Hypocrisy hell on subpoenas
HYPOCRISY is Washington, DC’s lifeblood, so it was a nice change when DC Judge Ana Reyes lambasted the Justice Department for instructing two lawyers in its Tax Division to disregard a congressional subpoena in the Hunter Biden investigation, all while it has been zealously prosecuting Trump officials for the very same offense.
Peter Navarro, a former Trump trade adviser, is sitting in jail for defying a subpoena from Nancy Pelosi’s star chamber, the January 6 Committee.
“There’s a person in jail right now because you all brought a criminal lawsuit against him because he did not appear for a House subpoena,” Reyes said, referring to Navarro. “And now you guys are flouting those subpoenas . . . I think it’s quite rich you guys pursue criminal investigations and put people in jail for not showing up.”
It’s about time someone in authority called out the hypocrisy and egregious double standard permeating every corner of the federal government, and if even a Biden-appointed judge like Reyes can see the problem, you know we’ve reached a tipping point.
It’s a crowded field but one of the worst forked tongues in the Biden administration is IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
He professes to Congress that he protects whistleblowers, but in practice he has hung Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler out to dry.
150 exhibits
The IRS investigators blew the whistle last year on egregious DOJ obstruction of the Hunter Biden investigation in Delaware. They made lawful whistleblower disclosures internally and to IRS and DOJ watchdogs before testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee. The story they told paints a sorry picture of their IRS bosses who behaved like cowards when Shapley kept informing them about wrongdoing in the investigation. They ignored the problem and so it ballooned out of control, forcing two honorable public servants to risk their careers by going public.
Shapley and Ziegler brought more than 150 exhibits when they testified to Congress last year about the shocking interference by prosecutors in the investigation. They alleged that prosecutors tipped off Hunter’s legal team about a planned search warrant of his storage unit, refused to allow them to search the cottage on his father’s estate where he had been living, played dead on their requests to geolocate Hunter’s phone after he sent a threatening WhatsApp message to Chinese partners claiming he was sitting next to his father.
The investigators were prevented from interviewing Hunter after the 2020 election because his father’s transition team was tipped off the night before, were denied access to Hunter’s laptop and to an FD-1023 document from a trusted FBI paid informant who alleged Joe and Hunter had taken bribes from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was paying Hunter $1 million a year when his father was VP. (That informant is currently in jail in California, awaiting trial on charges that he lied to the FBI). It goes on and on.
They alleged that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss slow-walked the investigation, misled them about his power to bring charges in California and DC, allowed the statute of limitations to run out on the most serious charges, allowed his prosecutors to interfere with the investigation in order to protect Joe Biden, and ultimately approved a sweetheart plea deal that would make all Hunter’s problems go away. It was only when a judge in Delaware smelled a rat that the deal collapsed, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was forced to appoint a special counsel.
Doing Bidens’ bidding
Unfortunately, he appointed Weiss, who shares with Hunter and his lawyers an antipathy for the whistleblowers who blew up their cozy deal and exposed Weiss’ favorable accommodations of the Bidens.
Weiss has since indicted Hunter on tax charges and for lying about his crack cocaine use on a background check form when he bought a gun.
Now a filing by Weiss suggests Shapley and Ziegler may be under federal investigation themselves for making their disclosures, as Werfel keeps changing the goalposts.
It is all part of an ongoing pattern of retaliation by their senior leadership against the pair, who also are under aggressive attack from Hunter’s pricey lawyers.
Werfel makes supportive noises, but when the rubber hits the road and he has two whistleblowers being attacked and intimidated, he does nothing. Both Shapley and Ziegler have asked him for a meeting to discuss their concerns. But he ignores them.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the congressional champion of whistleblowers, asked Werfel to meet Shapley and Ziegler a year ago and reiterated that request this month, yet they are still waiting.
“I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment that we must be supportive of whistleblowers,” Werfel wrote in a letter to Grassley. But he still cowers in his ivory castle and uses weaselly words to describe them, not as whistleblowers, but as “two employees [who] claimed whistleblower status.”
It is worm-like behavior not to defend your people and at least meet with them.
“We appreciate Commissioner Werfel’s words on paper and in the hearing before the Senate Finance Committee about support for whistleblowers,” Shapley and Ziegler told me in a joint statement. “But those words don’t match what’s really happening at the IRS.
“They have had multiple opportunities to stand beside us, but instead they stand in the corner letting misstatements go unanswered.
“The fact that we still haven’t heard from the commissioner more than a year after we asked for a meeting and a week after Senator Grassley personally asked him to meet with us to hear our story, says everything you need to know about the mentality of the agency toward employees with actual names who followed the letter of the law to make protected whistleblower disclosures.
“The failure to acknowledge that simple truth should be very disturbing to the public and to Congress.”
Every American should be disturbed by the mistreatment of these two honorable public servants who are being victimized for standing up for equal justice for all.