A former FBI supervisory special agent who worked on the Hunter Biden investigation corroborated assertions by two IRS whistleblowers that FBI headquarters tipped off the Secret Service and the Biden presidential transition team about investigative plans, according to a new transcript.
The transcript released Monday by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee compounds questionable investigative conduct in a probe run for five years by the office of U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss.
On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Weiss as special counsel in the case, officially giving Weiss more authority and powers to investigate the case in any jurisdiction. Previously, Weiss was confined to initiating legal action in Delaware, which Joe Biden represented in the Senate for 36 years before becoming vice president.
“The Oversight Committee has no confidence in U.S. Attorney Weiss as special counsel given his inability to prevent the Biden transition team from being contacted and federal agents were not permitted to interview Hunter Biden as planned,” Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., said in a public statement.
A federal judge last month threw out what critics had called a sweetheart plea agreement between federal prosecutors and Hunter Biden on tax and firearms charges, a deal in which the younger Biden would not do time behind bars.
The former supervisory special agent at the FBI isn’t named in the transcript, but committee staff said he worked for the FBI for 20 years and retired in June 2022.
The agent backed up testimony to House investigators from an IRS supervisory special agent, Gary Shapley.
In separate testimony, the committee’s majority counsel asked the former FBI supervisory special agent if he was upset that FBI headquarters had notified the Biden presidential transition team in December 2020 about plans to interview the president-elect’s son.
“I felt it was people that did not need to know about our intent,” the former FBI official said. “I believe that the Secret Service had to be notified for our safety, for lack of confusion, for deconfliction, which we would do in so many other cases, but I didn’t understand why the initial notification [of the Biden transition team].”
Shapley testified that Hunter Biden was assigned Secret Service protection on Dec. 3, 2020, about a month after the presidential election in which Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump.
IRS and FBI investigators developed a plan for the FBI’s Los Angeles office to reach out Dec. 8 to the Secret Service in LA and inform the agency of plans to go to the younger Biden’s residence to interview him.
However, those plans were interrupted the day before, when FBI headquarters notified Secret Service headquarters as well as the Biden presidential transition team, made up of political officials setting up the Biden administration.
In testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, Shapley said: “This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach of the witness.”
In his testimony, the former FBI agent said “the initial plan was to make approaches of multiple witnesses, to include subject Hunter Biden, on Dec. 8.”
He added later: “But suffice it to say, I was informed that FBI headquarters had contacted Secret Service headquarters and had made a notification at that time, or somewhere around that time on the evening of the 7th.”
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