wraps until last week.

A central — but contested — claim is that the lead prosecutor and U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, David Weiss, shocked Shapley and others by ultimately saying he was not “the deciding official on whether charges are filed.”

This revelation was followed, according to Shapley, by Weiss’s statement that he “subsequently asked for special counsel authority from Main [Department of Justice] at that time and was denied that authority.”

Why does this matter? 

If Shapley is right, the ultimate decision on charging Hunter Biden in many serious matters fell not to Weiss, who had been appointed by former President Trump, but to two U.S. Attorneys who were appointed by President Biden: Matthew Graves in the District of Columbia, and Martin Estrada in the Central District of California.

No charges were forthcoming in either jurisdiction. 

Is there anything else?

There is a lot more.

One element of Shapley’s testimony that has received enormous publicity is a reference to a 2017 WhatsApp message allegedly sent by Hunter Biden to a Chinese business associate.

The message shows Biden saying he is “sitting here with my father” and pressuring the associate to fulfill a “commitment” — or risk incurring the wrath of both Bidens.

However, it has not been shown that Joe Biden, then out of office, was physically present, and the president Wednesday told a reporter he was not. 

Nor has it been shown that President Biden had any knowledge of his son’s message. A lawyer for Hunter Biden has implied the younger Biden was lying at a time when he was in the grip of serious addiction.

That message aside, Shapley is especially withering about Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, whose interventions he considers to have hindered the investigation.

For example, he cites a 2020 meeting in which Wolf allegedly acknowledged that investigators could establish probable cause to obtain a search warrant for a guest house on President Biden’s Delaware property where Hunter stayed. 

But, according to Shapley, Wolf worried “whether the juice was worth the squeeze” and was concerned about “the optics” of such a search.

On another occasion, Shapley alleges that there were plans to search a storage unit in northern Virginia where documents from Hunter Biden’s office had been moved.

He describes a call to discuss that search and alleges:

“No sooner had we gotten off the call [than] 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.”

Wolf does not appear to have commented publicly on the allegations.

Is the whistleblower credible?

Based upon what we know so far: Yes. 

Shapley has been with the IRS since 2009 and is a supervisory special agent.

In his interview with the committee, he says that he has “absolutely no political activities in my past” and has “never given a dollar to any campaign.”

Buttressing those claims of political disinterest, he notably declined to bite on some of the more damaging suggestions that were dangled in front of him by counsel for the GOP majority on the committee.

To take one example, a lawyer asked Shapley if he believed Wolf was “angling for some sort of position in the [Biden] administration in the Justice Department.” 

Shapley answered, “I have no idea.”

Asked whether he had heard “chatter” to that effect, Shapley again demurred.

“No, I’ve never heard that,” he said.

What is the counterargument?

Attorney General Merrick Garland has pushed back hard at any suggestion that Weiss was thwarted by others or lacked the authority to bring charges.

“He was given complete authority to make all decisions on his own,” Garland said at a press conference late last week. 

Garland said that Weiss had the power to “make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.” 

“I don’t know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution given that he has this authority,” Garland also claimed.

Crucially, in a June 7 letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Weiss wrote that he did indeed have “ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges.”

This does not disqualify all of Shapley’s allegations by any means. But it is a sizable challenge for those who want those allegations to be taken at face value. 

Basically, a Trump-appointed prosecutor is denying Shapley’s narrative of pro-Biden political interference. That’s clearly important.

Anything else?

Shapley’s testimony includes other details that raise further questions about law enforcement’s conduct or are personally embarrassing for Hunter Biden.

In the first category, Shapley’s testimony includes details about the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop.

When the laptop’s existence became public in October 2020 — weeks before the presidential election — doubts were raised about its veracity. Twitter, in its pre-Elon Musk era, controversially blocked users from sharing a New York Post story on the laptop.

But, according to Shapley, the FBI had determined long before that — in November 2019 — that the laptop was authentic.

Other details from his testimony are more lurid and personal.

He states that the whole investigation into Hunter Biden began “as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

Part of the possible case for misconduct regarding tax affairs, he testified, involved “multiple examples” of Hunter Biden paying for flights for prostitutes and filing the costs as a business expense.

What happens next?

The controversy is not going to disappear quickly, that’s for sure.

Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has written to Weiss asking him to clarify his previous claim that he had “ultimate authority over the matter.”

Garland has said that he would have no problem with Weiss testifying to Congress.

The matter seems, at this stage, unlikely to have any effect on Hunter Biden’s legal case. In a plea deal revealed last week, the president’s son agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and enter a “diversion” agreement over a gun charge.

Politically, the battle is heating up, however. 

The conflict between Shapley’s account and Garland’s version of events — and the questions raised by that conflict — will fuel more controversy for a long time to come.