Congressional Republicans are being accused of political manipulation of the Justice system with the recent indictment of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on three felony gun charges.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys fired off a letter to Congressional Republicans accusing them of “interference” in a criminal investigation after the president’s son was indicted on Thursday.
“Your blatant efforts achieved your goal as the U.S. Attorney in Delaware today filed gun charges against our client — charges that are unprecedented when not part of some other criminal conduct and have been found unconstitutional by a federal court of appeals — and who reversed his earlier decision that such charges were not warranted,” Lowell wrote. “Your improper interference now affecting a federal prosecutor is a much greater threat to society than the 11 days that Mr. Biden possessed an unloaded gun.”
Tristan Leavitt, an attorney with the nonprofit group Empower Oversight, who represents one of the IRS whistleblowers, defended his client in a statement to Politico.
“Here we go again,” he said in a statement. “Hunter Biden’s attorneys have already made this argument to Judge Maryellen Noreika, who reviewed the whistleblower materials and rejected defense counsel’s baseless allegations, including their claims about grand jury secrecy violations. Taxpayer privacy laws are written by Congress, and it gave itself authority in those laws to hear disclosures about taxpayer information. Whether Congress decides to make that information public pursuant to its statutory process is up to them.”
According to Politico, “Lowell also said that the actions of the two IRS agents pressured the Justice Department to change its position in plea deal negotiations. Before one of the whistleblowers discussed the case on a national TV interview, the Justice Department was weighing ‘a consensual non-prosecution resolution to all conduct under investigation, where the resolution proposed by both sides did not include any guilty plea,’ Lowell wrote. But one day after the interview aired, he added, prosecutors said they would require Biden to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges.
Leavitt also remarked on the social media platform X about the development.
?? Hunter Biden’s attorneys are amping up their outrageous attempts to get the IRS whistleblowers prosecuted. The law is clearly on our side, and saying otherwise again and again doesn’t make it true. But that hasn’t stopped them from lashing out. ?https://t.co/FoZY0aMx1Z
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) September 15, 2023
“Hunter Biden’s attorneys are amping up their outrageous attempts to get the IRS whistleblowers prosecuted,” he argued. “The law is clearly on our side, and saying otherwise again and again doesn’t make it true. But that hasn’t stopped them from lashing out.”
“Whether their goal is to actually effect a retaliatory prosecution of the whistleblowers, argue a tainted jury pool in the gun case, or just muddy the waters on the entire process is unclear. (Maybe it’s all of the above!) Regardless, this shows how clearly desperate they are,” he continued.
“I’ve worked with whistleblowers my entire legal career–Republicans, Democrats, independents and more,” he added. “I believe wholeheartedly our government has to protect whistleblowers if we want people to put their careers on the line to disclose problems in gov’t.”
“There also have to be mechanisms for whistleblowers to make disclosures, and that’s what Hunter Biden’s attorneys don’t seem to understand,” he noted. “Congress wrote the tax code, established the requirements for tax secrecy–and gave itself a way to release tax information when it chose.”
“Judge Noreika acknowledged as much when she denied the request from Hunter Biden’s legal team to seal Rep. Jason Smith’s amicus brief, which included the IRS whistleblower transcripts,” he went on. “Defense counsel’s arguments today aren’t any different than those rejected by Judge Noreika.”
“But that hasn’t stopped attorneys for the President’s son from repeatedly lobbying the Biden Justice Department to initiate retaliatory prosecutions of SSA Shapley and then SA Ziegler for lawfully making protected whistleblower disclosures,” he concluded.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to testify before Congress next week and will almost certainly be asked about the appointment of Special Counsel David Weiss. Hunter Biden’s attorney Lowell has argued that Weiss should have been “barred” from being charged with felony gun counts under a prior legal agreement.
Furthermore, as the legal analyst Mike Davis of the Article III Project pointed out, the Hunter Biden indictment may be intended to frustrate calling him as a witness in the House’s impeachment inquiry.
