WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans raised unsubstantiated allegations Wednesday against President Joe Biden over his family’s finances as they summoned IRS whistleblowers to testify publicly for the first time about claims the Justice Department improperly interfered with a tax investigation into Biden’s son Hunter.
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Lawmakers heard from the two IRS agents assigned to the Hunter Biden case, which looked into his failure to pay taxes, for six hours of what was often grueling back-and-forth testimony. The hearing came after the president’s son pleaded guilty last month to misdemeanor tax charges in what Republicans have derided as a “sweetheart” deal.
Still, House Republicans are deepening their own investigation, making broad claims of corruption and wrongdoing by the Bidens, which they acknowledge have not been proven to be true.
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“We will continue to follow the money trail,” said Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, as he opened the session.
The Justice Department has denied the whistleblowers’ allegations. And the White House, in a statement, called the investigation and subsequent hearing part of “politically-motivated attacks on a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, the rule of law, and the independence of our justice system.”
The top Democrat on the committee, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, said the hearing was “a theater of the absurd.”
IRS supervisory special agent Greg Shapley, and a second agent, Joe Ziegler, claimed there was what Shapley called in testimony a pattern of “slow-walking investigative steps” into Hunter Biden, including during the Trump administration in the months before the 2020 election that Joe Biden won.
One of Shapley’s most detailed claims was that U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware, the federal prosecutor who led the investigation, asked for special counsel status in order to bring the tax cases against Hunter Biden in jurisdictions outside Delaware, including the District of Columbia and California, but was denied.
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