The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Wednesday that it will hold a hearing next week with testimony from IRS whistleblowers on alleged meddling in the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden.
The public hearing, scheduled for July 19, is expected to focus on testimony from Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator, and a second unnamed IRS criminal investigator who possess “critical information” related to the committee’s probe into the Biden family, the panel said in its announcement.
Hunter Biden last month agreed to plead guilty to a pair of federal misdemeanor counts in Delaware of failing to pay his taxes, an agreement that some Republicans lamented was insufficient punishment following a Justice Department investigation of the president’s son that spanned five years.
During closed-door testimony in May, Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee under oath that U.S. Attorney David Weiss had sought authority to charge Biden in the District of Columbia and California with broader charges.
But in a letter this week to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Weiss said that he has “never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”
Abbe Lowell, one of Biden’s attorneys, has also denied the veracity of a message that the president’s son allegedly sent to a Chinese businessman in 2017 demanding payment. Shapley told the Ways and Means Committee that he had obtained the message, but Lowell said purported screenshots of communications between Biden and the businessman are “not real and contain myriad of issues.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has maintained that the president and his family members engaged in bribery and corruption, despite repeatedly releasing documents that have not substantiated the accusations.
In a statement Wednesday, Comer called the upcoming hearing a chance to hear directly from Shapley and the other whistleblower whom he described as “credible.”
The hearing’s announcement comes the same week an unsealed indictment revealed federal charges against Gal Luft, who has alleged in so-far unsubstantiated public statements promoted by House Republicans that the Biden family received payments from Chinese nationals with ties to Chinese intelligence and that Hunter Biden had a mole inside the FBI.
Luft was charged with acting as an unregistered agent for the Chinese government, trafficking weapons and lying to federal agents.
Comer last week called Luft “very credible” and stood by that description on Tuesday, while noting he has never spoken to Luft.
