Hunter Biden ducked $1.2M tax bill over 2017, 2018: IRS whistleblower
WASHINGTON — IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley scoffed Wednesday at the notion that President Biden’s son Hunter paid off his overdue tax bills totalling $580,000 in 2017 and $620,000 in 2018 — saying Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris actually did it for him.
“To say he paid is a misnomer, right? Because it was an individual [Kevin] Morris that he met at a campaign finance event. And then he immediately starts giving Hunter Biden money to pay off tax debts, to pay living expenses,” Shapley said in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier.
“The money that was given to Hunter Biden by Morris was — showed up on his tax returns as a loan to him. So when you have a person that you meet at a campaign finance event, then he’s all of a sudden given you millions of dollars, and now it’s a loan to you — I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say that the the subject paid those taxes.”
Court documents filed last week by Delaware US Attorney David Weiss only specified that Hunter Biden, 53, failed to pay more than $100,000 in taxes each year, for which he agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanors expected to be punished with probation.
Shapley, who led the Hunter Biden tax fraud investigation for more than three years, told Baier, “The true number is $580,000 of failure to pay for 2017. It’s under $620,000 for 2018. Yet this document puts it close to $100,000.”
“The relevance to 2018 tax years — that doesn’t even include the false business expenses that he claimed and that the prosecutors refused to charge,” he added. “So there’s still outstanding tax… above that $620,000 that because of this deal, they’ll never recoup.”
“I mean to this day, there’s still around $400,000 of unreported income from Burisma [Holdings] in 2014,” Shapley went on. “Hunter Biden was told by his partner, Eric Schwerin, that he needed to amend his returns, and he never did.”
A judge still must approve the plea deal announced last Tuesday, which includes a diversion deal for Hunter Biden to avoid a felony gun-possession charge in exchange for two years of probation.
Shapley, who first made stunning disclosures of an alleged Justice Department coverup to the House Ways and Means Committee last month, also told Baier that Weiss repeatedly said behind closed doors that he lacked power to charge potential financial crimes outside of Delaware — despite publicly claiming he had been “granted ultimate authority over the matter.”
“I even had him repeat that because I knew how important that fact was, and I wanted to make sure I understood,” Shapley said of an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting that Weiss held with at least five others in attendance.
Shapley added that it was “crystal clear” what the federal prosecutor meant and he “documented it” in an email memo that his supervisor apparently confirmed days later, according to an internal IRS message handed over to Congress.
The lack of charges in California and Washington, DC, allowed Hunter to avoid having to pay Uncle Sam for much of the $8.3 million in allegedly untaxed income he received since 2014, Shapley said. His account of Weiss being blocked in the two districts was backed up by a second whistleblower who has remained anonymous.
The whistleblower also said prosecutors barred his team from executing search warrants on Hunter Biden in the months before the 2020 election, repeating an allegation from his congressional testimony.
“Between April and June of 2020, we drafted an affidavit to execute a search warrant in a couple of different locations, and the prosecutors at the time stated that probable cause had been achieved,” Shapley told Baier. “But as we moved closer to the election, it just seemed like they kept putting it on the back burner and they eventually didn’t allow us to do that search warrant, even though the legal requirements to execute that search warrant were met.”
The second IRS whistleblower — identified by his attorney as “Mr. X” — corroborated Shapley’s claims in separate testimony to Ways and Means earlier this month, saying the Justice Department paused all activities in September 2020.
Weiss’ private remarks contradict a June 7 letter he sent to the House Judiciary Committee, in which he said: “I have been granted ultimate authority over the matter including responsibility for deciding where, when and whether to file charges.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has maintained in sworn congressional testimony that Weiss had “full authority” to charge the first son and repeated Friday that the US attorney was able “to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”
Shapley, in his May 26 deposition, said Weiss had tried to charge Hunter Biden in the Central District of California and in Washington, DC, but was denied by US Attorneys Martin Estrada and Matthew Graves. Both were appointed by President Biden.
The Justice Department also denied Weiss special counsel status twice during the case, according to Shapley and the other IRS agent.
The attorney general said last week he never saw that request, and has often noted that Weiss was appointed by former President Donald Trump in 2019 and kept in place after Biden assumed office in 2021.
Delaware Democratic Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Carper recommended Weiss for the position.
Shapley also told CBS News Tuesday night that IRS investigators were barred from taking necessary steps that may have incriminated the president.
The crimes Hunter allegedly committed would have landed “any other person” in prison, the whistleblower told CBS reporter Jim Axelrod, including “personal expenses that were taken as business expenses, prostitutes, sex club memberships, hotel rooms for purported drug dealers.”
Between 2014 and 2019, Shapley said, he and his team found Hunter owed $2.2 million in unpaid taxes.
Last week, Hunter Biden entered into a probation-only plea deal with his father’s Justice Department for tax misdemeanors and agreed to a diversion program for a federal firearms charge.
