New York Post, May 24, 2023

IRS coverup of Hunter Biden could be scandal that sinks a presidency

by James Bovard

In his “Beautiful Things” memoir, Hunter Biden wrote: “I still have a ton of work to do . . . clearing the wreckage of my past.” And Attorney General Merrick Garland is just the bulldozer Hunter needs to clear that wreckage.

CNBC reported last month that federal prosecutors could charge Hunter with three tax crimes, including a felony charge for tax evasion. The IRS reportedly “finished its investigation more than a year ago” but no charges have been filed.

Mystery solved? Last month, an IRS criminal supervisory special agent filed a whistleblower complaint asserting that the investigation of Hunter Biden’s tax violations is being blocked by “preferential treatment and politics.” Monday, a special agent in the IRS’s international tax and financial crimes group who had spent five years investigating Hunter Biden also filed a whistleblower complaint on the Biden case.  Rather than respecting the concerns of veteran investigators, “the IRS responded with accusations of criminal conduct and warnings to other agents in an apparent attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might raise similar concerns,” according to Mark Lytle and Tristian Leavitt, lawyers for the first whistleblower.

Hunter Biden is a tax dodger straight out of IRS Central Casting. He and other Bidens pocketed more than $10 million from shady foreigners, triggering a bushel of Treasury Department suspicious-activity reports.

Hunter stiffed the IRS and was slapped by a tax lien of $112,805 for his 2015 taxes. His tax defaults were so bad that the IRS threatened to cancel his passport. The IRS began formally investigating Hunter in 2018; by January 2020, a team of a dozen IRS employees were working on his case. As early as summer 2020, the IRS supervisor whistleblower notified his superiors about the Justice Department’s “irregularities” in the case.

If Hunter had been charged with tax violations prior to the 2020 election, his father might have lost the race because it would have bolstered Donald Trump’s charges of Joe Biden’s corruption.

Last year, Hunter was saved by an angel of mercy when a Hollywood mega-lawyer paid Hunter’s $2 million+ IRS debt. Last week, another angel of mercy arrived when the Justice Department ordered the IRS to effectively fire its entire team that had spent years investigating Hunter Biden. John Fort, the former chief of the IRS’s criminal division, said the purge of IRS investigators could be unprecedented.

The IRS supervisor whistleblower asserts that Attorney General Garland falsely testified to Congress in March when he said the US attorney supervising the Hunter Biden prosecution, David Weiss, could file charges even for alleged crimes that occurred beyond Delaware (Weiss’ jurisdiction). Hunter’s tax crimes could span the globe.

Since the entire IRS investigative team has been dismissed, maybe Garland will order the IRS to re-staff the prosecution with rookie IRS employees who previously only handled slam-dunk Earned Income Tax Credit fraud cases. The loss of IRS investigative expertise could make it easier to bury the tawdry tax evasion details in a wrist-slap plea deal.

This would not be the first time that a rigged IRS audit changed American presidential history. In 1944, Congressman Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) was on the verge of political destruction thanks to an 18-month investigation by a team of IRS investigators into his failure to report campaign contributions as personal income. After LBJ finagled an emergency meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt, the IRS investigation vanished without a trace. If the IRS had filed charges against LBJ, he never would have been elected to the Senate or the presidency.

The House Ways and Means Committee will hear the IRS whistleblowers in a closed hearing Friday. Democratic members of Congress will probably zero in on whether either whistleblower ever owned or wore a MAGA hat. After their testimony concludes, The Washington Post will likely rush to report that the hearing offered no evidence of official misconduct or Biden rascality.

But the Team Biden damage-control operation may not hold forever. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment for President Richard Nixon for, among other charges, causing “income tax audits” to be “conducted in a discriminatory manner.” How many more leaks can the Biden presidency survive?

James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.