The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Wednesday that it will hold a hearing next week on testimony from IRS whistleblowers about alleged meddling in the Justice Department’s investigation into Hunter Biden.
The public hearing, scheduled for July 19, is expected to focus on testimony from Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator and an unnamed second IRS criminal investigator who possesses “critical information” related to the committee’s investigation into the Biden family, the panel said. said in his ad.
Hunter Biden agreed last month to plead guilty to a pair of federal misdemeanors in Delaware for failing to pay his taxes, a deal some Republicans bemoaned as insufficient punishment following a five-year Justice Department investigation into the president’s son. .
During closed-door testimony in May, Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee under oath that U.S. Attorney David Weiss had sought leave to indict Biden in the District of Columbia and California on broader charges.
But in a letter this week to Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Weiss said he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”
Abbe Lowell, one of Biden’s lawyers, has also denied the veracity of a message the president’s son allegedly sent to a Chinese businessman in 2017 demanding payment. Shapley told the Ways and Means Committee that he had obtained the message, but Lowell said the purported screenshots of communications between Biden and the businessman “are not real and contain a lot of problems.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, has maintained that the president and members of his family engaged in bribery and corruption, despite repeatedly releasing documents that have not substantiated the allegations.
in a statement On Wednesday, Comer called the upcoming hearing an opportunity to hear directly from Shapley and the other whistleblower whom he described as “credible.”
The hearing announcement comes the same week that an unsealed indictment unsealed federal charges against Gal Luft, who has alleged in hitherto unsubstantiated public statements promoted by House Republicans that the Biden family received payments from Chinese citizens with ties to Chinese intelligence and that Hunter Biden was a mole within the FBI.
Luft was charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government, trafficking weapons and lying to federal agents.
Comer last week called Luft “very credible” and stood by that description Tuesday, while noting that he has never spoken to Luft.
