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WaPo Is Suppressing Information that Might Debunk Devlin Barrett’s Latest Spin

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Last week, I asked the WaPo if they would release the two reports — one from Johns Hopkins professor Matt Green and the other from InfoSec expert Jake Williams — that were the basis of this report on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

I had asked once before, in May 2022.

But since I had originally asked, a bunch of things had happened to make those reports more newsworthy. Hunter Biden had countersued John Paul Mac Isaac (here’s the WaPo’s report). James Comer has stumbled over and over in his unabashed effort to manufacture a scandal (in which the WaPo has played along, still treating it as a credible investigation). Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office released a plea deal to which Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty next week (here’s the WaPo report). IRS agents claiming to be whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Whistleblower X, shared notes that raised questions about the FBI treatment of the device (but WaPo didn’t mention that in their report). Abbe Lowell claimed that Shapley misidentified Hunter Biden’s interlocutors in some key WhatsApp messages (something else WaPo didn’t mention even while repeating the substance of the contested WhatsApp texts). Denver Riggleman, who has been working as part of a Hunter Biden team to examine what has been released, has alleged some of the data has been manipulated (something WaPo hasn’t bothered to cover at all).

That all led me to start looking at the publicly released (but unreliable) emails at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, where I’ve discovered that during a period when Hunter Biden was getting Ketamine treatment and bookended by two communications from him that indicated he was not getting outside comms, someone:

  • Split Hunter’s Uber account, on which his two iCloud accounts had previously been joined
  • Accessed Hunter’s rhb iCloud account from a browser
  • Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account
  • Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf
  • Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device
  • Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account
  • Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account
  • Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account
  • Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account
  • Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases
  • Made changes to the Uber (and Waze) account associated with an XS phone that would be included in the “laptop”
  • Restored rhb as an alternate address to the account
  • Restored contacts from an unidentified prior change
  • Obtained — including at the droidhunter email account — a download link of the entire rhbdc iCloud account
  • Backed up the XS phone to the laptop
  • Gotten a trial app of a photo editor
  • Backed up an iPad to the laptop
  • Changed the iTunes password
  • Added the Dr. Fone account, allowing you to adopt a chosen second phone number for a phone, to a second of Hunter’s accounts
  • Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone
  • Restored the prior trusted phone number
  • Added software that could record calls
  • Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store
  • Got a new Mac phone for the droidhunter account

That series of changes are not the only emails in the MarcoPolo set that should raise questions about whether Hunter Biden’s digital identity may have been compromised.

Two that are important to the topic of this post are, first, that a great many devices logged into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts in 2018 and 2019, yet many of them don’t appear to be tied to him getting his own new iPhone or computer, and only rarely are the existing devices shut down or passwords changed afterwards. The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

But the timeline above provides some reason to believe that at the time the “laptop” was packaged up for delivery to John Paul Mac Isaac, Hunter Biden did not have complete — if any — control of his own communications.

I wouldn’t be able to prove whether Hunter Biden was hacked during this key period in 2019. It would require subpoena power and access to reliable data. But as it happens, Whistleblower X had subpoena power — and was already watching Hunter Biden closely — in precisely the period this happened.

For those of us who don’t have subpoena power, though, we have to rely on publicly available evidence, filtered through partisan gatekeepers alleged to have tampered with the device.

The two reports done for the WaPo are the only known assessments of the drive containing the “laptop” primarily using forensic — as opposed to a correlative — methodology. The correlative methodology, which shows all the communications on the drive confirm the others, unsurprisingly concludes that the “laptop” came from one of Hunter Biden’s several iCloud accounts.

The forensic methodology looked for digital verification — not just of email signatures, but also of the drive itself. Both Green and Williams raised questions about the treatment of and missing digital signatures on the drive, questions that seem to match what Riggleman’s team is seeing.

Indeed, the concerns that Green and Williams raised may explain something the FBI itself found. Shapley’s notes recorded that on March 31, 2020, someone wrote an email “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive” — an email that was being intentionally withheld from the agents (especially Whistleblower X) who might one day testify at trial.

This sounds like it might reflect the same concerns raised by anyone external examining the drive forensically. If it does, it would suggest that some of the irregularities everyone can see in drives released via Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon always existed, including in the one shared with the FBI and in any separate drive shared with Republicans in Congress.

Because of all the new questions raised about the “laptop,” and because of the centrality that the Republicans want it to have on the upcoming election, I thought it reasonable to ask the WaPo to do what even the Washington Examiner was willing to do: show their work. While the Examiner’s report from Gus Dimitrelos tellingly excludes many of the details I’ve laid out above and hides both some key later device accesses and types of apps — especially spyware — loaded onto Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts, while the way the Examiner released it exacerbated the privacy violations on Hunter Biden himself, it nevertheless was useful for explaining how two iCloud accounts were loaded up onto one laptop and how the government was able to obtain WhatsApp texts that don’t show up on the unencrypted parts of the laptop.

After I made several requests, WaPo PR manager Savannah Stephens declined to release the reports, calling the two reports, “foundational reporting documents.”

Marcy, thank you for reaching out. We do not release foundational reporting documents. Our coverage at the time was transparent about how the study was conducted, including this report.

Even though it has two reports that could significantly impact fairly pressing debates — debates the WaPo itself treats as important — the WaPo refuses to release more on these expert reports on the laptop.

Instead of doing that, the WaPo is instead paying Devlin Barrett to do what he does best — write down as true what right wingers tell him to write, not what the public evidence actually shows.

In a story with Matt Viser (the same guy who repeated the content of contested WhatsApp texts without revealing that Abbe Lowell had contested them), Barrett wrote that the testimony of the men he calls “whistleblowers” “show Hunter Biden’s laptop had little role in the investigation into Hunter Biden.”

Barrett and Viser utterly misrepresent the debate over the laptop — dodging the question, in the lede, at least, of whether the laptop can help get to the truth — something once considered the purview of journalism and something WaPo’s own report on this drive had previously done.

For more than two years, Democrats and Republicans have hotly debated the importance of the “Hunter Biden laptop” — insisting that it was either key evidence of corruption or fool’s gold meant to con 2020 voters into abandoning then-candidate Joe Biden.

Both theories were largely wrong, according to two of the agents closest to the investigation of tax crimes allegedly committed by President Biden’s son.

[snip]

But the agents’ accounts also indicate that the laptop played at best a small role in the criminal investigation into potential tax and gun-purchasing violations. Far from a smoking gun, the laptop appears to have been mostly an afterthought to the reams of text messages, emails and other evidence that agents gathered from Hunter Biden’s cloud data. A lawyer for one of those agents said he nevertheless was frustrated by the Justice Department’s refusal to let them review the laptop’s contents.

I’m very interested in the project of this column, because not only is this not what Shapley and Whistleblower X’s testimony said, but it misrepresented and misunderstands how evidence works.

This is a tax investigation. It came from, per Whistleblower X, his examination of what is probably a Russian escort service. But it’s a tax investigation: it relies on financial data that comes directly from banks and other financial institutions, institutions that are — to the extent they aren’t tainted by identity theft or hacking, like people seem to have tried to do to Hunter Biden’s Venmo — inherently reliable.

As for emails and texts, the IRS agents’ testimony (taken in conjunction with the report that the Washington Examiner was ethical enough to release), shows that the IRS didn’t obtain what is probably Hunter Biden’s rhb iCloud account — from which the cited, contested WhatsApp messages were probably obtained a second time — until August 2020, after it got some of the same material on the laptop. That potential taint may be why someone told Barrett to downplay the import of the laptop.

While the laptop may not have played a key role in substantiating a tax case against Hunter Biden, it may well have tainted the evidence in the case. It may well be part of the reason why Hunter Biden is getting to plead to misdemeanor rather than felony tax charges — because as even Whistleblower X explained that he had been told, there are emails that raised concerns about whether this could be charged at all, suggesting this case couldn’t withstand discovery.

Plus, WaPo is being coy here: The laptop may have played little part in a tax investigation reliant on bank records. But it did play a central part in allegations, including WaPo’s own reporting, of foreign influence peddling involving (among others), Burisma, the hack of which became public between the time the IRS started using this laptop as evidence and the time they learned Rudy Giuliani had a role in it.

That part is all pitch, though — yet another instance where Devlin Barrett writes down what right wingers tell him to say and WaPo reports it as if it were true. It’s what WaPo pays him to do.

It’s the claims about the laptop — from an outlet sitting on two reports that raise questions about its reliability — that I find especially curious. Start with this paragraph, which conflates the steps FBI took in November 2019 to authenticate that the laptop was Hunter Biden’s — subscriber information from Apple, a purchase record in Delaware, two but maybe only two phone calls with Mac Isaac, and “other intelligence” — with what the AUSA on the case said about it almost a year later.

After being handed the device by a Wilmington, Del., computer shop owner in 2019, the FBI quickly concluded by examining computer data as well as Hunter Biden’s phone records that the laptop was genuinely his and did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated.

That last bit — “did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated” — published by an outlet sitting on two reports that show the laptop was tampered with? It is a paraphrase from a meeting in October 2020, not a description of legal process served in November 2019. And therein lies a big part of the scandal.

In the actual quote, Wolf — painted as the bad guy here by the IRS agents — was saying that it “is not a priority” for the investigative team to see “if anything was added to the computer by a third party” even after learning that the lawyer for the President, whose demands for this investigation had raised influence problems from the start of the investigation, had some kind of tie to it.

This is as if Peter Strzok, rather than just failing to make sure people writing FISA applications had adverse information about the Steele dossier (which is what frothers think the IG Report showed), had instead said, “fuck it, I don’t care if it is tainted.” These notes show the Hunter Biden investigative team did what right wingers accuse the Crossfire Hurricane team of doing, blowing off the import of the involvement of a campaign in a key piece of evidence.

When the WaPo conflates those two items again later in the piece, they date the quote to May 2020.

Democrats suggested the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign. The information provided by IRS agents to Congress seems to put both the accusations and counter-accusations to rest.

FBI agents were able to determine in early November 2019 that the device they had was registered to Hunter Biden, and phone records showed he had been in contact with the computer shop owner.

“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop,” Shapley wrote in notes that dated that determination to around May 2020.

Dating Lesley Wolf’s comment saying they had no reason to believe anything on the laptop was fabricated to May 2020 is either a deliberate error or a confession that two journalists proclaiming the laptop to lack any taint have no fucking clue what they’re reading.

Wolf said this, at a meeting the investigative team had on October 22, 2020, in the wake of the discovery that Rudy Giuliani had some tie to the laptop, as the team scrambled to memorialize how they had treated a key piece of evidence about which a bunch of questions would now be raised.

A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.

So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices.

Because the laptop had become a huge story, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately,” Devlin Barrett’s star “whistleblower” explained.

And Shapley shows Wolf saying that they had no knowledge, in October 2020, of any fabrications on the laptop. But he records her saying that after “computer guy” said “they could do a csv list that shows when everything was created.”

That is, Wolf said this after “computer guy” described something they had not yet done ten months after obtaining the laptop, had not yet done two months after getting warrants relying on the laptop, that they would need to do to make sure the laptop had not been altered by third parties. Wolf said this after “computer guy” described that the FBI had not done very basic things to verify the integrity of the laptop they should have done ten months earlier, before relying on it.

Again, I’m not sure whether WaPo’s journalists are dishonest or just stupid. But this exchange is critical for another reason. Lesley Wolf’s assertion about the integrity of the laptop relied on correlation: by matching emails on the laptop with emails that could be obtained directly from the provider.

There are emails and other items hat corroborate the items on the laptop and hard dive.

This is the method that Washington Examiner’s expert used to proclaim the laptop authentic. It’s the method that a bunch of other right wing journalists have gotten experts to use to validate the laptop.

If you steal someone’s iCloud account, the way to prove that it is authentic is by proving that it is their iCloud account, which is what correlation does.

But “computer guy” was suggesting using a forensic method, ten months after the fact, to test the integrity of the laptop itself. DDOSecrets has done this test on the publicly released emails — and half of them have a last modified date of February 11, 2019, right towards the end of the timeline I show above.

Lesley Wolf made her comment on October 22, 2020. No one in Gary Shapley’s interview asked him what happened after that. Nor does Devlin Barrett seem curious to ask.

If “computer guy” subsequently did this test, there’s good reason to believe he would have found what DDOSecrets did: that while these emails match the ones in Hunter Biden’s accounts, they were all packaged up on February 11, 2019, at a time it’s not clear Hunter Biden had control of his own digital accounts.

If you use a forensic method to validate these files, you’re not going to get the same results as a correlative method. That’s why it would be very useful for the debate about the laptop for WaPo to share the two known expert reports done using forensic methods on the drive itself, rather than correlation.

There’s one more hilarious thing about this Devlin Barrett creation. He, predictably, repeats his “whistleblower’s” complaints about not getting stuff pertaining to the laptop.

Shapley said a federal prosecutor on the case, Lesley Wolf, told him that the IRS agents couldn’t see the laptop. “At some point, they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items,” Shapley told the committee, voicing his frustration that he would have liked to see all the data.

Devlin Barrett — dishonest or stupid? — quotes Shapley’s testimony out of context. The full quotation makes it clear Shapley is referring, again, to a discussion that took place on October 22, 2020. More importantly, Shapley is not referring to the laptop!!

And when it came down to item number 33 on page 2, Special Agent [Whistleblower X] is saying like, well, I haven’t seen this information. And AUSA Lesley Wolf says, well, you haven’t seen it because, for a variety of reasons, they kept it from the agents. And she said that at some point they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items [my emphasis]

That particular quotation, identified clearly as item number 33, is the report about the laptop — which I’ll copy again here to make it so easy even Devlin Barrett might understand it:

To help a right winger allege corruption, Devlin Barrett quotes his complaint that his team was not given the actual forensic report about the laptop. Corruption, in this story, is withholding a forensic report that might tell people what they need to know about the laptop.

And yet that is precisely what WaPo itself refuses to do: release two reports that raise questions about the quality and completeness of the drive.

According to Devlin Barrett’s own standard — at least the standard he applies when he’s parroting right wingers — withholding such a report is a sign of corruption.

Even the plain language of Gary Shapley’s contemporaneous notes show that Devlin’s claim that, “information provided by IRS agents to Congress” “put[s] … the accusations” that “the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign” … “to rest” is wildly false (dishonest or stupid?). It does the opposite: It shows that ten months after beginning to rely on the laptop, the FBI still had not done basic forensic checks of the data on it and the AUSA leading the investigation didn’t think doing so was a priority.

That should be the story. That’s the scandal.

And true to form, Devlin Barrett spins the exactly opposite tale.

The WaPo has in its possession some of the only available information that can help to explain what the FBI saw by March 2020, two independent equivalent reports to the one that Shapley implies it is corrupt to withhold.

And unlike the Washington Examiner, they won’t release it.

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Hunter Biden’s Matryoshka Cell Phone: How the IRS and Frothers Got Hunter’s Encrypted iPhone Content

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Believe it or not, what sent me down the rabbit hole of Hunter Biden’s “laptop” was not the laptop itself.

It was a cell phone.

Or, more specifically, it was two details in purported IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s testimony. First, after introducing summaries from some Hunter Biden WhatsApp chats — summaries that, Abbe Lowell claimed, got the most basic details wrong — Shapley explained that the chats didn’t come from the laptop itself, they came from a warrant served on Apple for the iCloud backup to which they were saved.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

This appears to be the search warrant return obtained — again, per Shapley’s testimony — in August 2020.

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.

Shapley’s disclosure that there were WhatsApp texts saved to iCloud stunned me. That’s because, for all the material produced from the laptop itself — which even frothers have treated as all the content in Hunter Biden’s iCloud account — I had never seen WhatsApp texts.

Plus, there’s a technical issue. WhatsApp texts, like Signal texts, don’t automatically back up to iCloud. If one really wants to use their end-to-end encryption to best advantage, one doesn’t store them in the cloud, because then the only easy way to get the texts would be directly from someone’s phone. These texts purported to involve a Chinese national (though, as noted, Lowell says that’s false) whose phone would presumably be inaccessible overseas. And at the time the IRS obtained these texts, Hunter Biden didn’t know about the investigation into himself. They hadn’t seized his phone.

For Shapley’s description to be true, then, Hunter Biden would have had to back up the texts to his iCloud. But if he had, they should have shown up on the laptop itself, right along with every other scrap of the President’s son’s private life.

There were crumbs of an explanation for this in Shapley’s notes from the October 22, 2020 meeting on the government’s treatment of the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden.

In the meeting, Whistleblower X — who by his own description saw things online that he hadn’t obtained via the laptop directly, even though DOJ warned the agents not to do that — kept prodding about whether the investigative team had been provided all the messages on the laptop.

29. SA [Whistblower X] asked if all information on the hard drive had been reviewed…the answer is that they did not look at all of that SA [Whistleblower X] questions if Dillon reviewed all iMessage’s that wore relevant and not privileged. They would find the answer.

As Shapley recorded, on February 27, 2020, the forensics people provided all messages from the hard drive of material John Paul Mac Isaac restored from the laptop.

30. 2/27/2020 DE3 with all messages from the hard drive were provided by computer forensics— via USB Drive

That production included iPad and MacBook messages, but no iPhone messages.

32. 227 Productions

DE3 USB containing exported messages (ipad and macbook messages) No iphone messages

They didn’t get messages off any iPhone until they found a password, conveniently written on a business card, and with that password, were able to get into encrypted iPhone content on the laptop.

Laptop — iphone messages were on the hard drive but encrypted they didn’t get those messages until they looked at laptop and found a business card with the password on it so they were able to get into the iphone messages [my emphasis]

This still didn’t answer my question — how was the IRS able to get WhatsApp texts from iCloud when they weren’t on the iCloud content that appears on the Hunter Biden laptop.

But a detail on the fourth of Guy Dimitrelos’ reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop may explain it.

In his first report, Dimitrelos explained that the 5 million artifacts found on the hard drive were connected to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, which he says was tied to the email [email protected].

  1. The hard drive contained approximately 5,791,819 files and system artifacts and was connected to and authenticated on an Apple iCloud account of [email protected] which is owned by Robert Hunter Biden (RHB).

[snip]

  1. Since this Apple MacBook Pro model was not released until 2017, all data prior to 2017 was stored (backed-up) to the [email protected] account and then downloaded to the MacBook Pro hard drive Downloads folder as illustrated in paragraph 30.

In his fourth report — basically 133 pages into his sequential reporting — Dimitrelos noted that Hunter Biden had another iCloud account, one tied to one of the emails he identified on page 4 of his report: [email protected].

In fact, at least according to the unreliable emails released at BidenLaptopEmails dot com (AKA MarcoPolo), that’s the account to which the laptop believed to be the one that ended up at Mac Isaac’s shop was registered to, not the [email protected] account.

At the Marco Polo site, there are 453 pages of emails from the [email protected] account (so around 22650). They include some of the most interesting in the collection, the ones directly with the Biden family and others indicating sensitive travel. There are 269 from the [email protected] account (so around 13,450) — but it’s the latter that seems to have been taken over in early 2019. I’ve described that the droidhunter88 gmail account effectively took over control of the iCloud account in that period (though I need to go back to the timeline and distinguish which events happened on one iCloud account and which on the other), and I think that’s right. But importantly, at times, the RosemontSeneca email is linked into it. That is, a RosemontSeneca email was used on both iCloud accounts.

As to the phone, Dimitrelos describes that he found a phone registered to the [email protected] account in an encrypted container in an iTunes backup.

I identified an encrypted container located within Apple’s MobileSync iTunes default backup folder.

[snip]

I identified the iOS backup to be an iPhone with the phone number below and Apple id of

[email protected] which is one of Robert Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts.

Part two of Dimitrelos’ report described finding passwords for the iTunes account in two places. First, a picture of a partly rumpled lined piece of paper stored in a Hidden Album. This picture included Amazon, WiFi, iTunes, GMail, and Apple ID passwords, all registered to a different Gmail account. And then, associated with an iPad registered to still a third iCloud account, registered to a Gmail account.

The latter shows that Hunter Biden’s iTunes password was changed on January 30, 2019, solidly in the middle of the period I’ve argued that his account was taken over by the DroidHunter gmail account.

And screencaps in parts two and four of Dimitrelos’ report show that both the iPad and the iPhone were backed up during this same period, on February 6, 2019. Someone changed the iTunes password, and backed up these two devices, where they were found on the laptop. All in this same period where Hunter Biden seems to have lost control over his laptop.

In part four of Dimitrelos’ report, he describes that there were, indeed, WhatsApp messages on the iPhone, registered to that entirely different iCloud account, seemingly backed up to iTunes on the [email protected] account.

I can’t be sure about this, because I’m not a forensics expert, both Shapley and Dimitrelos are deliberately unreliable narrators, and even they don’t have all the data to understand what went on here. But it appears that the reason why there were no WhatsApp texts on the laptop itself, which had all the content in the [email protected] iCloud account, is that they weren’t used by a device registered to the [email protected] iCloud account. They were used by a device registered to the [email protected] account, which was (as Shapley’s notes reflect) stored in encrypted fashion on the laptop.

There’s one more very important point about this.

The government had a warrant. If they really did find a business card (one not described anywhere I’ve seen in Dimitrelos’ report) with a password, they were able to get the encrypted content (though oftentimes prosecutors will recommend you go back and get a second warrant for that). From there, it seems, the IRS got another warrant for the other iCloud account, the [email protected] one. That’s how they got a legally sound copy of the WhatsApp texts in August 2020.

But for people like Rudy Giuliani or Garrett Ziegler or John Paul Mac Isaac, taking a laptop they purport to have been abandoned, and then using a password found on that laptop to access an encrypted container — especially one of a different iCloud account — is legally another level of conduct.

Update: I screwed up the number of emails; I’ve corrected that now.

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The Blind Squirrel’s Nut: Chuck Grassley Unwittingly Debunks Bill Barr

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Last month, Bill Barr got Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland to claim that Jamie Raskin was lying when he said that the lead from an informant claiming that Joe Biden had been bribed was assessed by Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady and then shut down.

It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

Then James Comer relied on that to claim that Raskin was wrong when he said that it was shut down as an assessment.

Bill Barr to Margot Cleveland to James Comer: At each new level, this Matryoshka doll of disinformation gets less and less credible.

So incredible, in fact, that even Chuck Grassley debunked them.

Unwittingly.

Like the proverbial blind squirrel finding a nut.

You see, Chuck is outraged that the IRS agents conducting the investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes were not included in a meeting at which Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the Delaware US Attorney’s office about the informant report. He has written Delaware US Attorney David Weiss a letter demanding an explanation of why.

The answer is clear from the timing of the briefing, which Senator Grassley reveals in his letter: October 23, 2020.

Based on information provided to my office from individuals aware of the meeting, on October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of your top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the FBI-generated FD1023 alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden; however, the meeting did not include any IRS agents. In addition, based on information provided to my office, potentially hundreds of Justice Department and FBI officials have had access to the FD-1023 at issue, which begs the question that I’ve been asking since the start of my oversight in this matter: what steps have the Justice Department and FBI taken to investigate the allegations?

This briefing was nine days after a NYPost story would have made clear that Rudy Giuliani had ties to the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” that the IRS agents had been relying on for investigative materials for the better part of a year.

It was one day after an October 22, 2020 meeting that the IRS agents did attend. As Gary Shapley confessed to the House Ways and Means Committee, the meeting was largely an effort to make sure that the government had used proper legal process before acquiring two devices that — it had only recently became clear — had become and may always have been part of a political hit job.

A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.

So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices. I thought one of the most important first parts was that on November 6 of 2019, the FBI case agent, Josh Wilson, called up the computer shop owner, John Paul, and basically got the device numbers from him.

If Shapley’s notes are at all reliable, prosecutors at the meeting instead discovered that the FBI broke the most basic rules of forensics when exploiting the laptop purportedly owned by the former Vice President’s dissolute son, and in the process may have destroyed evidence about who was really behind it. I’m still not convinced his notes are reliable, but if they are, then the meeting should have raised all sorts of alarms within DOJ.

As I laid out here, Shapley has instead pitched the meeting as one that served the primary purpose of giving Whistleblower X opportunity to complain that the US Attorney’s office had prevented the IRS agents from being tainted by dodgy materials on the laptop. Whistleblower X did complain, mind you, but those complaints mostly raise questions about the extent to which he had already been accessing materials from the laptop that Rudy Giuliani had been tampering with, thereby tainting the investigation.

Shapley’s propaganda has worked, because that’s what our blind squirrel from Iowa focuses his letter on.

But as Shapley described in his prepared statement, even before that meeting he had written to AUSA Lesley Wolf complaining about how the laptop was being referred to in the news.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We
need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations
about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the
IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also
executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is
informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the
laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can
be briefed on this issue.”

Shapley appears to have been concerned, in the weeks before the Presidential election, that people believed the laptop was being investigated by the FBI as an information operation targeting Joe Biden, when in his view, it remained the cornerstone of his investigation into Hunter Biden.

But if DOJ was not already investigating both topics by October 23, 2020 — both Hunter Biden’s tax crimes and a potential information operation targeting Joe Biden — if it has not spent years doing so, then the FBI has become even more captured than I already suspected.

Indeed, if the FBI hasn’t already significantly substantiated that Hunter Biden was hacked in early 2019, then I may renounce my citizenship. I know FBI’s cyber agents can be incompetent, but they can’t be that incompetent, can they?

Can they?

Chuck Grassley may not realize it because he is very old and he is staffed by a bunch of partisan cranks. But he’s basically complaining that DOJ might have learned their lesson after the Steele dossier — the lesson that Chuck Grassley spent years demanding they learn! — and decided, upon the revelation that a key piece of evidence they had been relying on for months had ties to a political hit job, they should figure out precisely what tie that key piece of evidence had to the political hit job.

Chuck Grassley may also not realize that the political cranks who staff him got him to sign a letter effectively complaining that the FBI thought it worthwhile to figure out if the information operation Russian spies had been bragging about for over a year at that point had actually succeeded. Chuck is bitching that the FBI decided to protect a presidential candidate.

Chuck Grassley also likely doesn’t realize his staffers got him to sign a letter bitching that David Weiss attempted to maintain the integrity of the tax investigation even while DOJ assessed whether they had been caught in another information operation. That’s why you don’t include the IRS agents in a meeting where Pittsburgh FBI agents explain to Delaware lawyers how sketchy was the information Rudy Giuliani was collecting from known Russian agents in Ukraine. If you include them, you risk blowing the otherwise meritorious tax investigation.

And Chuck Grassley definitely doesn’t realize that he has debunked Bill Barr.

You see, Bill Barr, who is a very adept liar, was sort of telling the truth to Faceplant Margot that the FD-1023 was referred to DE USAO for further investigation. It surely was. But Pittsburgh FBI agents shared it on October 23, 2020, because the US Attorney’s office was frantically trying to figure out whether the entire tax investigation had been blown, or only parts of it. The US Attorney’s office was undoubtedly trying to understand what kind of other garbage Rudy had produced that got shared with the FBI, in addition to any role he had with the “laptop” that had been used in the tax investigation.

Even Gary Shapley admitted that in the wake of the NYPost story, the Delaware US Attorney’s office did some quick CYA to figure out whether they had been using a tainted information operation for the better part of a year (they had!). The October 23 briefing would have had substantially the same purpose as the October 22 one: to figure out how tainted the investigation was.

And Bill Barr instead got even stupider people to believe that that an attempt to triage the damage done by Rudy’s political hit job amounts to an investigation for bribery.

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Gary Shapley and Hunter Biden’s Colleague Named “Z”

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There was a detail in Abbe Lowell’s letter to House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith complaining about the way Smith platformed purported whistleblowers to launch an attack on Joe Biden that deserves more attention: Lowell claimed that Gary Shapley misrepresented the identity of the person with whom Hunter Biden had a WhatsApp exchange in 2017.

This is the WhatsApp exchange that Smith mocked up to look like texts themselves. The mocked up texts went wildly viral based on Smith’s unsubstantiated claim that Joe Biden was in the room with Hunter during his deal-making.

Lowell described that fake mock-up this way.

The agent only described one message, but you took that purported text and disseminated images of it on June 22 and June 24 in two Twitter postings.

The screen-grab images you posted are not real and contain myriad of issues: both include a photo of Mr. Biden not from 2017 but from the White House Easter Eggroll in April 2022 (long after the purported message was sent); both images portray the message in a blue bubble, when WhatsApp messages are in green; one image super-imposed the Chinese flag for the contact ID, when surely that was not how a text or contact was kept; and one purports to be a screenshot with the “. . .” of someone composing a text (as in Apple’s iMessage) when that does not happen on WhatsApp.

I explained why Smith had to attempt to recreate WhatsApp messages in this post: Shapley himself shared summaries of the purported WhatsApp messages, rather than the WhatsApp messages themselves or the forensic report from Apple whence (Shapley claimed) the IRS obtained them.

Not only did Shapley admit to the Committee they were summaries, but Shapley isn’t even sure who did the summary.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

Q Okay. Who was it provided to?

A The — the investigative team from —

Q Okay. A It would go through all the same processes of — since it’s electronic, it would go to one of the computer analysis folks, and then they would put it in a readable format, and then it would go through filter review.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [redacted, probably Whistleblower X], one or the other [my emphasis]

Even on their face, they’re not reliable summaries. In this text, for example, someone interjects their opinion, “believed to be Zhao” right into the middle of a purported quotation, without marking that opinion as such.

Given that the summary presents at least this direct quote with additional information, we can’t be sure whether other quotes — particularly references to Zhao — are accurate.

Compare Shapley’s summaries with what reliable law enforcement summaries of WhatsApp chats saved to iCloud and obtained from Apple look like (this was an exhibit in the Vladimir Klyushin trial and would have been obtained in the same timeframe).

Not only does this directly quote all the messages, but it includes exact time and the accounts used, details that should drive any law enforcement investigation.

The summary matters, a lot. That’s because Lowell claims that Shapley — or whoever did these summaries — misidentified the Hunter Biden interlocutor whose last name begins with Z.

In one excerpt that has now gotten a great deal of media attention, Mr. Biden is alleged to have been sitting next to his father on July 30, 2017, when he allegedly sent a WhatsApp message, urging the completion of some business transaction. See Shapley Tr. at 14. The inference is that the referenced message was being sent to an official of CEFC (China Energy) to forward a false narrative about the Bidens’ involvement in that company. The facts, which some media has now reported, are that President Biden and our client were not together that day, the company being referenced was not CEFC but Harvest Financial Group (with a person who also had the initial “Z”), and that no transaction actually occurred. More important, your own actions call into question the authenticity of that communication and your subsequent use of it. In short, the images you circulated online are complete fakes. Many media articles confirm that data purported to have come from Mr. Biden’s devices has been altered or manipulated. You, or someone else, did that again. All of the misstatements about this communication and your use of a false text are good examples of how providing one-sided, untested, and slanted information leads to improper conclusions. [my emphasis]

This is a remarkable claim, because — if true — it suggests the IRS was investigating Hunter Biden based on wildly incorrect assumptions about the identity of his interlocutors.

Abbe Lowell claims that the IRS agents who investigated his client for five years — the son of the President!!! — didn’t know to whom he was talking! I’ve heard a lot of outlandish claims from defense attorneys (though Lowell is far more credible than the grifters who defend a lot of January 6 defendants), But this is an utterly inflammatory claim.

Had Shapley used responsible summaries, rather than the unprofessional script he did use, it might be possible to figure out who is right, here, because then we could compare the actual number or email account used.

Or maybe not.

There’s another possible way to explain why IRS agents wouldn’t even know the identity of the person with whom Hunter Biden was discussing business deals.

One of the things that happened during January 2019 when Hunter Biden’s droidhunter88 account had taken over his iCloud account is that his contacts list was “restored.”

In the publicly released emails, there’s no indication of when the request was made, or restored from what. But it happened around the same time as “Hunter Biden” requested a full iCloud download, including his contacts list.

That iCloud download is almost certainly what became much of the content on what is now known as the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” — a laptop the IRS was using (after booting it up in a new laptop, if you can believe Shapley’s notes) for evidence in this investigation.

There are at least three possibilities here:

  • Shapley is right and Abbe Lowell is wrong
  • Whoever wrote these unprofessional summaries just guessed — wrongly — who Hunter’s interlocutor was
  • The iCloud contacts list that the IRS was using when these summaries were made had been altered

We don’t have enough data to know. But given what even Hunter Biden’s persecutors have released, we can’t rule out the last one — that the IRS was using a doctored contacts list to investigate Joe Biden’s son.

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The Technical Oddities of the FBI’s Exploitation of Hunter Biden’s Laptop

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I wrote about the memorialization of an October 22, 2020 meeting about the Hunter Biden laptop that Gary Shapley did here.

Shapley is using it to wind up the frothy right, which as is true of all things Hunter Biden, has worked like a charm.

He has used it not only to make false claims that the FBI has validated the laptop and all its contents, but also to claim that Whistleblower X was being denied access to some of the materials on the laptop. As I noted, by his own description, Whistleblower X saw contents from the laptop, as released by Rudy Giuliani, at some point in the investigation, even though investigators had been instructed not to view publicly available materials out of taint concerns.

But the meeting wasn’t held 8 days after the Rudy laptop had been made public so Whistleblower X could air his complaints. It was held as CYA, to make sure DOJ documented the chain of custody that had just been rendered suspect by the disclosure that a source the FBI had basically trusted had turned the laptop into an election season hit job.

Authentication

The frothy right is either lying or ignorant when they claim this report authenticates the laptop and all contents. Indeed, the report makes it clear that, over a year after first learning of the laptop, the FBI still hadn’t validated every file on it.

But it did do some authentication, some of which could have been faked. That includes:

  • Financial records showing Hunter Biden made a purchase in a cigar shop on the “same day” (could easily be faked, particularly since anyone with his laptop had images of his credit cards)
  • “Other intelligence” showing he was in the area
  • Phone records showing at least two calls “around this time” (but may not reflect later calls Mac Isaac claimed to have made)
  • Device number registered to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account
  • October 2020: Discussion of tracking data creation dates on laptop

Forensic Process

From the description of the memo, the hard drive was easy to access. It was imaged within days of receipt and sent to the regional forensics lab in Philadelphia. Even there, though, by March there were concerns about the quality and completeness of what got imaged from the hard drive.

For some reason, however, to access the laptop, the FBI obtained a new PowerBook and installed the hard drove from the Hunter Biden laptop in the new laptop, which “the computer guy” in the meeting said “returned [the laptop] to original.” It took three months to get this image.

Furthermore, there were problems with exporting the results. Even in October 2020, the team were joking that anyone else who wanted to access the laptop would need to buy their own laptop and review the discovery on that.

Here’s what the memo said about this:

FBI determined in order to do a full forensic review a replacement laptop had to be purchased so the hard drive could be installed, booted and imaged.

[snip]

Josh Wilson stated that (while laughing) so whoever [people wanting to review the laptop] are they are going to have to buy a laptop to put the hard drive so they can read it.

As noted, at that point in October 2020, the FBI had not checked the laptop for any alterations made while in Mac Isaac’s custody. Of particular concern given what I’ve heard about the hard drive is whether the computer access email updates during the period it was at the shop (not least because in that period, Burisma was hacked). Shapley said nothing about any validation that happened after this point.

  • Replacement laptop purchased, hard drive installed, booted, imaged
  • CART images external hard drive
  • 12/19/19: Regional Computer Forensics Lab receives image of har drive
  • 3/6/20: FBI receives image of laptop
  • 3/10/20: RCFL receives laptop image
  • 3/31/20: email about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered from hard drive (not shared with agents)
  • No list of when files created

Legal Treatment

Before the government took the laptop, they checked with Apple (what might be a subscriber report) to make sure the laptop in question was registered to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. The FBI did two telephone and one in person interview with Mac Isaac (curiously, Shapley refers to his as John Paul rather than Mac Isaac). They then served a subpoena on Mac Isaac to take custody. The Office of Enforcement Operations approved the warrant. The IRS then used a Title 26 (tax) search warrant, with search protocols, to access the content.

There are two references to LTFC, which I suspect is the filter team.

  • Order to Apple to verify computer
  • Two telephone and one in-person interviews of Mac Isaac
  • Subpoena for laptop (12/9/19, but not recorded in doc)
  • 12/12/19 OEO approval for search warrant
  • 12/13/19 T26 Search Warrant approved with filter protocol
  • Some grand jury process relating to iPad backup
  • LTFC [?] emails 1/23/20 about data imaging
  • 4/10/20: thumb drive (from laptop?) to LTFC

Discovery History

As noted, the hard drive was easy to access; the laptop was not.

The forensic team first started describing the contents of the hard drive 24 days after obtaining the search warrant (with Christmas in between), and first obtained messages from the hard drive in February.

The investigators didn’t get content from the laptop until April, and it was deduped from the hard drive (though there seems to have been stuff on the laptop that was not on the hard drive).

Whistleblower X kept complaining about not getting a Cellebrite report on the devices. It’s unclear whether that pertained to some of the forensics challenges.

Shapley mentioned that there had been an error when the FBI tried to upload the laptop to USAfx, a discovery platform. That’s weird because USAfx is really finicky. Problems uploading it would be unsurprising. Problems uploading it that remained an issue in October, six months later, would be.

  • After 1/6/20: Emails about “body parts, file names”
  • 1/15/20: Email with file extensions
  • 1/27/20: DE1 and DE2 provide file extensions, provided on USB drive
  • 2/27/20 DE3 All messages from hard drive provided on USB drive (includes iPad and MacBook messages, not iPhone messages)
  • After 2/27/20: iPhone messages decrypted with password obtained from business card
  • 4/7/20: DE4 first evidence from laptop (de-duped from hard drive)
  • 4/17/20: Uploaded files to USAfx, receive error (many file types)
  • 4/20/20: Zip file with PDF and HTML files of cell phone records, and redacted Cellebrite file

Investigative treatment

The most interesting aspect of the investigative treatment of the laptop is that a filter team withheld information from the Mac Isaac 302 from investigators. I wonder whether he told them what he has said publicly–that he has no idea whether Hunter Biden really was the one who showed up in his shop.

  • 10/16/19: Richard McKissack calls the FBI Albuquerque
  • 10/17/19: Baltimore Field Office receives lead from FBI Albuquerque
  • 11/3/19: Unnamed person reaches out to McKissack for contact information for Mac Isaac
  • 11/6/19: Josh Wilson calls Mac Isaac
  • 11/7/19: FBI interviews Mac Isaac, 302 not shared with prosecution team
  • 11/21/19: Follow-up phone call to clarify Mac Isaac claims about timing of abandonment
  • 12/3/19: Whistleblower X starts drafting search warrant
  • 12/9/19: Took property of laptop, external hard drive, and receipt (redacted information about subpoena)
  • 12/12/19: OEO approved search warrant for laptop and hard drive
  • 12/13/19: Whistleblower X obtains T26 Search Warrant
  • 1/6/20: Forensic analysis begins
  • 2/10/20: Filter review completed, scope review begins

Update: Added link to DDOSecrets report.

Links

Original NYPost story

WaPo analysis of drive

Washington Examiner-paid analysis of drive

DDOSsecrets Report

Hunter Biden countersuit

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Double Booked: Whistleblower X Described Inappropriate Presidential Interference … Back in 2019

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There’s a line in Whistleblower X’s testimony that hasn’t gotten enough attention amid the uncritical treatment of Gary Shapley’s media tour claiming improper political interference in the investigation of Hunter Biden.

Whistleblower X described that when investigators asked late last year why prosecutors hadn’t yet charged Hunter Biden, they learned that the attorneys had “found some emails” that made them question whether “they could actually charge the case.”

So we found out through talking with our SAC that the attorneys had found — we were always asking for updates on charging. When are we going to charge? When are we going to charge? We were told that the prosecutors had found some emails that concerned them if they could actually charge the case. That’s what they said to us.

This explanation — that prosecutors had discovered emails that made them question whether they could charge the case, at all — would present an entirely different explanation for the delayed (and seemingly softball) charging decision with regards to Hunter Biden, one for which there is abundant evidence in the two transcripts, yet one that has been ignored by lazy journalists.

It suggests there may be evidence of past misconduct that, if shared with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in discovery, would lead to dismissal of the entire case, or at least an acquittal.

Non-Virgin Birth

Start with how the investigation was set up. Shapley described that the investigation into Hunter Biden was spun off of an investigation into what he called a “foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

The investigation into Hunter Biden, code name Sportsman, was first opened in November 2018 as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.

Whistleblower X, who opened the case immediately after joining the International Tax and Financial Crimes group, described that “amateur online pornography platform” differently; he described it as a “social media company” that may have hosted a prostitution ring.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

Also included in those bank reports was evidence that Hunter Biden was living lavishly through his corporate bank account. This is a typical thing that we look for in tax cases — criminal tax cases, I should say.

Remember that Whistleblower X has a habit of seeing sex workers everywhere he looks.

Whistleblower X then went from there to look for evidence of crime in public reporting on Hunter Biden’s divorce proceedings.

In addition, there was media reporting related to Hunter Biden’s wife, ex-wife, divorce proceedings basically talking about his tax issues. And I wanted to quote some of the things that were said in her divorce filing which was public record.

“Throughout the parties’ separation, Mr. Biden” — referring to Hunter Biden — “has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, gifts for women with whom he had sexual relationships with, while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

“The parties’ outstanding debts are shocking and overwhelming. The parties have maxed-out credit card debt, double mortgages on both real properties they own, and a tax debt of at least $300,000.” [my emphasis]

Then, in response to questioning from Minority Counsel, Whistleblower X described how, on his third attempt to open the investigation, he ran bank reports for Burisma, which is what convinced his supervisor to permit him to open the investigation.

Mr. X. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation. My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

So I kept digging for more and more. And even after that point, he goes: You haven’t found enough. So I ended up searching bank reports that [I] ran on the periphery of what we were looking at.

So I ran bank reports for Burisma, and in those bank reports I had found additional payments that Hunter had received. And then at that point I had found that Hunter did not report the income for 2014 related to Burisma.

So now I had a false return year. So that alone — it was basically so much evidence that I put in there — allowed us to elevate the case.

A potentially “amateur” sex worker site, to divorce proceedings, to Burisma. It all sounds like an effort to find a crime, and finding that crime has been a significant focus of a 12-person international tax group supposedly tasked to find much more significant tax crime ever since.

I don’t think anyone asked how long this process of making three bids to open an investigation into Hunter Biden took. So it’s actually unclear how the timing works with the investigation in Delaware opened in January 2019.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax. And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

Likewise, there has never been an explanation for what predicated the separate investigation in Delaware opened in 2019, though NYT describes that an existing civil review of Hunter Biden’s tax problems became a criminal investigation that also included the foreign influence peddling, largely, Burisma, that appears to have since been dropped.

Then, we learn, that shortly after Barr was confirmed, and in a period when he was trying to reverse the prosecution of Michael Cohen, sustaining investigations into Greg Craig and Andrew McCabe, perpetuating efforts to seed an investigation into John Kerry, and launching a four year witch hunt based off fabricated claims about Hillary Clinton, the Attorney General consolidated everything in Delaware — the perfect venue if Joe Biden is your target but (as Whistleblower X noted), the wrong place for Joe Biden’s son, who lived in LA or DC during the alleged crimes in question.

Documented Sixth Amendment Concerns

How all this got started matters, because this early period may be when adverse emails that could make it impossible to prosecute Hunter Biden at trial got put into the record.

That’s because Whistleblower X’s supervisor for the first period of the investigation — for a period that may have spanned over 14 months — believed there were Sixth Amendment and political influence problems with the investigation.

When describing how this perturbed him, Whistleblower X freely admitted that he was reading everything in the press about Hunter Biden (that detail will become important later) and that he went to his supervisor’s boss to get his boss to stop raising concerns about Trump’s tweets.

Whistleblower X described his supervisor Matt Kutz’ concern about Trump’s tweets — a direct example of precisely what Republicans are searching for, inappropriate Presidential interference!! — as exhibiting a liberal viewpoint.

From what I was told by various people in my agency, my IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

I recall that at one point I had to go around my supervisor and ask his boss, ASAC George Murphy, to tell him to stop sending me and the Hunter Biden prosecution team these emails and that I was searching media articles on a weekly basis and was aware of everything being written in the media regarding the case.

[snip]

A So it was actually Matthew Kutz. He was my supervisor at the time and from the articles that he was sending me, I would say he had more of a liberal view than I had and it was pretty obvious from the things he would send me and discuss. And that’s just me making an observation.

So I later found out about these memos that were put in the file regarding the issues that he saw with the investigation, the fact that we even had it opened. So I only learned about those after.

And then it came to a point to where he’s sending us so many media articles about different issues that I had to tell him stop, please. And I had to go around him. And that’s when I went to my ASAC at the time, George Murphy, who was above him. [my emphasis]

After learning of an example of Presidential interference, but from Trump, GOP staffers in the interview interrupted the Minority’s questioning by going off the record about something, as if they were the witness.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. On the record.

That off the record discussion appears to have discussed why Whistleblower X believed that his supervisor’s concerns about the Sixth Amendment were proof of liberal bias, because that’s what Whistleblower X explained immediately after going back on the record. And then, Whistleblower X explained to Minority Counsel, that Matt Kutz raised concerns four years ago about whether this could ever be prosecuted.

Mr. X. So these articles were a lot about — were a lot of articles regarding Trump and getting a fair investigation and things related to that, Trump’s tweets and stuff like that. So, that’s what drew me to my conclusion.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q What was the purpose behind him sending you the Trump tweets? What was he trying to get at, or was he trying to give you more information for your case? Why would he send those, or do you know?

A Yeah, I think he was bringing up concerns with potentially us prosecuting the case down the road, potential issues we’re going to incur. I don’t remember the exact email that he sent that caused me to be — that he had to stop sending me some of the news articles, because it wasn’t even the fact that he was sending me these news articles.

It was the opinion he was providing in those emails that I did not agree or that I did not — not agree with but did not think was appropriate. [my emphasis]

Whistleblower X told us in one part of the interview that prosecutors had found something in the email record that led them to worry they could not prosecute this case at all, and then in another part of the interview he told us that the supervisor for the first year or so of this investigation believed they would have problems prosecuting it down the road because of Trump’s constant badgering for precisely this investigation.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason no US Attorney’s Office wanted to take this to trial is because this investigation was plagued by inappropriate tampering from the other President from the start?

Gary Shapley’s Involvement

In January 2020, in the same period when Bill Barr was setting up an alternative channel via which DOJ could ingest dirt about Hunter Biden that Russian spies shared with Rudy Giuliani, Gary Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor, overseeing the 12-person International Tax group that would hunt Hunter Biden for five years.

Now is probably a good time to note that Shapley — who splits his time between Baltimore and DC — seems to have a good relationship with Rod Rosenstein, a Maryland AUSA who went on to become US Attorney and then Deputy Attorney General during a period when DOJ was launching politicized investigations into Trump’s enemies.

Mr. Shapley. No. I think I’ve said it, that this is not the norm. This is — I’ve worked with some great guys, some great prosecutors that went on to be U.S. attorneys and went on to be the deputy attorney general and, I think I have experience enough to where it means something.

As noted, Shapley became Whistleblower X’s supervisor just as Barr was setting up a protected means to ingest dirt pertaining to Burisma. But by his own description, Shapley didn’t start liaising more closely with David Weiss until later….

… Until Rudy Giuliani released the laptop.

From around October 2020 through October 2022, I was the IRS CI manager who interacted directly with the United States Attorney, David Weiss, and individuals at DOJ Tax Division the most.

This coincidence — that Shapley became more involved just after Rudy disclosed that a blind computer repairman had shared a laptop with the FBI before he himself, the President’s personal lawyer, got a copy — may be significant.

The Really Really Really Dated Claim about the Laptop

By Shapley’s description, he contacted the AUSA on the case, Lesley Wolf, and not only complained that the FBI was misrepresenting the laptop (when in fact they were mostly no-commenting), but also raised the possibility that John Durham may have searched the laptop.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can be briefed on this issue.”

In his congressional testimony Durham specified that Hunter was the one Trump enemy he hadn’t been ordered to investigate — but remember that there were reports Ukrainians brought dirt to him.

In his testimony, Shapley admitted that the investigative team called this meeting because, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.” But he emphasized Whistleblower X’s complaints that parts of the laptop had been withheld from investigators.

As I noted in this post, per Shapley’s own notes, that’s not what the bulk of the meeting was about.

Of 43 numbered entries, just eight deal in part or in whole with access Whistleblower X had, and some of that is conflicting [note that Shapley misspells Cellebrite “cellabright” throughout]. Here’s what those eight numbered entries describe:

  • 14a. Describing that the John Paul Mac Isaac 302 about what he saw on the laptop was being withheld from the prosecution team (as a whole), even though the taint team had found no privileged items discussed in it
  • 25. Describing that Whistleblower X had never seen a PDF version of the Cellebrite report from the drive, but instead had to look at the device itself
  • 29. Describing Whistleblower X asking whether all the iMessages that were relevant and non-privileged had been reviewed, the answer to which the team didn’t know immediately [this seems to confirm the IRS was not doing the scope review of the laptop]
  • 30. Describing that all messages from the hard drive had been shared in the third disclosure to investigators in February 2020, which seems to partially address item 29
  • 33. Discussing a March 2020 email describing limits on the quality and completeness of the recovery of the hard drive; in response to Whistleblower X’s complaint that he hadn’t seen it, an AUSA (probably Wolf) said they would eventually see a redacted version of the report
  • 40c. Quoting Whistleblower X complaining [it’s unclear whether this is in an April 2020 email or live] that he never saw the Cellebrite file
  • 41. Describing that the Cellebrite file was uploaded sometime in May [which may refute 40c]
  • 42. Describing Whistleblower X stating that if they’re going to testify, they need to see everything, in response to which Lesley Wolf said they would return to that issue

Most of the report seems to be an effort to ascertain legal chain of custody, given the discovery that the original source of the laptop had just spent the last few months turning it into a campaign season political hit job. But amid that discussion, Whistleblower X appears to have aired a series of complaints about decisions DOJ made about access in the interim year.

In his testimony, Shapley also made much of the final bullet point in his notes — the only part of the memo, aside from Whistleblower X’s complaints, that memorializes contemporaneous discussion. In his testimony, Shapley quoted AUSA Lesley Wolf stating, just over a week after NYPost released their first story on the laptop, that there was no reason to think anything had been added to the laptop.

We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop and hard drive.

Shapley repeated that judgment from October 2020 in May 2023 uncritically, as if it is remotely definitive.

AUSA Wolf acknowledged that there was no reason to believe that any data was manipulated on devices by any third party. She further supported this belief by mentioning that they corroborated the data with other sources of information received.

Right wingers are predictably going nuts over this, claiming it proves something it does not.

Even ignoring the timing of Wolf’s comment, just days after the initial disclosure of the laptop, this comment falls far short of validating authenticity of the laptop. Wolf was only validating the laptop — all of it!! — by matching data points. Importantly, “the computer guy” at the meeting (who could probably spell Cellebrite correctly) proposed doing a report showing document creation date.

If the FBI did that after that meeting, Shapley chose not to disclose the outcome. Given what we know about Mac Isaac’s treatment of the laptop, such a step might have showed whether the blind computer repairman’s failure to airgap the machine resulted in email updates — including from the recently hacked Burisma — being loaded to the laptop.

More importantly, the discussion shows that a year after the government obtained the laptop, no one had yet done this kind of validation of the laptop (and given the recovery problems with it, it’s not entirely clear they could).  A year after obtaining the laptop, the government was still just working off trust in Mac Isaac’s sketchy and changing story.

Plus, it’s one thing to say the laptop as Mac Isaac delivered it to the FBI had nothing added, if that’s true, but we know that the laptop as released by Rudy did have alterations. And the fact that Rudy altered the laptop in the midst of launching an election-year attack discredits any claim that anyone makes about the laptop as released by him.

Whistleblower X’s Hot and Cold Affection for Forensic Reports

One of Whistleblower X’s serial complaints about the laptop — that he couldn’t get the Cellebrite report of the laptop itself, items 25, 40c, and 41, above — is of particular interest: That’s because the WhatsApp messages that Shapley shared with the Committee, showing Hunter Biden invoking his father in an attempt to get business in China, also did not come from the forensic format in which they’d be received from Apple.

In fact, they’re not even direct copies of the report from Apple — they are summaries, as Shapley admitted to the Committee. Shapley doesn’t even know who did the summary.

Q Could you tell us about this document, what is it, and how was it obtained —

A Sure. So there was an electronic search warrant for iCloud backup, and these messages were in that backup and provided —

Q Okay.

A — from a third party, from iCloud.

Q Okay. Who was it provided to?

A The — the investigative team from —

Q Okay. A It would go through all the same processes of — since it’s electronic, it would go to one of the computer analysis folks, and then they would put it in a readable format, and then it would go through filter review.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [redacted, probably Whistleblower X], one or the other

This is the content that the Committee tried to recreate to look like real messages, only to mix message type and appearance.

Here’s what an FBI production from WhatsApp messages obtained from an iCloud warrant would look like in official admissible form, from an exhibit in Vladislav Klyushin’s trial.

It is also a reconstruction (and includes translations), but one that has enough information to afford reliability. It’s also entirely readable.

There’s simply no reason to further summarize from there, much less to do so without all the metadata included, as the IRS reportedly did. It’s not the Committee that first did sketchy reconstructions. Shapley, or Whistleblower X, did, off material they claimed to obtain directly from a warrant return.

These WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden’s iCloud are important for several reasons: notably, that investigators reportedly had them in hand, directly from Apple, by August 2020, possibly relying on the laptop they had not yet fully validated to get them, then using them to validate the laptop content, the kind of investigative bellybutton that can get a case thrown out.

Further, when discussing them, Whistleblower X makes much of the fact that he wasn’t able to get location data to see whether Hunter was with his father when he sent these emails.

They had just served a search warrant on Apple, which should have gotten a good deal about Hunter Biden’s data — at the very least, the IP from which he was logging in. But given that they had an Apple return in hand, Whistleblower X’s complaint that they weren’t able to get it … almost certainly means he’s complaining that they weren’t able to get Joe Biden’s location data.

In 2020.

During the election.

Taint

With that in mind, go back to Whistleblower X’s complaints, over and over, that he didn’t have all the content from the laptop.

As Shapley explained in response to questioning, the investigative team was instructed not to look at anything from the Internet that was otherwise available, including — especially — the laptop.

Q Now, was your team, were they permitted to use open-source methods for looking at the materials for this case? Like, if materials were published on the internet related to Hunter Biden or related to Hunter Biden’s business concerns, were you allowed to consult that?

A No. We were directed that if there’s anything from the laptop from other sources to not look at it because then it’s potential for it to be tainted.

Q Okay. So if it’s posted on the internet, if it’s written about in the newspaper, you were not allowed to consult that open source method?

A Yeah. We were directed not to.

Q Is that customary?

A I would say yes. Yes.

Whistleblower X, however — after describing that the case predication itself came from press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy divorce and that he was referencing press coverage of Hunter Biden’s messy life on a weekly basis — described seeing videos on Twitter that he had not received from the laptop.

And one thing that I want to be clear on, that there was information — and I don’t know the detail of that information that was withheld from us — but there was information withheld from the investigators.

And some of that was withheld for privilege. But there was other things — we went out and talked to one of the potential prostitutes. And there were videos that I’ve seen out there on Twitter, on the internet, and information related to that person that I had never seen before.

And I brought this up as an issue. I’m like: I’m seeing things here. Why am I not seeing that from you guys? And when I say “you guys,” the prosecutors. And there was a notion that some information was being held back from us, and I don’t know what that information was.

Whistleblower X, who chased down every one of Hunter Biden’s known sex partners for interviews, complained there were videos online — videos that would have come from a laptop that had been altered — that he had never seen.

Attorney-Client Taint

Whistleblower X risked tainting the investigation by reviewing material released on a laptop that had been altered.

That wasn’t the only taint concern though.

Twice in the interview, Congressional investigators introduced exhibits that Shapley hadn’t seen before: first an email from Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden, which Shapley explained that he “ha[d]n’t seen it in this form, but I’ve seen excerpts of this document.” Then they showed Shapley an email involving — in addition to Schwerin and Hunter Biden — George Mesires, an email clearly marked as “Re: Tax Analysis — Attorney Communication.”

When Majority Counsel asked Shapley if he has seen that email, he and his attorney went off the record.

Have you seen this document before?

Mr. Lytle. Can we talk to our client just briefly.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Of course. We can go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. We’re back on the record.

Having had to consult his attorney about what the simple yes or no response was, Shapley came back to note that this was privileged.

BY MAJORITY COUNSEL 2: Q The question is whether you’ve seen this document before.

A No. Anything from George Mesires was considered privileged —

Q Okay.

A — attorney-client privilege and was not provided to us.

Q Okay. And so that was kept from you by the FBI?

A No. It would be a filter team.

Q Okay.

A When we get any information, and even from the laptop and hard drive, it went through filter reviews, and we only saw what came back as nonprivileged.

A long discussion ensued in which Republican lawyers complained that DOJ conducted privilege reviews for lawyers and accountants working for lawyers. It was immediately after that discussion that Majority Counsel asked whether the investigative team could review material made public from the laptop, as described above.

No, they couldn’t, Shapley explained, because they might see something that would taint the prosecution.

In response to a later question from the Minority, Shapley admitted that if he remained on the prosecution team, reviewing the Mesires letter would amount to taint.

In his response, he referred to Mesires as a “quote-unquote” attorney.

Q Okay. And this was back in 2017. Okay. And then on exhibit 5, it’s the same question, George Mesires, and I think you might have mentioned him earlier, do you know his relationship?

A Yeah. I know him to be a personal, quote, unquote attorney to Hunter Biden. And if I wasn’t taken off the case, I would have been tainted by this document

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on. [my emphasis]

That’s how Shapley “quote-unquote” dealt with Mesires.

Whistleblower X, who admitted seeing videos online he hadn’t seen in material shared from the filter team, was different though.

As he was reading from an email that, he said, showed Lesley Wolf refusing to get approval for interviews, Whistleblower X stopped himself from reading one particular name.

Lesley Wolf says to me on September 9th, 2021: “I do not think that you are going to be able to do these interviews as planned. The document requests require approval from Tax Division. At present, Jack and Mark are racing to get the EWC motion on Stuart’s desk” — so Stuart was the [Acting] Deputy [Assistant] Attorney General, Stuart Goldberg at Tax Division — “Stuart’s desk for approval before he leaves town for a week. “Along with the approval for the” — and I’m going to leave the name out of that — “both of these items are higher priority and we can’t pull time and attention away to move these subpoenas through. [my emphasis]

In follow-up, Minority counsel asked Whistleblower X what name he had asked to leave out.

It was George Mesires.

Q Okay. You mentioned — this is a little ways later — I believe on September the 9th of 2021 that you had an email. You were reading through it, and you had mentioned that Stuart Goldberg was leaving town. You said there was a name that you wanted to leave out when you were reading the email. What was that name?

A So it was the name of Hunter’s personal counsel, George Mesires.

A year after complaining loudly that he hadn’t been provided stuff he saw on Twitter, he tried to subpoena Hunter Biden’s “quote unquote attorney.”

Whistleblower X’s Unclean Dirt

There’s one more detail that suggests whatever prosecutors found in email could have made the case unsustainable — and also makes Whistleblower X’s urgent concerns, in a meeting just over a week after NYPost reported on Rudy’s version of the laptop — far more suspect.

In what appears to be the last of his complaints about not getting information on the laptop (item 42), he said, as recorded by Shapley,

42 SA [redacted, probably X] — For items not seen by agents shouldn’t they see everything because if they have to testify to it they need to see it

a. Lesley response is that this is a historical review and we can discuss that later.

To get access to the entirety of the laptop, Whistleblower X made an argument about what he would need to do to prepare to be the key witness against Hunter Biden at trial.

That argument is 180 degrees the reverse from what he explained over and over in his testimony, about how he was avoiding anything that might taint him as a witness.

For example, he said he had been avoiding testimony to Congress to preserve his ability to testify.

I’d like to note that I wasn’t present at the leadership meeting on October 7th, 2022, that Mr. Shapley and leaders from the IRS were a part of with U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the meeting where he made the statements about not being in charge.

I also wanted to continue to protect the record and my ability to testify as the case agent in the future, which is also a part of the reason I didn’t come forward to you.

[snip]

I was interviewed by an investigator — I think they were with TIGTA. I told them, I didn’t leak anything. I thought that the leak might have come from either defense counsel, or from DOJ like the other ones came. But what I can tell you, and I’ve told this to the prosecution team, I’ve done everything that I can to keep my record clean and to keep my ability to testify as the case agent as clean as I possibly can.

He explained that he purposely wouldn’t write stuff down to preserve his ability to be summary witness.

Mr. X. On the record.

I just want to say that I made every effort to — when we work these cases, you have to be careful of what you might say that could be used against you if you were to go to trial or if you were to go in front of a grand jury. Usually, the IRS special agent is the final witness, the summary witness. So things that you put out there in emails, they can attack you at a later date.

So I did everything that I could to possibly make the record as clean as it possibly could, investigated the case, but in doing that, here’s all the things that happened because of that.

Shapley, on the other hand, did put all that in writing. When Minority Counsel pressed him on the fact that he really hadn’t disclosed any of this to supervisors, he described that he kept taking notes of bitch sessions so that the others could testify.

Q No one at IRS above — other than CI, no deputy commissioners, no commissioner? A That is correct. And, there was a common theme that and the co-case agent Christine Puglisi would — after all these pros team calls we would have a follow-up call. And sometimes FBI agents would be on there as well. And it was basically talking about the strategy and it often became like, Wow, they are not letting us do this. Can you believe they said that? Like that type of thing.

And we — in order to protect the record of the investigation basically it was me that could only document that, right? Because we wanted to make sure that the agents weren’t documenting things that would eventually be turned over in discovery and could somehow affect the viability of the case.

So that is something that I documented moving forward. And each time we were, like, Wow, they didn’t let us do the search warrant. Like she said — to overcome probable cause with a search warrant is, like, that is it, right? That is really, like, okay, well, you are going to go do it, because we want evidence that is unfiltered, right? But the whole point is we were like, well, there is no way they are not going to charge us. The evidence is there. They say the evidence is there. And we just really couldn’t believe that they would be doing something wrong. It was a very heavy burden to overcome from my experience and training to be, like, wow, there is something going on here.

[snip]

Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct. [my emphasis]

Effectively, what Shapley and Whistleblower X described to Congress is that the IRS investigators were keeping a double set of books regarding the investigation.

To be fair, I think many — perhaps most! — government investigative teams do this. Short of that, they get an agent who investigated just a small corner of the whole, shielded from any ongoing investigation. Or a paralegal.

But if an investigator really really wants to take the stand against they guy they’ve been investigating for five years, they have to be sure to keep their books clean.

Reviewing the full Hunter Biden laptop would have tainted Whistleblower X as a witness, though. Even ignoring probable chain of custody problems with the laptop, reviewing the laptop as reviewed with a search warrant would have made Whistleblower X a tainted witness. Reviewing the laptop as Rudy released it after altering it, all the more so.

Plus, some of the details in the IRS’ double set of books about the Hunter Biden investigation raise questions not about DOJ approval processes, but about integrity of evidence, including the laptop and everything that came after that.

For example, because in September 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf raised the possibility (and then debunked) that the investigation would shut down after the election, as this double set of books recorded, it raises real concerns about whether this investigation was nothing more than an election stunt, whether Bill Barr’s DOJ was simply investigating Hunter Biden for a campaign ploy. When Wolf described that DOJ was under fire for self-inflicted reasons, it’s unclear whether she was talking about past disclosures, like the Carter Page IG Report that focused on FBI’s conduct, or whether she was talking about Barr’s tampering in ongoing investigations, something that was quite pressing in September 2020.

Gary Shapley created a double set of books in the Hunter Biden investigation and described it as such. That double set of books raises ample questions about whether this investigation was about Hunter Biden … or his father.

Cleanup on Aisle Nine

The press release from Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office announcing two Informations as part of a plea deal stated the investigation into Hunter Biden was “ongoing.”

The team assigned to the plea deal includes two Special AUSAs, Leo Wise (who has been brought into troubled cases in the past) and Derek Hines, and includes Benjamin Wallace from DE USAO rather than the AUSA at the center of allegations of abuse, Lesley Wolf.

Whistleblower X — a big fan of hearsay — told the House Ways and Means Committee that FBI Agents were being treated the same way IRS Agents are: requiring that they report through their Special Agent in Charge to Weiss.

A I did hear from FBI that they were being treated the exact same way — that they had to communicate through their SAC to the U.S. Attorney in Delaware.

So in spite of Gary Shapley’s wails that his team got cut off as retaliation, there’s some reason to believe everyone did.

Whistleblower X also referenced two topics into which there might be an ongoing investigation. The first was a CEFC deal with Hunter Biden in 2017 and 2018.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Can I go off the record? Mr. X. Yeah. Off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Back on the record?

Mr. X. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing anything further on that issue.

The other involves the circumstances of how Kevin Morris paid off Hunter Biden’s tax debt in 2000.

A So on his 2020 tax return, personal tax return, Hunter stated: “See statement in 2020. The taxpayer received financial support from a personal friend totaling approximately $1.4 million. The parties agreed in 2020 to treat the support as a loan and later documented their agreement in a promissory note in the amount of $1.4 million, 5 percent interest. “The promissory note requires periodic payments between 2025 and 2027. The promissory note was executed by both parties on October 13th, 2021. “The taxpayer is treating this amount as a loan for tax purposes. The balance of the financial support is treated as a gift. No amount of the support is treated as a reported taxable event on this tax return.” So that’s what was filed with the return.

Q And has that transaction been investigated or —

A I’m no longer a part of an investigation related to that.

[snip]

Q It’s a voluntary interview. If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to answer the question, any of our questions.

A It goes back to one of my — if there is potentially a current investigation that’s out there to —

Mr. Zerbe. Let’s go off the record.

[Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Go back on the record?

Statutes of limitation on the latter event would not expire until at least 2025 (though, as noted, the terms of the loan only require that the President’s son start repaying the loan in 2025). It could well be that Hunter Biden, or his benefactor, will eventually be charged with a serious felony — potentially include campaign finance violations — for the way Joe Biden’s son eliminated some of his past tax exposure (though this post-dated the election).

So I think it very possible that Weiss effectively reset the Hunter Biden investigation as a way to move past a great deal of dodgy shit that went down in the last five years.

But amid the media attention Shapley has generated, there are signs that something else — not lefty political bias — undermined the case against Hunter Biden, potentially up to and including outright misconduct. There is a whole range of communications that may have made a prosecution of Hunter Biden unsustainable: documentation of political pressure from Trump, concerns about the sources of leads, evidence of potential taint, and a clear obsession with investigating Joe, not just Hunter.

Those thing should make a Hunter Biden prosecution unsustainable. And the people who kept a double set of books recording some of it are now wailing as if someone else blew the case.

When they may have.

The leaks that seem to have been the proximate cause of the turmoil may make — may already have made — such misconduct more apparent.

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Gary Shapley’s Goosey Gander: When Investigators Want Treatment They Don’t Accord Others

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Update, July 10: In a letter to Lindsey Graham, David Weiss has even more explicitly debunked Gary Shapley’s claims. (Jordain Carney first reported the letter.)

To clarify an apparent misperception and to avoid future confusion, I wish to make one point clear: in this case, I have not requested Special Counsel designation pursuant to 28 CFR § 600 et seq. Rather, I had discussions with Departmental officials regarding potential appointment under 28 U.S.C. § 515, which would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney. I was assured that I would be granted this authority if it proved necessary. And this assurance came months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations. In this case, I’ve followed the process outlined in my June 30 letter and have never been denied the authority to bring charges in any jurisdiction.

It was over four-fifths of the way through the interview of purported IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley — at least four hours in, if you include lunch — before the discussion turned to the October 6, 2022 leak about the investigation to Devlin Barrett.

Q In No. 1 on this email you prepared, says: “Discussion about the agent leak — requested the sphere stay as small as possible…DOJ IG will be notified. FBI — HQ is notified.” What was the specific leak?

A So there was a leak, I’m not sure what outlet, on October 6th of 2022 — it appeared to come from the agent’s level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not charging the case.

Q Okay. Talking about the Hunter Biden case?

A Yes, not charging the Hunter Biden case. So, obviously that was part of the discussion at the beginning. And there have been multiple leaks in this case going back, and this one was handled a lot differently because I guess it was purportedly from the agent’s level. So this drastic — you know, they used that as an excuse to kind of — to do what they were doing to us after this meeting on the 7th, they kind of used that leak as an excuse to exclude us.

The October 7 meeting, at which the leak was agenda item number one, was mentioned during the interview as Shapley’s line in the sand with what he claimed was DOJ misconduct over twenty times before anyone discussed the leak.

The reverse order congressional interview

And so before the actual leak was discussed, Shapley described two different instances where DOJ asked for his emails, as discovery in advance of trial, he described.

The first was in March 2022, the same month as details of the Hunter Biden investigation — including a discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop — appeared in this NYT story.

But, even though he was one of two people who had attempted to interview Hunter Biden in December 2020, Shapley didn’t provide his emails, because — he said — managers’ emails aren’t discoverable to a defendant.

It is common practice for DOJ to ask for the case agents’ communications in discovery, as they might have to testify in court. However, it’s much more unusual to ask for management communications, because it is simply not discoverable.

In March of 2022, DOJ requested of the IRS and FBI all management-level emails and documents on this case. I didn’t produce my emails, but I provided them with my sensitive case reports and memorandums that included contemporaneous documentation of DOJ’s continued unethical conduct. [my emphasis]

Shapley’s discussion of the second request that he turn over his emails appears in conjunction with a discussion of an email he sent in December 2022, which I’ll get to in a sec.

That request for his emails was in October, like the March request, in the same month as a major leak.

[T]his was the culmination of an October 24th communication from Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office and — well, it was really Lesley Wolf and Mark Daly who called the case agent, [redacted], on the telephone and said, hey, we need — we need Shapley’s emails and his — these sensitive case reports that he’s authored back to May.

And they didn’t ask for discovery for anybody else. They didn’t ask for, from the — mind you, the agents had provided discovery March-April timeframe, so there was 6 months or so of additional discovery, and they’re not asking for that, right? They’re only asking for mine.

So [redacted] sends me an email with Wolf and Daly on it that says, hey, you know, they asked for this, you got to talk to Shapley. I respond, hey, yeah, I’m available 9:15, let’s chat. And she sends that, she forwards my email to Shawn Weede, number [two] — a senior level at Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And then he contacts me about this discovery, and he’s kind of putting a lot of pressure on me. So even Weiss called up, the deputy chief, to complain about timing of the emails that got turned over from me at that request.

Presented this way, before any discussion of the October 6 leak (to say nothing of the March 2022 leak, which was never explicitly mentioned), Shapley explained that DOJ was only asking for his email because in March he had shared memos critical of their actions, and they wanted to see all the criticism he had memorialized.

That’s important theater behind the way he was able to appear before the House Ways and Means Committee as someone making protected disclosures. DOJ was retaliating against him, he claimed, because he had documented misconduct about the investigation.

Shapley’s thin protected disclosures

There’s something funny about Shapley’s claim to be making protected disclosures, though, and about the documents he shared with the committee that he claimed documented misconduct.

A few things, actually.

You’d think that if his memorialization of misconduct were so damning that DOJ was retaliating against him, he’d have some pretty damning documents to share with Congress.

But none of the documents he shared about the investigation were documents from 2021, and no document memorializing misconduct from 2022 predated October 7:

Even recreated versions of some WhatsApp messages obtained in August 2020– the big GOP takeaway of the interview — investigatively date to Bill Barr’s tenure at DOJ, as does the transcript excerpt from the December 2020 interview of a Hunter Biden business associate, another complaint about 2020 that Shapley was making.

Crazier still, when Minority Counsel asked Shapley for details of whether he had shared some of the exhibits he presented in the hearing as protected disclosures, he admitted he didn’t share them.

Okay. Now I want to talk about exhibit 6, which is your memo about the laptop and the hard drive. Was this memo provided to anyone?

A This memo was discussed in length with the case agent and co-case agent, but to protect the record, these I couldn’t send to them.

Q Okay.

A So after each time we had calls like this, I would have conversations with them. There was even a document that I produced where they were like, well, there was this problem, this problem, this problem. So I was like, I’ll record it, because we don’t want this to potentially be discoverable and have any issues in the future. So this is an example of that, where if there are at least two people that will say that we talked about this right after, and most of the conversation is to discuss what happened during that, to make sure that it was accurate.

Q But you don’t provide a copy to your supervisor or Mr. Fort or anyone else in your chain of command?

A No.

Q It just stays with you?

A That’s correct.

[snip]

Now I’m going to look at exhibit 7. And the question is the same as the one before it. Was this memorandum provided to anyone or copied to anybody?

A It was not. Just to reiterate again, that this was discussed right after — I can’t even think of a time when we didn’t have a discussion immediately after these meetings with just me, case agent, co-case agent, and sometimes with FBI agents on the phone to discuss this.

I’ll return to the document about the laptop, but it doesn’t really document misconduct; it documents investigators trying to cover their ass after they discovered that a problematic piece of evidence that they had spent a year reviewing got turned into an election season political hit job. All the more so given that both so-called whistleblowers made clear they replicated the evidence with an August 2020 warrant for Hunter Biden’s iCloud account, obtaining the WhatsApp messages mentioned above.

That said, the document about the laptop would be useful proof for journalists for stories like the March 2022 one.

Minority Counsel asked why Shapley didn’t share his 2020 complaints — the only documents that he claimed described misconduct shared in the interview that predate his October 7 email — during Bill Barr’s tenure.

Q Okay. When we were talking about this exhibit 7, you mentioned that, at the time, Bill Barr was the AG. Why did you not take your concerns up the chain in 2020 at that time?

A Well, as I said before, there is a healthy tension between investigators and prosecutors, right? And there are sometimes when I don’t agree with a prosecutor, but every time I don’t agree with a prosecutor, I’m not going to run to Bill Barr or to senior leadership to — to blow the whistle or make a protected disclosure. The whole focus was to do what we had to do, even if it meant dealing with obstructions from prosecutors to get this case across the finish line, if it was worthy of it. And, that’s what we did. Every single time something happened wrong in this investigation, I couldn’t bring it to Bill Barr or anyone else, so —

Q And did you think about, in 2020 at all, coming to the committee at that point in time? Because I know that you mentioned that there were irregularities that you saw in the summer of 2020. Did you think about coming to the committee or coming forward at that time or making a report to TIGTA in 2020?

A Like I said, we are trained and we work with these prosecutors hours and hours, trips, and spend all this time. We are just trained to trust them, and it was an incredibly high burden. If I wasn’t in the October 7th meeting, my red line might not have been crossed. [my emphasis]

All that led to this weird exchange with Majority Counsel. Shapley claimed to have made protected disclosures without making protected disclosures.

Q Okay. And would it be correct to say that you sought to state your opinion and impact decision making short of protected disclosures before the October 7th meeting?

A Well, I think I reached a level of protected disclosure internally to IRS senior leadership before that.

Q And at what point was that first protected disclosure?

A I believe it was June of 2020. You got to understand, at the time, I wasn’t making a protected disclosure. I was just working a case raising issues, right? It’s not until we’re down the road a hundred miles that that was a protect[ed disclosure] — you know?

Q Yeah. Understood

A But it seems like the October 7th meeting, after that, after I raised issues directly to them, I explained to them the risk of not charging ’14, ’15. I explained to them how we had no mechanism to ever recoup that money, and I went like kind of like point by point how the elements were met.

And, it was that meeting where I think DOJ started to look into the discovery that I had provided back to March, because I was like, this is not right, there’s a big, huge problem here. And it switched from me raising just concerns, hoping that they’d be remedied, to now I’m like, no, this is a problem. And I think because of that, they went and looked at all my documents that I contemporaneously documented over the years. And then I think they started attacking me. And I think I read a part in my opening statement, the email that I sent to my director of field operations exactly on that topic. [my emphasis]

This is what led me to look back at the letter Shapley’s lawyer sent to Congress in April, which was the subject of a great deal of press attention at the time. It explained that his client — Shapley — had already made protected disclosures.

My client has already made legally protected disclosures internally at the IRS, through counsel to the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, and to the Department of Justice, Office of Inspector General.

I remember at the time thinking that the Inspectors General must not have been very impressed with those disclosures, if the anonymous whistleblower — who we now know was Shapley — was going to Congress with them.

And when Minority Counsel invited him to explain why he hadn’t brought his concerns to Treasury’s Inspector General, his attorney piped in to say that his attorneys have made such disclosures.

MINORITY COUNSEL 1. But if you’d like to answer about the inspector general that is fine, too, but I was asking about Main Treasury.

Mr. Lytle. Just to clarify, his attorneys have made some disclosures to all of these entities so —

MINORITY COUNSEL 1. That is fine. But I am not asking about those. I was asking more at the time —

Mr. Lytle. Got it.

But by timeline, none of these occurred before DOJ was already demanding his emails in the wake of a second major leak about the investigation (because he didn’t lawyer up until still later).

All of which suggests that Gary Shapley didn’t start claiming to be making protected disclosures of any substance until after he started worrying he was under investigation for leaks, and his lawyers’ contact, by that point, would have been with two Inspectors General investigating those leaks.

Gary Shapley’s Investigative Priorities

Which is why some of Shapley’s purported protected disclosures are so interesting. He complains, over and over, that his team wasn’t permitted to take steps that might leak or would be really showy. IRS wasn’t permitted to send out subpoenas using Hunter Biden’s own name in advance of the election because those might leak. IRS wasn’t permitted to interview Hunter Biden’s children. IRS wasn’t permitted to conduct physical surveillance — 14 days before a Presidential election!! — of Hunter Biden.

Shapley was really angry, in fact, that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss congratulated the team in December 2020, as they prepared to take their first overt steps, that the investigation had remained secret up to that point (though the very next day, a December 9, 2020 story confirming the investigation, which included Barrett’s byline, did provide non-public details about the investigation).

A I think that she wasn’t worried about that part. She was worried about blow-back from doing a search warrant that was related to Hunter Biden. I think all of these things that they didn’t allow us to do, even back in June of 2020, was because their primary goal was to keep this investigation secret, right?

And even on December 3rd of 2020, when we’re in Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office prepping for the day of action on December 8, Weiss came in and was like — congratulations for keeping it secret. And I was like, well, I thought that we were conducting an investigation here. I didn’t think that what we were doing was trying to keep a secret.

But Shapley’s complaint about emphasizing secrecy, which in addition to avoiding political blowback would have protected the investigation, is wholly inconsistent with his claimed reason to be concerned that the Secret Service got tipped off the day before he tried to interview Hunter Biden on December 8, 2020, or that, days later, Hunter Biden’s lawyers were asked to comply with a subpoena of a storage facility rather than permitting a search.

On December 10th, 2020, the prosecutorial team met again to discuss the next steps. One piece of information that came out of the day of action was that Hunter Biden vacated the Washington, D.C., office of Owasco. His documents all went into a storage unit in northern Virginia. The IRS prepared an affidavit in support of a search warrant for the unit, but AUSA Wolf once again objected.

My special agent in charge and I scheduled a call with United States Attorney Weiss on December 14th just to talk about that specific issue. United States Attorney Weiss agreed that if the storage unit wasn’t accessed for 30 days we could execute a search warrant on it.

No sooner had we gotten off the call then we heard AUSA Wolf had simply reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit, once again ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed.

Gary Shapley didn’t want any of the subjects of the investigation to get advance notice, because they might obstruct the investigation.

However, the night before, December 7th, 2020, I was informed that FBI headquarters had notified Secret Service headquarters and the transition team about the planned actions the following day. 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 on the witnesses.

It’s a fair consideration! Most investigators are going to feel the same!

But that’s why that December 2022 Shapley email sent to FBI Special Agent Darrell Waldon and cc’ed to Michael Bartoff is so interesting.

Waldon was part of the case team, but also the guy who referred the Barrett leak to IRS’ Inspector General. Bartoff is the guy to whom Shapley claimed to have made protected disclosures.

It turns out that Shapley was on vacation as DOJ was reviewing his emails. He sent the email to ask Waldon to let him explain any emails before they got shared with anyone else.

If you have questions about any emails I would ask you share it in advance so I can look at them and be prepared to put them into context. The USAO was so eager to got my emails (which they already had 95% of) … then surprise … they “might” have a problem with a few of them that memorialized their conduct. If the content of what I documented, in report or email is the cause of their consternation I would direct them to consider their actions instead of who documented them.

I have done nothing wrong. Instead of constant battles with the USAO/DOJ Tax, I chose to be politically savvy. I documented issues, that I would have normally addressed as they occurred, because of the USAO and DOJ Tax’s continued visceral reactions to any dissenting opinions or ideas. Every single day was a battle to do our job. I continually reported these issues up to IRS-CI leadership beginning in the summer of 2020. Now, because they realized I documented their conduct they separate me out, cease all communication and are not attempting to salvage their own conduct by attacking mind. This is an attempt by the USAO to tarnish my good standing and position within IRS-CI … and I expect IRS-CI leadership to understand that. As recent as the October 7 meeting, the Delaware USAO had nothing but good things to say about me/us. Then they finally read “discovery” items (provided 6 months previous — that are not discoverable) and they are beginning to defend their own unethical actions.

Consider the below:

  1. I am not a witness — therefor Jencks/impeachment is not an issue.
  2. I am not the receiver of original evidence nor engaged i any negative exculpatory language against the subject … My documentation only shows the USAO/DOJ Tax’s preferential treatment of this subject. [bold underline original, italics mine]

This was an email asking — at a minimum — for the kind of advance notice that Shapley believed Hunter Biden should not get. And given that Shapley’s other testimony (in which he said he didn’t turn over any of his email) seems to conflict with his claim here that DOJ already had 95% of them, it might be more than that.

Just before the end of the interview, Shapely implored the committee to help him, because, “My life’s on the line here, so do what you can.” He repeated Whistleblower X’s complaint that the IRS and DOJ aren’t considering the human cost of their actions after the October 2022 leak.

But the document which Shapley points to as documentation that he raised such concerns made a request — an opportunity to participate in an investigation — that he himself complains Hunter Biden started getting over two years into the investigation. That’s his complaint: That Hunter Biden got to look at stuff in advance, starting two years into an investigation.

And in response to that, he ran to Congress and, with Whistleblower X, made disclosures that didn’t consider the impact they’d have on the equally human life of Hunter Biden.

Timeline

2007: Shapley at NSA IG

2010: Whistleblower X starts at IRS

July 2009: Shapley starts at IRS

April 12, 2016: Mesires email (from laptop)

January 16, 2017: Schwerin email to Hunter

July 30, 2017: Date of suspect WhatsApp message

November 2018: Whistleblower X moves to International Tax and Financial Crimes; opens criminal investigation into Hunter Biden (after prior civil action)

March to April 2019: DOJ Tax reviews Whistleblower X’s lead

2019: IRS supervisor documents Sixth Amendment problems with case, collects Trump’s tweets

October 16, 2019: First lead on laptop

December 9, 2019: FBI takes property of laptop

December 13, 2019: Search warrant for laptop

January 2020: Shapley becomes supervisor over Sportsman Case

March 6, 2020: Request for physical search warrants in CA, AR, NY, DC

April 2020: Latest date on laptop timeline

June 16, 2020: Call about search warrants

June 16, 2020: Meeting with DFO about foot-dragging

August 2020: iCloud returns with WhatsApp messages

September 3, 2020: Donoghoe imposes halt on pre-election activities (Lesly Wolf denies SW, also warrant for Blue Star Strategies — but it was OEO that denied that)

September 21, 2020: FBI tries to limit number of interviews

October 19, 2020: We need to talk about the computer (mention of Durham)

October 22, 2020: Meeting about laptop

October 2020: Shapley IRS CI Manager interacting with Weiss’ office

November 17, 2020: Original plan to go overt delayed

December 3, 2020: Wolf objects to questions about Joe Biden; Weiss congratulates on keeping investigation secret

December 7, 2020: Notice to Secret Service and transition team

December 8, 2020: Day of action, attempted interview of Hunter Biden, interview of Rob Walker

December 9, 2020: Article confirming investigation includes inside details

December 31, 2020: Don Fort leaves as Chief of CI, replaced by Jim Lee

March 2, 2021: Mention of blowing whistle about DOJ handling of the case

May 3, 2021: Wolf chooses not to examine campaign finance (loan to Hunter), which Shapley documents to chain of command (not shared in interview)

August 18, 2021: Plan to interview Hunter’s children

October 21, 2021: Wolf nixes plan to interview Hunter’s children

January 27, 2022: Prosecution memo

February 9, 2022: Christy Steinbrunner sends prosecution plan forward with concur

February 11, 2022: CT responds with non-concur

March 2022: DOJ presents prosecution plan to DC USAO, DC rejects prosecution, Hunter Biden extends SOLs first of two times

March 16, 2022: NYT story including inside information

March 2022: DOJ asks for all management-level emails (Shapley doesn’t produce)

May 2022: Joe Gordon asks why IRS doesn’t ask for Special Counsel

April 26, 2022: Garland response to Bill Hagerty promises independence

June 15, 2022: Bigger meeting at DOJ, explaining why they couldn’t charge the case

July 29, 2022: Wolf says Weiss sets September as indictment for 2014, 2015 charges

August 12, 2022: Prosecutors claim Chris Clark said charging Hunter Biden would be career suicide

August 16, 2022: Prosecutorial meeting, discussion of CT’s nonconcur memo

August 25, 2022: FBI Supervisor Curley complains about missed communication between meetings

September 2022: IRS presents case in CDCA

September 22, 2022: Wolf says no action until after midterms

October 6, 2022: Devlin Barrett leak

October 7, 2022: Meeting about leak, and DC approval

October 12, 2022: Final interview in case

October 17, 2022: Investigators told no grand jury available

October 24, 2022: DOJ renews request for Shapley emails

November 2022: DOJ lets statutes of limitation on 2014, 2015 expire

November 7, 2022: SA Mike Dzielak says DOJ requests management and senior management documents pertaining to case

December 8, 2022: Waldon and Weiss cancel meeting about case

December 12, 2022: Claims concern about emails about documentation of misconduct

February 2023: Batdorf pauses ongoing investigation

March 1, 2023: Grassley asks Garland about case

March 16, 2023: DOJ Tax Mark Daley stated they would give approvals for charge (overheard)

April 13, 2023: Whistleblower X emails Lola Watson

April 19, 2023: Mark Lytle letter to Congress

May 15, 2023: DOJ requests new IRS team

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Republican House Chairmen Are Resorting to Immunizing Crimes to Gin Up Their Fake Scandals

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Even before Abbe Lowell wrote a long letter trying to make this plain for obtuse journalists, it was clear to me that Republican House Chairmen are resorting to immunizing crimes in an attempt to gin up scandals to use against Joe Biden.

It’s right there at the start of Gary Shapley’s testimony.

IRS agents are prohibited from leaking details from private tax returns.

To permit Shapley to do so, the (unnamed) House Ways and Means Majority Counsel first laid out that Shapley was sharing information as a whistleblower, effectively waving a magic wand to let Shapley ignore this prohibition.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Finally, I’d like to note the information discussed here today is confidential. As an IRS agent, I know you understand the significance of our tax privacy laws. Chairman Smith takes our tax privacy laws extremely seriously, and we have worked diligently to make sure that you can provide your disclosures to Congress in a legal manner and with the assistance of counsel.

As I’m sure you know, 26 U.S.C. Section 6103 makes tax returns and return information confidential, subject to specific authorizations or exceptions in the statute.

The statute anticipates and provides for whistleblowers like yourself to come forward and share information with Congress under Section 6103(f)(5).

Specifically, that statute permits a person with access to returns or return information to disclose it to a committee referred to in subsection (f)(1) or any individual authorized to receive or inspect information under paragraph (4)(A) if the whistleblower believes such return or return information may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse In your position at the IRS, do you or did you have access to return or return information covered by Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code?

Mr. Shapley. Yes.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Have you had access to return information that you believe may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse?

Mr. Shapley. Yes.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Do you wish to disclose such information to the committee today?

Mr. Shapley. Yes, I do.

And, as Lowell noted, Shapley then answered a bunch of questions, some of which were unrelated to his core allegations. Then, days after the Hunter Biden settlement was out, House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith released Shapley’s transcript, after which Shapley has run to the right wing media to repeat his allegations.

Shapley’s media appearances might constitute a crime. But how is Merrick Garland’s DOJ going to prosecute it, now that the right wing has made Shapley a hero for floating the latest manufactured scandal about Hunter Biden? Hell, Shapley is going to be the cornerstone of an attempt to impeach Garland, not for prosecuting Shapley for breaking the law, but because Garland let a Trump appointee prosecute the President’s son unimpeded.

That’s Garland’s sin: Letting a US Attorney appointed by Donald Trump prosecute the son of the most powerful man in the world, something that should be a remarkable, however sober, feat of due process, but which Republicans want to undermine because a Republican US Attorney didn’t find enough crime for their needs, because they need this story to go on and on and on.

In his letter, which was addressed to Chairman Smith, Lowell also pointed out what was clear to both me and Andrew Prokop: One or both of these IRS so-called whistleblowers may be source(s) for the biennial right wing leak to Devlin Barrett, leaks that always appear just before and are intended to influence an election, leaks that in this case got the IRS team removed from the investigation.

Right wingers seem to like Devlin because he can be trusted to write down what they tell him to write, rather than write what the evidence they describe would indicate. In 2020, for example, Devlin read an interview report, which was improperly redacted, and which made it clear that a right winger on the Mike Flynn case bullied a woman at work and was willing to make claims about which he had no first hand knowledge, and instead of reporting that, Devlin claimed that it indicated misconduct in the Mueller investigation. Last fall, Devlin took evidence that some investigators who were either ignorant of or ignoring known details about the documents seized at Mar-a-Lago and instead tried to preempt investigative conclusions by proclaiming that Trump didn’t exploit the documents he stole for personal gain. In 2016, Devlin wrote the story that would eventually get Andy McCabe fired — yet another scandal that fed itself for years — because he deigned to correct the false claims of people trying to impugn Hillary before the election.

In the case of investigators on the Hunter Biden team, the pre-election leak at issue here, Devlin took a report making clear that investigators had not substantiated any of the foreign influence peddling claims about Hunter Biden and instead let agents use him to pressure David Weiss to charge Hunter in a certain way and do so before the election.

Regurgitating right wing law enforcement claims of scandal credulously is what Devlin seems to do best. “If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the campaign season,” seems to be Devlin’s journalistic ethos.

And it’s not just tax law that Devlin’s sources violated by leaking details about the Hunter Biden investigation. As Lowell notes, it may well be grand jury information — something Lowell alleges was also included in Shapley’s disclosures (though about this I’m less convinced).

As I said, if one or both of these men do turn out to be Devlin’s source, then the scandal created here will make it far harder to prosecute them, just as Jim Jordan has been trying to reward several other people — FBI agents — suspected of leaks politicizing the FBI by retroactively claiming they’re whistleblowers after a disciplinary process began.

Then, Republicans are using the confidentiality guaranteed as part of due process to create more scandal. In the wake of the transcript release, Republicans released a letter demanding more testimony from people who would not normally, and won’t now, be able to comply, especially given that this is an active prosecution. The WaPo, which played a central role in this false scandal in the first place, reported that as “news,” without explaining to readers that of course the recipients won’t comply and won’t be able to and shouldn’t be able to, in the same way people investigating Donald Trump should not be and are not running to Congress to describe what they discovered in Melania’s underwear drawer.

This is a stunt. It should be reported as a stunt. Until it is reported as a stunt, Republicans will continue to corrode democracy, using their majority to do nothing but manufacture political dirt.

WaPo offered no context in their report on this manufactured story (including noting that Trump was accorded the same treatment as some of the things being spun as distinct). It’s just pure pavlovian reaction, taking dogshit from Republicans who have made it crystal clear for six months they plan to do nothing — nothing!! — else with their majority than simply manufacture scandals, and packaging up obvious dogshit as if it were news. Notably, there’s also no update (why update a story manufactured for a pre-holiday Friday release?) to note that US Attorney David Weiss (originally identified as an AUSA, which betrays ignorance about a key detail of the way DOJ guards independence and took special measures to do so here) did respond to the letter, predictably saying that he can’t violate the confidentiality that Shapley did, but also reiterating his past claims that he was in charge of the decisions on this case.

Why ruin the clickbait scandal with actual facts?

Then, finally, this manufactured scandal moves onto the next step, in which WaPo claims to be helpless to assess these contested claims — in which several US Attorneys have repeatedly debunked claims about topics that Shapley was not in a position to know — so instead suggests that Lowell’s letter will instead just create a difference of opinion.

Here’s how the WaPo — again, which is one key reason there is a scandal here in the first place — described the manufactured scandal that Republicans have not hid was a manufactured scandal, at all.

Lowell’s letter battling with Congress illustrated that while the president’s son appears close to resolving the federal misdemeanor charges — and this week also settled a separate child support case — he still faces a number of challenges that could yield further headlines. The action is set to move from the courthouse to Capitol Hill, as Republicans delve into Biden’s business dealings and scrutinize the Justice Department’s handling of the criminal investigation.

[snip]

Lowell’s salvo signaled the beginning of what could be a newly intense phase of the battle for public opinion between the president’s son and congressional Republicans.

It’s all about the headlines to the WaPo that wittingly made it headlines in the first place.

Lowell’s letter is not “battling with Congress.” Lowell’s letter is not “battl[ing] for public opinion.

He’s laying out some basic facts, not only answering some questions that have floated for months about Hunter Biden’s conduct, but also pointing out the crime that WaPo of course is not going to report on, because of course they cannot.

Rather than assess the facts, WaPo instead resorts to both-sides glee — this scandal, the one they kicked off, will continue forever!!!

I don’t know what kind of person goes into journalism only to profess utter helplessness to weigh the credibility of various sources, or even whether someone was in a place to know what he is claiming he knows. I don’t know why someone would go into journalism only to willingly treat people like James Comer and Jim Jordan as credible, when even Steve Doocy keeps mocking them for their flimsy claims, when they don’t even try to hide what they’re up to! I don’t know what kind of credulity you would need to immediately treat a request for testimony designed to be impossible as big breaking news.

I do know this: in 2014, some corrupt oligarchs decided to put Joe Biden’s son in a place where, no matter what he did, they could use it to their future advantage. It was stupid for him to take that offer, but let’s all acknowledge it was a set-up from the start. I know that no later than 2018, other corrupt oligarchs, some with clear ties to Russian spooks, started pitching Hunter Biden as a scandal, all wrapped up for Donald Trump’s personal consumption. I know that ever since, Republicans have been milking the addiction recovery of a private citizen relentlessly. I’m not sure a private figure has ever been scrutinized so closely and relentlessly by Congress, including past mob or union corruption investigations that actually served the public interest. I know that Trump’s own tax scandals, Ivanka and Jared’s influence peddling, Trump’s corrupt oligarch ties, Trump’s pardons — including of far bigger tax cheats than Hunter Biden — have gotten nowhere near this level of scrutiny, and almost no one is making the GOP’s base hypocrisy here the story.

I know that Hunter Biden has made a ton of mistakes in his life, and I admire that he is doing the hard work to turn his life around. I can’t imagine trying to do it at a time when millions of people have made him their personal plaything for scandal.

What I don’t understand is how self-respecting people can so willingly play a part of the effort to rip Hunter Biden to shreds solely because Republicans choose to run on wildly hypocritical scandal-mongering rather than policy. You’re letting half-wit bozos manipulate you like children, and you’re positively gleeful about it! Do you not understand — or care — what a grotesque project you’re playing useful idiots for?

Back in 2020, Zeynep Tukfeci wrote what remains one of the most insightful pieces on the way that Republicans have milked Hunter Biden’s legal challenges and addiction for their political ends.

[T]raditional media is, still, terrible at recognizing how these hack-and-leaks are, in fact, as much about blackmailing political candidates as they are about politically relevant allegations.

That’s right, there’s a blatant blackmail attempt right in front of our eyes, and we’re not recognizing it for what it is.

[snip]

Is the Hunter story newsworthy, in the sense that it should be reported on? Yes, of course. Should Joe Biden be asked about some of the allegations? Yes, of course. (Note the some).

But the real questions we need to ask of ourselves are these: what should be asked of Biden? How much media attention should be given, to what parts of the story? What parts of the story are very important,, and not being covered?

This has been an ongoing theme in my work: In the 21st century, it is attention, not speech, that is restricted and of limited quantity that the gatekeepers can control and allocate. In the digital age, especially in countries like ours, there is no effective way of stopping people from publishing or talking about this story through traditional censorship—but there are many ways to regulate how much attention it gets.

[snip]

In 2016, the media got hacked—not in the sense of a computer breach, but that their unreflective habits allowed them to be played. They spent their time giving disproportionate attention to gossip and privacy violations that were illegitimate—ironic, in my view, since they barely covered the newsworthy aspects of that hack.

Before the 2016, election, in a New York Times op-ed, I called this whistle-drowning. Whistle-blowing is designed to focus our attention on something that is being kept from the public, something that is in the public’s interest to know and evaluate. Whistle-drowning is designed to flood the public a flurry of allegations that make it very difficult to concentrate on the important questions facing us.

[snip]

If a story about Hunter Biden deserves attention and not getting it yet, it is this: the Hunter Biden story, as it has happened, is a blatant attempt to blackmail and rattle his father, who is, of course, concerned over his son’s struggles with drug addiction. In that context, and with appropriate diligence, allegations of influence-peddling should be investigated, with proper reporting, not innuendo.

[snip]

The media is still under some illusion that fairness and balance means devoting equal attention to allegations about, and stories potentially damaging to, both candidates–rather than devoting proportional attention to allegations and stories according to their credibility, scale, scope and importance.

She calls this a hack-and-leak (this was before it became clear that the “laptop” was instead an alleged theft and leak), but a better description is just trolling. Indeed, what Comer and Jordan — and now Smith — are using their gavels for is no different than what Microchip, one of the trolls who played an instrumental role in getting people to care about John Podesta’s risotto recipe rather than Donald Trump’s racism and emotional instability in the 2016 election, testified he succeeded in doing in 2016.

Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?

A That’s a good question.

So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.

T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.

Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.

A That’s right.

Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?

A No, and I didn’t care.

Q Did you fact- check any of it?

A No.

Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?

A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.

It’s about chaos, not facts. Manufactured conspiracy can and is designed to distract from the fact that there’s no there there. It is designed to make voters irrational. It is designed to make democracy fail.

Over time, Shapley’s claims, as well as any misconduct allegations about Devlin’s sources, will be reviewed — but anyone with the most basic understanding of how due process works in the country knows that that’s not going to happen immediately, also knows that Jim Jordan and James Comer are the last people you’d ask to conduct a competent review of anything.

And so the willingness to bow to Comer and Jordan and Smith’s demands that it be immediate and relentless is just willingness to be used, manipulated, to perpetuate the kind of manufactured conspiracy that is designed to kill democracy.

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Paul Manafort Remains a Bigger Scandal than Hunter Biden

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I haven’t had the time to dig into Gary Shapley’s purported whistleblower claims about the case against Hunter Biden, which several US Attorneys have already disputed.

My read, thus far, matches Andrew Prokop’s: after IRS investigators tried to take steps during a pre-election prohibition period last year, someone in their vicinity leaked to Devlin Barrett, as right-wingers do every pre-election period. That led Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to (justifiably) remove the suspected leakers from the case. As other right wing officials have before, they then ran to Congress and belatedly claimed whistleblower status.

The purported whistleblowers claim that investigative steps — pertaining to allegations about conduct after Biden left the Obama White House — were slow-walked in 2020, during Bill Barr’s tenure as Attorney General. The most serious claim made by the purported whistleblowers is that US Attorneys appointed by Joe Biden refused to file charges against Hunter in the venues where they occurred — MDCA and DC. Merrick Garland, David Weiss, and Matthew Graves have all denied that.

But even if that allegation is true, even if Weiss continues to investigate and substantiates some foreign influence peddling (at this point, limited to 2017, a time when Biden was not in office), the allegations against Hunter Biden would still be far less scandalous than the Paul Manafort case. That’s true because the scale of Manafort’s tax crimes were far worse. That’s true because Manafort has confessed to his foreign influence crime. And that’s true because Trump pardoned Manafort after his former campaign manager lied to investigators about what he did with (since confirmed) Russian agent, Konstantin Kilimnik, during and after the 2016 campaign.

Here’s my understanding of the comparison. The claims against Hunter, in bold, reflect the two Informations docketed as part of the plea deal. All but the pardon TBDs in his case reflect allegations from the so-called whistleblowers that remain unresolved.

Note: I have not listed “lied to protect the president” for Hunter because, as far as I am aware, the President’s son has not made sworn statements to law enforcement — true or false — about matters affecting his father. Manafort did make false statements about matters implicating Trump during his breached cooperation with Robert Mueller’s prosecutors.

A whole pack of DC journalists have chased the IRS allegations, like six year olds do a soccer ball, but with perhaps less consideration of what they’re chasing. They’re doing that even as Trump’s pardons remain largely unreviewed since he announced his run. This manic response to contested IRS claims reflects a choice. Just not a justifiable journalistic one, given the contested allegations to date.

Paul Manafort sources

Millions in tax avoidance: On August 21, 2018, an EDVA jury convicted Manafort of filing false tax returns each year from 2010 to 2014. On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to tax crimes spanning from 2006 through 2015. Between 2010 and 2014, he failed to report over $15M in income on FBAR.

FARA component: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to serving as an unregistered foreign agent from 2006 through 2015.

Money laundering: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to laundering over $6.5M in payments, from 2006 through 2016, as part of his FARA scheme.

Bank fraud: In August 21, 2018, an EDVA jury convicted Manafort of two counts of bank fraud, totalling $4.4M. On September 14, 2018, Manafort admitted to over $25M more in bank fraud.

Conspiracy with foreign spy: On September 14, 2018, Manafort pled guilty to a conspiracy to witness tamper with Konstantin Kilimnik. In a 2021 sanctions filing, Treasury stated as fact that Kilimnik is a Russian Intelligence Services agent.

Joint Defense Agreement with President: Before Manafort pled guilty, Rudy Giuliani confirmed that Manafort was part of a Joint Defense Agreement with the President.

Lied to protect President: On February 13, 2019, Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Manafort had breached his plea agreement by — among other things — lying about what he did in an August 2, 2016 meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik at which he described how the campaign planned to win swing states.

Intervention from Attorney General: On May 13, 2020, Manafort was given COVID release to home confinement, even though his prison was at that point low risk and his case did not meet the criteria laid out by Bureau of Prisons. He served less than two years of an over seven year sentence in prison.

Pardoned: On December 23, 2020, Trump pardoned Manafort.

Hunter Biden sources

Hundreds of thousands in tax avoidance: In both 2017 and 2018, Hunter failed to pay full taxes on $1.5M in income ($3M total).

Gun possession: For 11 days in 2018, Hunter possessed a gun in violation of a prohibition on gun ownership by an addict.

Update: Just to give a sense of scale, in his Ways and Means interview, Whistleblower X tried to explain how big the scale of Hunter Biden’s graft was by noting that he and his associates, over five years, got $17.3M.

But Manafort was doing more than that himself.

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