How the Hunter Biden cover-up continues to this day

In the same week that Hunter Biden burst back onto the public stage to play the victim and lash out at Democrats, we also heard from his one time protector turned reluctant nemesis, Special Counsel David Weiss, with similarly self serving and disingenuous testimony to Congress.

Weiss, the former US Attorney in the Bidens’ home state of Delaware who presided over the troubled five year investigation into the former First Son, told the House Judiciary Committee that there just wasn’t enough evidence to justify charging Hunter under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). 

His investigators “couldn’t put together a sufficient case,” he said in June testimony released last week.

That’s pretty rich, considering that those very IRS investigators complained bitterly about the obstruction and slow walking they faced on Weiss’ watch every time they pursued an investigative trail that led to Joe Biden and the lucrative foreign lobbying Hunter did in his father’s name.

That’s why IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and Special Agent Joseph Ziegler blew up their successful careers and became whistleblowers.

Hunter’s business model during his father’s vice presidency and beyond revolved around foreign lobbying — including for the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma that was paying him a million dollars a year, Chinese government-linked firms BHR and CEFC, and an oligarch client in Romania.

In fact, the very first email this newspaper published from Hunter’s infamous laptop was from a Burisma executive, thanking him for arranging a meeting with his father the previous night.

It wasn’t just any old meeting, either. 

Hunter had invited VP Biden to a private dinner at Georgetown restaurant Cafe Milano in April 2015 to meet his partners from Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, as his former “best friend in business” Devon Archer told Congress. 

In their upcoming tell-all book, “The Whistleblowers v the Big Guy,” Shapley and Ziegler point out that, along with that Burisma bombshell, emails and communications they recovered from the laptop showed that Hunter’s relationship with DC lobbying shop Blue Star Strategies was tied to his position on the Burisma board and that the firm had been hired “to influence U.S. government officials on Burisma’s behalf.”

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“These connections raised red flags about potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act FARA and any comprehensive warrant would naturally include references to individuals who may have been involved, even tangentially.”

And so, when their team drafted a search warrant related to potential FARA violation, Weiss’ top U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf ordered them to remove all references to “Political Figure 1,” the DOJ pseudonym for Joe Biden.

 “Please focus on FARA evidence only. There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,” Wolf wrote in an August 2020 email, according to their whistleblower testimony to Congress.

Whenever their investigations might lead to Joe Biden they found subpoenas were denied, interviews were canceled or not allowed, and Hunter’s lawyers were tipped off before search warrants could be executed.

Prosecutors cited bad “optics” or questioned whether the “juice was worth the squeeze”

For instance, Shapley testified that Wolf refused to approve a search warrant for a guest house Hunter had been staying in on Joe’s palatial Delaware estate as part of FARA-related evidence collection. 

When they discovered incriminating WhatsApp messages Hunter wrote to a business partner at Chinese energy company CEFC on July 30, 2017, citing his father, the investigators were blocked from using phone location data to confirm that Joe really was in the room.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter wrote, demanding $10 million.

“I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.”

Hunter also threatened that his father would retaliate if the Chinese did not do as he commanded:  “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.” 

Here was Hunter explicitly claiming his father was involved in his business negotiations. Apart from the fact that Joe claimed that he knew nothing about his son’s overseas business dealings, Shapley and Ziegler decided there were serious tax implications to the conversation, but they were blocked from pursuing them. 

They weren’t even allowed to find out if Hunter had sent the message from Joe’s house.

“The message was clear,” Shapley and Ziegler write in “The Whistleblowers v. the Big Guy.” “Although we were investigating Joe Biden’s son — who, it seemed, had often involved his father in his shady overseas business dealings — none of our materials were supposed to mention Joe Biden.

“Even when we needed material that might be in one of Joe Biden’s homes or storage units, we couldn’t mention him. The document might leak to the press, and that would make the Biden campaign look bad. 

“And in the summer of 2020, there was nothing that the leadership of the FBI wanted less than to make Joe Biden look bad. Doing so might help elect Donald Trump for a second time.”

How different was the way the FBI handled Donald Trump compared to Joe Biden. Whether it was the fake Steele Dossier the FBI treated as if it were legitimate evidence, or the raid on Mar a Lago, there was no concern about the “optics” of investigating a sitting president or presidential candidate when it was Trump.

As for FARA, the once little-used law against lobbying the US on behalf of foreign interests has been selectively used to target Trump allies and Democrat enemies. 

For example, Paul Manafort, former chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign, was charged with FARA. 

So, too, was Gal Luft, the original Hunter Biden whistleblower, who told FBI and DOJ officials in a March 2019 secret meeting in Brussels that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were on the payroll of the Chinese. 

His accurate information was buried and then, one week before Republicans took back the House in 2022, Luft was charged with FARA and other violations. He is currently languishing in jail in Cyprus while Hunter escaped scot free.

In the last days of his presidency, Joe issued a uniquely tailored pardon for his son, stretching back 11 years and covering Hunter’s conviction on gun charges and guilty plea on felony tax evasion charges that Weiss was forced to press after the sweetheart plea deal he’d stitched together with Hunter’s lawyers fell apart in the wake of Shapley and Ziegler’s revelations. 

In the end, Weiss forced the IRS to remove Shapley and Ziegler from the investigation as soon as he suspected Shapley had blown the whistle. The Office of Special Counsel last year determined that the IRS had illegally retaliated against the pair by removing them from the investigation after they made protected disclosures to Congress about DOJ interference in the probe.

All the obstruction and interference and slow walking past statutes of limitation happened under the benign leadership of David Weiss.

So spare us his mealy mouthed justifications for squibbing what should have been the most consequential political corruption investigation in history.