The agent at the Internal Revenue Service who has alleged that the ongoing criminal investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been littered with politics and lies has now been pulled from that inquiry.
On Monday, the lawyers for the whistleblower informed Congress that they believe that this move is being done potentially in retaliation for speaking out. The attorneys, Tristan Leavitt and Mark Lytle, said that their client – who is a criminal supervisory special agent at the IRS – was informed “that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblowers to Congress.”
The two lawyers said that their client ultimately was “informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice.” They also added that the “move is clearly retaliatory and may also constitute obstruction of a congressional inquiry.”
For a few years, investigators at both the IRS and FBI reportedly have been taking a look at the tax affairs and business dealings of Hunter Biden.
Sources mentioned to The Washington Post after Biden’s legal team met with officials at the Department of Justice last month that David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney in Delaware, could soon issue gun-related and tax charges.
Hunter Biden has said he fully expects that his name will be cleared of all the allegations against him, and his father also said that Hunter has “done nothing wrong.”
A supervisory agent with the IRS contacted some of Washington’s leading lawmakers in April trying to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress about the Hunter Biden investigation. Lawyers for that agent met with investigators at Congress, during which they laid the groundwork for what could ultimately turn into a formal disclosure that would involve tax information for Hunter Biden.
Lytle has already said that his client made disclosures to a few different inspectors general, which has included “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions … [a] failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case … [and claims that] contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”
Lytle recently said that his client has possession of communications including emails that prove the disclosures he has made.
The official who Lytle referenced in the letter he sent to Congress has been identified as Merrick Garland, the U.S. Attorney General. He briefly spoke about the Hunter Biden inquiry when he gave testimony to Congress back in March.
As he told the Judiciary Committee in the Senate at the time:
“I pledged not to interfere with that investigation and I have carried through on my pledge.”
An attorney for Hunter Biden, Chris Clark, said recently that the official at the IRS “appears” that he has committed a criminal offense. As the lawyer said in a statement:
“It is a felony for an IRS agent to improperly disclose information about an ongoing tax investigation.”
