BIDENS’ ‘SECRET’ WEAPON
Ex-fed ‘not authorized’ to testify
WASHINGTON — The former federal prosecutor who allegedly shielded President Biden and his son Hunter during a criminal investigation testified 79 times to Congress that she was “not authorized” by the Justice Department to answer questions about the case, according to a transcript reviewed by The Post.
Ex-Assistant Delaware US Attorney Lesley Wolf repeatedly cited a five-page authorization letter from Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer as she refused to answer questions during a House Judiciary Committee deposition last week.
Weinsheimer’s Dec. 12 letter, also reviewed by The Post, says: “The Department generally does not authorize congressional testimony from line-level personnel, especially relating to an ongoing investigation with charges pending in court. The Department has declined to do so in connection with this matter.”
Wolf ’s dozens of refusals to answer questions — a day after the House voted to authorize an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden — frustrated attempts to firm up the storyline involving what whistleblowers say was a sweeping coverup by Wolf and colleagues to protect the Biden family.
The near-blanket rejection of questions follows pressure from House Republicans on the administration to allow witness testimony and could bolster GOP arguments that the White House is obstructing the inquiry, which itself could form an article of impeachment.
Shielding ‘the big guy’
Two IRS agents who worked on the long-running tax fraud investigation of Hunter, which focused on his foreign income from countries such as China and Ukraine, alleged in prior testimony to House committees that Wolf tipped off the first son’s lawyers to investigative steps and forbade inquiries into Joe Biden, even when communications mentioned him.
IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, who oversaw the Hunter investigation for three years, and case agent Joseph Ziegler, who worked on the inquiry for five years, made a series of specific claims against Wolf, which she did not refute in her testimony.
Tax investigators learned in December 2020 that Wolf “reached out to Hunter’s defense counsel and told them” about investigators’ plans to search a northern Virginia storage unit that contained business records, “circumventing our chance to get to evidence from potentially being destroyed, manipulated or concealed,” Ziegler testified in July.
Shapley testified that investigators were months earlier barred from searching a guest house at Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home where Hunter often stayed.
Wolf also allegedly objected on Dec. 3, 2020, to questioning a key Biden family associate, Rob Walker, about the president.
“Wolf interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to ask questions about ‘dad,’ ” Shapley testified. “When multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had to ask, she responded, there’s no specific criminality to that line of questioning. This upset the FBI, too.”
Wolf served under Delaware US Attorney David Weiss. The whistleblowers accused Weiss’ office of giving Hunter’s legal team advance knowledge of a planned interview attempt in 2020, and said that prosecutors didn’t pass along a paid FBI informant’s tip that Joe and Hunter received $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which paid Hunter a salary of up to $1 million.
DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment