Blam: The House Ways and Means Committee just dropped a howitzer round into the Justice Department’s bid to sweep the Biden scandals under the rug.
The release of whistleblower testimony and other findings implicates Attorney General Merrick Garland not only in perjury, but in full-on obstruction of justice.
The revelations also tie President Joe Biden far closer to Hunter’s sleaze.
It’s astonishing that Garland let the Hunter plea proffer proceed this week, when he had to know House Republicans were sitting on this dynamite.
For starters, Ways & Means chair Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) told reporters that the prosecutor officially in charge of the case, Delaware US Attorney David Weiss, wanted to charge Hunter last year first in the District of Columbia and then in California, only to be denied both times.
That directly contradicts Garland’s sworn testimony — claims he affirmed under multiple followups.
Smith also says the Biden Justice Department repeatedly turned down Weiss requests for special-counsel status, which would’ve allowed him to charge (and investigate) as he saw fit, without political interference.
But the rot at Justice preceded the Biden presidency: The whistleblowers — who have no apparent motive to lie about anything, and indeed risked their careers by coming forward — allege multiple incidents in 2020 when prosecutors outright squashed parts of the investigation.
Per whistleblower Gary Shapley, Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf “told us there was more than enough probable cause for the physical search warrant” for Joe Biden’s guest house (where Hunter often stayed) in September 2020 — but Wolf refused to go for it, arguing it wasn’t worth the political price.
Wolf in December 2020 even quashed an IRS warrant to search Hunter’s own Northern Virginia storage unit: He agreed to OK it if the unit went untouched for a month, but immediately “reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit.”
Higher-ups also sabotaged investigators’ efforts to interview witnesses, Shapley says.
Another whistleblower says that information then-AG Bill Barr now says was sent to the Delaware office in June 2020 never made it to the IRS team.
Heck, the investigators didn’t even get access to Hunter’s laptop, though the FBI got and verified it in 2019.
(That’s right, a year before The Post was falsely accused of publishing “Russian disinformation”).
Add to this Hunter’s July 2017 WhatsApp message to a Chinese “client” that the investigators uncovered in mid-2020 but were never allowed to follow up on:
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, 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.”
Was Joe sitting next to him at that moment?
Plainly, the Justice Department didn’t want to know.
Then there’s the fact that the crack IRS team identified $8.3 million in unreported Hunter income — yet the plea deal mentions less than half that amount.
Without question, the House is going to need a lot more sworn testimony — from Weiss, Wolf, Garland and many more — to even begin getting to the bottom of this mess.
In the meantime, Gavin Newsom and other top Democrats should amp up preparations to jump into the 2024 race.