[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]






                    HEARING WITH IRS WHISTLEBLOWERS
                        ABOUT THE BIDEN CRIMINAL
                             INVESTIGATION

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
                      OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             JULY 19, 2023

                               __________

                           Serial No. 118-52

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability




                 [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]



                       Available on: govinfo.gov,
                         oversight.house.gov or
                             docs.house.gov



                               ______
                                 

                 U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

53-006 PDF                WASHINGTON : 2023









               COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                    JAMES COMER, Kentucky, Chairman

Jim Jordan, Ohio                     Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Ranking 
Mike Turner, Ohio                        Minority Member
Paul Gosar, Arizona                  Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of 
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina            Columbia
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin            Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Gary Palmer, Alabama                 Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia
Clay Higgins, Louisiana              Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Pete Sessions, Texas                 Ro Khanna, California
Andy Biggs, Arizona                  Kweisi Mfume, Maryland
Nancy Mace, South Carolina           Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York
Jake LaTurner, Kansas                Katie Porter, California
Pat Fallon, Texas                    Cori Bush, Missouri
Byron Donalds, Florida               Jimmy Gomez, California
Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota        Shontel Brown, Ohio
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania            Melanie Stansbury, New Mexico
William Timmons, South Carolina      Robert Garcia, California
Tim Burchett, Tennessee              Maxwell Frost, Florida
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Summer Lee, Pennsylvania
Lisa McClain, Michigan               Greg Casar, Texas
Lauren Boebert, Colorado             Jasmine Crockett, Texas
Russell Fry, South Carolina          Dan Goldman, New York
Anna Paulina Luna, Florida           Jared Moskowitz, Florida
Chuck Edwards, North Carolina        Vacancy
Nick Langworthy, New York
Eric Burlison, Missouri

                       Mark Marin, Staff Director
       Jessica Donlon, Deputy Staff Director and General Counsel
            James Mandolfo, Chief Counsel for Investigations
        Jake Greenburg, Deputy Chief Counsel for Investigations
      Mallory Cogar, Deputy Director of Operations and Chief Clerk

                      Contact Number: 202-225-5074

                  Julie Tagen, Minority Staff Director
                      Contact Number: 202-225-5051

                                 ------                                







                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page
Hearing held on July 19, 2023....................................     1

                               WITNESSES

                              ----------                              

Mr. Joseph Ziegler, Special Agent, Internal Revenue Service 
  Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI)
Oral Statement...................................................     9
Mr. Gary Shapley, Supervisory Special Agent, Internal Revenue 
  Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI)
Oral Statement...................................................    12


 Opening statements and the prepared statements for the witnesses 
  are available in the U.S. House of Representatives Repository 
  at: docs.house.gov.

                           INDEX OF DOCUMENTS

                              ----------                              

  * Statement for the Record; submitted by Rep. Connolly.
  * Article, New York Times, ``Settlement Is Approved in Central 
  Park Jogger Case, but New York Deflects Blame''; submitted by 
  Rep. Crockett.
  * Article, NBC, ``Trump's Tax Returns Released by House 
  Committee Show He Paid Little in Taxes''; submitted by Rep. 
  Crockett.
  * Article, Washington Post, ``Federal Agents See Chargeable 
  Tax, Gun-Purchase Case Against Hunter Biden''; submitted by 
  Rep. Goldman.
  * Letter, July 10, 2023, to Chairman Jason Smith of Committee 
  on Ways and Means, from RM Neal; submitted by Rep. Gomez.
  * Article, New York Times, ``House G.O.P., Defending Trump, 
  Targets Bragg Ahead of Expected Indictment''; submitted by Rep. 
  Ocasio-Cortez.
  * Letter, July 18, 2023, to Chairman Comer, from Lev Parnas; 
  submitted by Rep. Raskin.

  * Questions for the Record: to Mr. Shapley; submitted by Rep. 
  Gosar.

  * Questions for the Record: to Ziegler; submitted by Rep. 
  Gosar.

The documents listed are available at: docs.house.gov.









 
                    HEARING WITH IRS WHISTLEBLOWERS
                 ABOUT THE BIDEN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION

                              ----------                              


                        Wednesday, July 19, 2023

                        House of Representatives

               Committee on Oversight and Accountability

                                           Washington, D.C.

    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:02 p.m., in 
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Comer 
[Chairman of Committee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Comer, Jordan, Turner, Gosar, 
Foxx, Grothman, Palmer, Higgins, Sessions, Biggs, LaTurner, 
Fallon, Donalds, Armstrong, Perry, Timmons, Burchett, Greene, 
McClain, Boebert, Fry, Luna, Edwards, Langworthy, Burlison, 
Raskin, Norton, Lynch, Connolly, Krishnamoorthi, Khanna, Mfume, 
Ocasio-Cortez, Porter, Gomez, Brown, Stansbury, Garcia, Frost, 
Lee, Casar, Crockett, Goldman, and Moskowitz.
    Also present: Representative Smith of Missouri.
    Chairman Comer. The Committee on Oversight and 
Accountability will come to order. I want to welcome everyone 
here today.
    Without objection, the Chair may declare a recess at any 
time.
    Without objection, Chairman of the Ways and Means 
Committee, Mr. Jason Smith of Missouri, is waived on to the 
Committee for the purpose of making an opening statement and 
questioning the witnesses at today's Committee hearing. I want 
to thank Chairman Smith and Chairman Jordan for their 
cooperation in working with the Oversight Committee on this 
investigation. This is an important joint effort that shows the 
American people that accountability matters regardless of your 
last name.
    For this hearing, opening statements will be limited to 10 
minutes for the Chair and 10 minutes for the Ranking Member.
    I now recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening 
statement.
    Since assuming our Republican Majority in January, the 
House Oversight Committee has made historically fast progress 
in our investigation into the Biden family's influence-peddling 
schemes. In just 6 months, we have obtained thousands of pages 
of financial records. This includes bank records for Biden 
family associates and suspicious activity reports generated by 
the Bidens and their associates high-dollar or foreign business 
transactions. What these records reveal is astonishing. The 
Bidens created over 20 shell companies, most of which were 
created when Joe Biden was Vice President. Bank records so far 
show the Biden family, their business associates, and their 
companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals and 
related companies.
    A lot of this money poured in while Joe Biden was Vice 
President. Despite creating many companies after Vice President 
took office, the Biden family used associates' companies to 
receive millions of dollars from foreign companies in China, 
Ukraine, and Romania. After foreign companies sent money to 
business associates' companies, the Bidens then received 
incremental payments over time to various different bank 
accounts. These complicated financial transactions were used 
deliberately to conceal the source of funds and total amounts. 
No normal business operates like this. What were the Bidens 
selling? Nothing but influence and access to the Biden network. 
This is an influence-peddling scheme to enrich the Bidens.
    We need to know whether Joe Biden is compromised by these 
schemes and if our national security is threatened. During our 
investigation, our Committee became aware through whistleblower 
disclosures provided to Senator Chuck Grassley that the FBI had 
an unclassified record that details an extortion and bribery 
scheme involving then Vice President Biden and a Burisma 
executive. This record was generated by a trusted confidential 
human source that the FBI has used for over a decade. It 
memorializes the source's conversations with a Burisma 
executive who claimed that he paid Joe Biden $5 million in 
exchange for certain actions. The Burisma executive told the 
confidential human source that he did not pay the ``big guy'' 
directly, but that he used so many bank accounts that it would 
take 10 years to unravel. Now, that sounds an awful lot like 
how the Bidens conduct business, using multiple bank accounts 
to hide the source and total amount of the money.
    Today, we have two brave and credible IRS whistleblowers 
who have risked their careers to come forward and provide 
important testimony. Thank you all for being here today. I know 
it was not an easy decision. Their testimony about the DOJ, 
FBI, and IRS' investigation of Hunter Biden confirms the 
Committee's findings, that there is nothing normal about the 
Biden family's business activity.
    The White House and Democrats would have Americans believe 
that our investigation is based on 5 years of conspiracy 
theories, but we have facts, and new evidence continues to be 
uncovered by our Committee revealing the First Family's 
corruption. The Bidens have put themselves first and Americans 
last. We will continue to follow the money trail and provide 
the answers, transparency, and accountability that Americans 
demand and deserve.
    With that, I yield to the Chairman of the Ways and Means 
Committee, Jason Smith.
    Mr. Smith. Thank you, Chairman Comer. The Ways and Means 
Committee is charged with ensuring that the Tax Code is 
enforced fairly. Clearly, the President only believes in making 
taxpayers pay their fair share if they do not share his last 
name. These two courageous whistleblowers provided my Committee 
with devastating testimony, showing that the government is not 
treating all taxpayers equally, and the DOJ and the IRS gave 
preferential treatment to the President's son during a criminal 
investigation into his taxes. These individuals in front of us 
today are credible and sat for nearly 15 hours of interviews 
with both Republicans and Democrats. I personally took part in 
the interview with Mr. Ziegler.
    Here is what we learned from the interviewees. The IRS 
recommended multiple felony charges against Hunter Biden for 
tax years 2014 through 2019 relating to at least $8.3 million 
in income from foreign companies, including companies based in 
China, Romania, and Ukraine, and that is the only amount 
discovered despite the roadblocks and obstruction their 
investigation faced.
    The Department of Justice engaged in a campaign to delay, 
divulge, and deny that investigation. They delayed 
investigators for years, leading to the expiration of the 
statute of limitations for many of the crimes involved. They 
divulged key investigative details to Biden's attorneys and 
even the President's transition team, and they denied 
investigators the ability to authenticate evidence, serve 
warrants, question witnesses, and bring charges. This led to 
Hunter Biden's sweetheart agreement announced 5 years after the 
investigation started, but mere days before my Committee voted 
to publicly release this testimony. Would Americans in my 
congressional district or any other congressional district ever 
receive the same treatment?
    After raising their concerns internally at the IRS, these 
whistleblowers were discouraged and demoralized and turned to 
Congress as a last resort. They bravely reported wrongdoing to 
us, and what have President Biden's allies, including Hunter 
Biden's lawyers done? They have responded with a vicious smear 
campaign to discredit these whistleblowers and discourage 
others from coming forward, and may have even coordinated with 
the White House on this effort. This is a disgrace.
    I urge any IRS employee watching today, if you know of 
misconduct, please come to the Ways and Means Committee so we 
can hold accountable those who are responsible. And let me be 
clear: there will be zero tolerance for any retaliation against 
whistleblowers by DOJ and the IRS. The American people expect 
answers about whether the Federal Government is treating all 
taxpayers equally or if the wealthy and politically connected 
get special treatment. Our committees are working together to 
get to the bottom of this abuse of power, and we will work 
tirelessly to do so and to make sure it does not ever happen 
again. Americans should not have to accept two tiers of justice 
in this country, one if your last name is Biden and one for 
everybody else.
    I want to thank both whistleblowers for coming forward 
publicly and for your testimony today. I yield to Mr. Jordan.
    Mr. Jordan. I thank the gentleman for yielding. The 
question is who are you going to believe? April 26, in front of 
the U.S. Senate, the Attorney General said David Weiss is in 
charge of the investigation. October 7, in a meeting with Gary 
Shapley, one of the whistleblowers, David Weiss said ``I am not 
the deciding official.'' Who are you going to believe?
    On February 28, I wrote the Attorney General asking him why 
there is no special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation. 
He did not respond, which is unusual in and of itself. They 
always respond to the Judiciary Committee when we write 
something to them. I wrote again on May 25. Again, the Attorney 
General did not respond, but David Weiss did, and here is what 
he said. June 7, he said this: ``I have been granted ultimate 
authority over the matter, including responsibility for 
deciding where, when, and whether to file charges.'' That is 
what the U.S. Attorney said on June 7. Three weeks later, Mr. 
Weiss wrote me again, and he said this, ``I stand by what I 
wrote, but I wish to expand.'' Wow, already changing his story 
23 days later. And he said this, ``My charging authority is 
geographically limited to my home district.'' Well, wait a 
minute. You just told me 23 days before you have ultimate 
authority. Now you change it.
    Then again, on July 10, Mr. Weiss wrote to Senator Graham 
and he said this, paragraph 2, ``To clarify, I have not 
requested special counsel designation. Rather, I had 
discussions with departmental officials.'' Mr. Weiss cannot get 
his story straight: three different stories in a 5-week 
timeframe. On June 7, he is Tarzan. I got ultimate authority. I 
can do what I want, file charges where I want, when I want, and 
how I want. June 30, well, actually, no, I cannot. And then, of 
course, on July 10, he says to clarify, I have not requested 
special counsel status, but I have been talking to the folks at 
Main Justice. Three different positions in a little over a 
month.
    You know whose story has not changed? These two guys. Their 
testimony has been consistent, throughout their testimony has 
been the same, and guess what? Two days ago, an FBI agent 
confirmed their testimony. Who are you going to believe, the 
Justice Department who cannot get their story straight, changed 
3 times in 33 days, or these two guys? The Justice Department 
that was found to censor Americans just 2 weeks ago from the 
Federal Court in Louisiana, the Justice Department that said 
moms and dads are terrorists, the Justice Department that said 
if you are a pro-life Catholic, you are an extremist, the 
Justice Department that cannot get its story straight, or these 
two guys? Over a decade of experience for each of them, the go-
to guys in international tax evasion cases, the A Team when it 
comes to investigating these matters, all over the world they 
have done this and who have been consistent throughout. I think 
I will believe these guys. I think they are the ones telling 
the truth, and that is fundamentally what this comes down to.
    So, God bless you guys for the work you have done, the 
courage you have, and for being here today, stepping forward 
because you care about equal treatment under the law. That is 
what is at stake plain and simple. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. I now yield to the Ranking Member, Mr. 
Raskin of Maryland, for his opening statement.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon to the 
witnesses. I thought we might be here today on the matter that 
the Chairman declared his top priority, the crusade to find 
evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden. But now the 
Majority's long-promised star witness turns out to be a 
fugitive from American justice, an arms trafficker indicted on 
eight Federal criminal felony counts, and an unregistered 
foreign agent for China, who tried to trade Chinese arms for 
Iranian oil. So, I guess he is not going to be a witness for 
the Majority anytime soon. Well, after the failed SARs reports, 
bank records, Form 1023, we can conclude that this Inspector 
Clouseau style quest for something that does not exist has 
turned our Committee into a theater of the absurd, an exercise 
in futility and embarrassment. And now we can finally 
definitively say why the Committee's efforts have run dry time 
and again.
    Just yesterday, Mr. Chairman, you and I got a letter from 
Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian-born American businessman, who was at 
Rudy Giuliani's side as his right-hand man for a year between 
November 2018 to October 2019 as Giuliani and then-President 
Trump tried to smear Joe Biden before the 2020 election with 
the very same allegations we are still running through the 
political spin cycle every week in this Committee.
    I request unanimous consent to enter the Parnas letter into 
the record.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Raskin. Now, in this extraordinary 10-page letter, 
Parnas painstakingly describes the campaign orchestrated by 
Giuliani and Trump to ``dig up dirt on the Bidens and spread 
misinformation about them through various networks, including 
government officials, journalists, and Fox News personnel.'' 
After explaining this campaign to fabricate corruption charges 
against Biden, Parnas concludes his letter by saying, 
``Throughout all these months of work, the extensive campaigns 
and networking done by Trump allies and Giuliani associates, 
including the enormously thorough interviews and assignments 
that I undertook, there has never been any evidence that Hunter 
or Joe Biden committed any crimes related to Ukrainian 
politics. Never during any of my communications with Ukrainian 
officials or connections to Burisma did any of them confirm or 
provide concrete facts linking the Bidens to illegal 
activities.'' As Mr. Parnas concludes, ``There has never been 
any factual evidence, only conspiracy theories spread by people 
who knew exactly what they were doing.'' And then he calls on 
this Committee to end its wild goose chase and offers to come 
and testify.
    Remember, this is Mr. Giuliani's guy. This is his 
interpreter and right-hand man who spent a year out there 
trying to cook the books against Joe Biden, and he offers to 
come testify. So, if anyone doubts anything he is saying, let 
us bring him in as a witness and let us hear about that crusade 
that they were on to smear President Biden by promoting the 
same baseless conspiracy theories that this Committee serves up 
as moldy leftovers every day.
    At today's hearing, we are going to hear about wrongdoing 
by Hunter Biden, who is pleading guilty on two tax charges and 
a gun charge next week. We will hear about the back and forth 
among investigators, prosecutors, and a Trump-appointed U.S. 
attorney, over a dozen people who spent 4 years investigating 
the President's son. We will hear about how they disagreed on 
investigative steps and what criminal charges to bring, all 
normal stuff in government investigations that does not usually 
lead to a congressional hearing.
    But one thing you will not hear today is any evidence of 
wrongdoing by President Joe Biden or his Administration. Like 
every other try by our colleagues to concoct a scandal about 
President Biden, this one is a complete and total bust. In 
fact, the ongoing case that the Majority invites us to 
interfere with today is actually a striking illustration of the 
success of the American system of independent prosecutors 
operating under the rule of law and outside the realm of the 
kind of political influence my colleagues are trying to 
exercise today.
    So, what happened? Well, the son of the sitting President 
of the United States lost his brother and then lost his way 
badly back in 2015. As too many families around the country 
know, drug addiction is a dark and powerful affliction, and 
like other addicts, Hunter Biden made foolish and criminal 
choices, including failing to pay his taxes and owning a 
firearm in violation of Federal law, and he is now being held 
criminally accountable for it. His investigation began under 
the Trump Administration. It was conducted by a U.S. Attorney 
for Delaware, David Weiss, who Donald Trump appointed to his 
office and who Attorney General Barr chose for this assignment 
to conduct this investigation.
    In his final press conference in December 2020, Attorney 
General Barr expressed full confidence in Weiss' work, saying 
it was ``being handled responsibly and professionally within 
the Department. And to this point, I have seen no reason to 
appoint a special counsel and I have no plan to do so before I 
leave.'' Furthermore, Joe Biden never publicly questioned or 
challenged this prosecution. When it began, he did not decry it 
as a witch hunt by Donald Trump. He placed his trust in the 
fairness of the American justice system. When he became 
President not only did he not use his power to halt the 
investigation, he kept in place Trump's handpicked U.S. 
Attorney, Mr. Weiss, overseeing it, even though incoming 
Presidents usually replace U.S. Attorneys with their own 
appointees. And his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, made 
sure that Mr. Weiss, appointed by Donald Trump, had full 
authority and resources to pursue this probe and charge it 
however and whenever he saw fit in any district in the country.
    And in the past few weeks, as Hunter Biden accepted a 
guilty plea, the President and his Attorney General have done 
nothing to interfere with the case, which is overseen by a 
Federal judge appointed by, yes, Donald Trump. Now, can you 
imagine Donald Trump saying nothing about a witch hunt or not 
trying to quash the prosecution if it were his son being 
prosecuted? Indeed, President Biden's traditional and 
scrupulous respect for the independence of the Justice 
Department stands in sharp contrast to Trump's spectacular 
disrespect for the rule of law and his serial efforts, both in 
office and outside office, to get prosecutors to go after and 
lock up his political rivals and to suspend accountability in 
specific criminal cases when it comes to his friends.
    When Michael Flynn was investigated for lying to the FBI 
and later convicted for it about communicating with the 
Russians, or when Paul Manafort was investigated and later 
convicted for bank and tax fraud, or when Roger Stone was 
investigated and later convicted for lying to Congress and 
witness tampering, an outraged President Trump repeatedly 
denounced the Department of Justice for prosecuting his cronies 
and reportedly got Attorney General William Barr to pressure 
prosecutors to recommend more leniency in their cases. Trump 
also went to FBI Director James Comey and pushed him to pledge 
absolute loyalty to Trump and to find a way to let Flynn go. 
Ultimately, Trump used the power of the presidency to pardon 
all of these convicted criminals.
    Now, unlike President Trump's blatant abuse of the rule of 
law and the relationship between the President and DOJ, there 
is no evidence that President Biden has involved himself in any 
way in the investigation into his own son, an investigation 
that has been overseen by Trump's appointed U.S. Attorney. No 
matter what my GOP colleagues say, and I appreciate the 
testimony of our witnesses today, there is no evidence that 
Hunter Biden has received any kind of official favoritism in 
this prosecution for being Joe Biden's son. On the contrary, 
there are more than 10 million Americans who have filed taxes 
but failed to pay them, the exact crime Hunter Biden is 
pleading guilty to.
    The vast majority of these cases are resolved 
administratively or through civil settlement. Indeed, every 
year, the IRS and DOJ obtain convictions and sentences in fewer 
than 700 cases for tax crimes of any kind, a minuscule 
percentage. The fact that Hunter Biden faced a 4-year criminal 
probe involving dozens of agents and prosecutors from the IRS, 
the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware, DOJ Tax, 
demonstrates to my mind at the very least that he received no 
special treatment, but arguably selectively tougher treatment 
than the millions of the people who never face criminal 
investigation for doing the same thing.
    If my GOP colleagues think that the treatment of millions 
of tax scofflaws or even the handful who face criminal 
prosecution, like Hunter Biden, is too lenient, I invite them 
to join us Democrats in supporting the $80 billion in funding 
for the IRS that we passed in the Inflation Reduction Act last 
year. This money will enable the IRS to make long-overdue 
improvements in customer service, but will also enable the 
Agency to restore lost capabilities in enforcement to identify 
and prosecute tax cheats. But the very first thing House 
Republicans did this Congress was vote to rescind that funding, 
while disparaging these future IRS employees who will do the 
same kind of work today's witnesses do. Senator Cruz called 
them Biden's shadow army. Senator Grassley said they will be 
going around ready to shoot some small businessperson in Iowa.
    Today, we get to witness MAGA Republicans take the side of 
IRS agents from the Deep State against a Trump-appointed U.S. 
Attorney and a rich guy exercising his Second Amendment rights, 
but now facing criminal gun charges and tax charges that they 
would call in any other circumstance purely technical. We are 
about to hear testimony from two IRS criminal investigators. 
They will describe their frustrations and disagreements with 
their supervisors, as well as with Mr. Weiss and his team of 
prosecutors, who they consider junior varsity and not up to 
snuff during the Trump Administration generally. We will also 
hear about their confusion and profound misunderstandings about 
Mr. Weiss and how he reviewed the evidence and made the 
ultimate decision about charging Hunter Biden.
    A lot of the controversy here relates to the agents' 
failure to distinguish between special counsels and special 
lawyers, but we will clear that up today. The key point, Mr. 
Chairman, that America needs to understand is that the only 
political interference at play here is coming from Donald Trump 
and my Republican colleagues. We will listen carefully to the 
testimony, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The Ranking Member yields back. I would 
like to remind the Members and the public that Section 6103 of 
the Tax Code makes taxpayer information confidential, except in 
certain circumstances. One of those exceptions is the process 
the Ways and Means Committee used to receive testimony from 
these whistleblowers and report transcripts of their testimony 
to the full House of Representatives to make that information 
public. These whistleblowers have gone above and beyond to 
submit information to Congress in accordance with the law, and 
we are grateful to them for that. The witnesses can only 
testify to tax information that has already been released 
through proper procedures through the Ways and Means Committee. 
This means that in some instances they may have to decline to 
answer a question and instead submit additional information to 
the Ways and Means Committee, at a later date, through the 
appropriate process.
    They are each accompanied by a counsel to address questions 
that arise on Section 6103 and are not present today to provide 
testimony or answer Members' questions. I ask Members to 
respect that process and requirements of Section 6103. I look 
forward to hearing what our courageous witnesses have to say. 
Further, due to the complex nature of the matter at hand, each 
of the witnesses shall have 10 minutes for their opening 
testimony.
    I would now like to introduce our witnesses. Mr. Joseph 
Ziegler is a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service 
Criminal Investigation Division, specifically assigned to the 
International Tax and Financial Crimes Division. This is a 
group of 12 elite special agents who are subject matter experts 
in complex international tax and other related crimes. He 
started his career with the IRS in 2010 as a special agent and 
has developed and successfully completed a multitude of complex 
financial investigations. The types of investigations include 
money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, 
healthcare fraud, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, income 
tax evasion, and income tax-related charges, such as identity 
theft and filing false claims for income tax refunds. Mr. 
Ziegler has won multiple performance awards throughout his 
career in recognition for his work.
    And Mr. Gary Shapley. Mr. Shapley is the supervisory 
special agent of the International Tax and Financial Crimes 
Group. Mr. Shapley started his career with the IRS in July 
2009. He was detailed to the Department of Justice's Tax 
Division from 2013 to 2018 investigating foreign financial 
institutions. He was also assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task 
Force, working as a task force officer at both the FBI 
Washington Field Office and the FBI Baltimore Field Office. Mr. 
Shapley was promoted to supervisory special agent of the elite 
ITFC Group in 2018. He also served as the assistant special 
agent in charge of both the New York Field Office and the 
Chicago Field Office.
    I want to, again, thank both gentlemen for their 
willingness to come forward and share their testimony today for 
the Members of this Committee and for the American people.
    Pursuant to Committee Rule 9(g), the witnesses will please 
stand and raise their right hands.
    Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you are 
about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth, so help you God?
    [A chorus of ayes.]
    Chairman Comer. Let the record show that the witnesses all 
answered in the affirmative. We appreciate you being here today 
and look forward to your testimony. Let me remind the witnesses 
that we have read your written statements and they will appear 
in full in the hearing record. Please press the button on your 
microphone in front of you so that it is on, and the Members 
can hear you.
    I recognize Mr. Ziegler to please begin his opening 
statement.

                      STATEMENT OF JOSEPH ZIEGLER

                             SPECIAL AGENT

                        INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

                    CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, (IRS-CI)

    Mr. Ziegler. Thank you, Chairman Comer, Chairman Smith, 
Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and Members of the 
Committee. Today, I sit here before you not as a hero or a 
victim, but as a whistleblower compelled to disclose the truth. 
That said, in coming forward, I believe I am risking my career, 
my reputation, and my casework outside of the investigation we 
are here to discuss. I ultimately made the decision to come 
forward after what I believe were multiple attempts at blowing 
the whistle at the Internal Revenue Service.
    No one should be above the law regardless of your political 
affiliation. I humbly view my role here today as providing the 
facts as I best understood them, and to let Congress, and the 
Administration, and the public consider those facts and 
determine the best path forward. I recognize that while I was 
present at the start of this investigation and was closely 
involved with the investigation for roughly 5 years, I am just 
a part of the story. Others, including my colleague and 
supervisor, Gary Shapley, who is here with me today, have their 
own views and understandings of what took place during this 
investigation.
    I have been an agent with the IRS since 2010. In 2007, I 
received my undergraduate degree from Ohio University, my MBA 
from John Carroll University. Prior to starting my career at 
the IRS, I worked at Ernst & Young as an external auditor. 
Throughout my career with the IRS, I have worked a variety of 
successful criminal tax and money laundering investigations. In 
2018, I transitioned to being a part of the International Tax 
and Financial Crimes Group out of the Washington, DC. Field 
Office. I was the lead IRS case agent on the Hunter Biden 
investigation.
    I recently discovered that people are saying that I must be 
more credible because I am a Democrat who happens to be married 
to a man. I am no more credible than this man sitting next to 
me due to my sexual orientation or my political beliefs. The 
truth is, my credibility comes today from my job experience 
with the IRS and my intimate knowledge of the agency's standard 
and procedures. I was raised and have always strived to do what 
is right. Although I do have my supporters, others have said 
that I am a traitor to the Democratic Party and that I am 
causing more division in our society. I implore you to consider 
that if you were in my position with the facts as I have stated 
them, ask yourself if you would be doing the exact same thing.
    I hope that I am an example to other LGBTQ people out there 
who are questioning doing the right thing at the potential cost 
to themselves and others. We should always do the right thing 
no matter how painful the process might be. I kind of equate 
this to the experience and feelings I encountered when coming 
out. It was honestly one of the hardest things I ever had to go 
through. I contemplated scenarios that would have been highly 
regrettable, but I did what is right, and I am sitting here in 
front of you today.
    I would first like to take a minute to thank some people 
for their unfettered help and support: first off, God for 
giving me the strength and courage to get through this process; 
my husband, who has been my rock, has put up with me, my 
stress, and has had to deal with his personal information being 
out there; my attorney, Dean Zerbe, who has agreed to represent 
me through this matter pro bono and someone who has provided me 
so much help and guidance; my colleagues from the Hunter Biden 
investigation. The work that was done on this case is 
tremendous but seems to be overshadowed by what is happening 
here today, and I just want to say to the investigative team 
that I am thankful for having worked with you. I also want to 
thank my family and friends back home in Northeast Ohio and 
Georgia.
    I do not live in the D.C. area. I had to fly here and have 
had to pay out of pocket for all my travel-related expenses in 
being a whistleblower. On that note, I would like to make 
another statement that I have not accepted a single payment 
from anyone for being a whistleblower.
    So, Mr. Chairman, while I have my written statement as well 
as my testimony before the Ways and Means Committee, I would 
like to touch on briefly seven specific matters. First, in a 
recent letter to Congress, Mr. Weiss stated that he had been 
granted ultimate authority over this matter, but then later 
stated in the same letter that his charging authority is 
geographically limited and that he would need a President 
Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney to partner with him in charging 
the case. Mr. Weiss stated that he was making all decisions 
necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution 
consistent with Federal law, the principles of Federal 
prosecution and departmental regulations.
    In the Criminal Tax Manual, Chapter 10 found on the DOJ 
website, Tax Division policy states that cases involving 
individuals who fail to file tax returns or pay a tax, but who 
also commit acts of evasion or obstruction, should be charged 
as felonies to avoid inequitable treatment. In early August 
2022, Federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice Tax 
Division drafted a 99-page memorandum. In so, they were 
recommending for approval felony and misdemeanor charges for 
the 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax years. That did not happen here, 
and I am not sure why, and as the special agent on this case, I 
thought the felony charges were well supported.
    When considering the elements of felony tax case under the 
Criminal Code, there are two key considerations: willfulness 
and tax due and owing. In the criminal context, willfulness is 
defined as voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal 
duty. The tax loss is the monetary loss to the government.
    In early 2020, Hunter Biden's unfiled and delinquent tax 
returns were being prepared, which included his 2018 tax 
return. During the 2020 time period, by Hunter Biden's own 
account, he was sober, newly married, and writing his memoir. 
Hunter Biden's accountants requested that he sign a 
representation letter stating that all the deductions were for 
business purposes and were being reported appropriately. 
Statements Hunter Biden made in his book completely 
contradicted what he was deducting as business deductions on 
his 2018 return.
    While writing his memoir, Hunter stated, ``I holed up 
inside the chateau for the first 6 weeks and learned how to 
cook crack.'' Hunter Biden allegedly falsely claimed business 
deductions for payments made to the Chateau Marmont, a hotel 
room for his supposed drug dealer; sex club memberships, 
falsely referenced on the wire as a golf membership; hotels he 
was blacklisted from; and a Columbia University tuition payment 
for his adult daughter. All of these items were used to support 
the willfulness element for felony tax evasion. These false 
deductions claimed by Hunter Biden caused a false return to be 
prepared that underreported his total income by approximately 
$267,000 and a loss to the U.S. Treasury of $106,000.
    Second, with respect to the 2014 tax year, Hunter Biden did 
not report any of the money he earned from Burisma for the 2014 
tax year, which would have been a tax loss to the government of 
$124,000. According to my previous testimony, Hunter Biden did 
not report this income to the IRS or pay tax on the source of 
income. There is nothing that I see in the public documents as 
to the Department of Justice's action against Hunter Biden that 
indicate that Hunter Biden will be required to pay tax on this 
Burisma income from 2014 or amend his 2014 tax return. I would 
like to note that the plea agreement, when released, may 
provide a greater understanding.
    Third, I would like to make clear that in the charging 
document for the District of Delaware, Hunter Biden was charged 
with failure to timely pay his taxes for 2017 and 2018 in 
excess of $100,000 for each tax year. On Hunter Biden's 2017 
and 2018 tax returns, Hunter reported taxes owed of 
approximately $581,000 and $620,000, respectfully. This tax 
amount in 2018 would not have included the alleged additional 
tax due and owing from the filed false return of $106,000. 
Thus, as I read the public documents as the Department of 
Justice action against Hunter Biden, there is nothing that 
indicates Hunter Biden will be required to amend his false tax 
return for 2018, a false tax return that includes improper 
deductions for prostitutes, sex clubs, and his adult children's 
tuition. Again, perhaps when the plea agreement is released, it 
may provide us with a greater understanding.
    Fourth, the decision to bring felony counts against Hunter 
Biden was agreed to by both prosecutors and investigators. In 
the fall of 2021, I met with prosecutors assigned to the case, 
and we all agreed and decided which charges we are going to 
recommend in the prosecution report, which included felony 
counts related to 2014 and 2018. In March 2022, the prosecutors 
requested discovery from the investigative team and presented 
the case to the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office. In later meetings 
in early August 2020, the assigned prosecutors, all four 
attorneys, agreed to recommend felony and misdemeanor charges 
for the 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax years, insofar as the 
Department of Justice Tax Division attorney sent an email about 
the process of bringing charges to include felony and 
misdemeanor tax charges in two separate districts, Delaware and 
Los Angeles.
    Less than a month later, Gary Shapley and I met with Mr. 
Weiss. He stated that he agreed with us regarding the 2014 and 
2015 tax year misdemeanor and felony charges, but that this 
could somehow affect the later year misdemeanor and felony 
charges that he conveyed were stronger. Despite these facts, 
the plea deal that is being discussed occurred. To this day, I 
do not have a reason why that occurred. From my perspective, 
this might not have been problematic had the investigation been 
handled in the ordinary course.
    Fifth, as I had previously testified and is contained in my 
written testimony, I have outlined for you some instances in 
which assigned prosecutors did not appear to follow the normal 
investigative process, slow walked the investigation, and put 
in place unnecessary approvals and roadblocks from effectively 
and efficiently investigating the case. A number of times, we 
were not able to follow the facts. I am happy to respond to 
questions concerning these instances.
    Sixth, I will also note that while the impression has been 
conveyed by the U.S. Attorney in Delaware that he has similar 
powers to that of a special counsel in this case, free rein to 
do as needed, that was not the case. It appeared to me, based 
on what I experienced, that the U.S. Attorney in Delaware in 
our investigation was constantly hamstrung, limited, and 
marginalized by DOJ officials as well as other U.S. Attorneys. 
I still think that a special counsel is necessary for this 
investigation to further handle ancillary investigations that 
are spun off and relate to Hunter Biden, but may not have venue 
in Delaware.
    Last, I would like to conclude again by encouraging 
Congress and the Administration to consider establishing an 
official channel for Federal investigators to pull the 
emergency cord and raise the issue of the appointment of a 
special counsel for consideration by senior officials. I do not 
want my colleagues at the IRS, FBI, and other Federal law 
enforcement agencies to go through my frustrating journey and 
that of our team. I believe such a path will strengthen the 
public's confidence in their institutions and their fair and 
equal treatment of all Americans under the law.
    Thank you, and I look forward to the questions.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you very much. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Shapley for his opening statement.

                       STATEMENT OF GARY SHAPLEY

                       SUPERVISORY SPECIAL AGENT

                        INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

                    CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, (IRS-CI)

    Mr. Shapley. Thank you for inviting me to testify here 
today. I want to thank every Member and staffer on both sides 
of the aisle for the work you do to represent your constituents 
and hold government accountable.
    My name is Gary Shapley. I worked as a special agent for 
IRS Criminal Investigation for 14 years. I have risen to become 
a senior leader in the organization and currently supervise 12 
elite agents in the International Tax and Financial Crimes 
Group. I have worked directly with United States Attorneys in 
multiple districts and have supervised or investigated cases in 
more than a dozen United States Attorneys' offices across the 
country. I have led, planned, or executed undercover operations 
or search warrants in more than a dozen countries. I have 
investigated and managed some of the largest cases in the 
history of the agency, recovering more than $3.5 billion for 
the United States taxpayer.
    In this country, we believe in the rule of law and that 
applies to everyone. There should not be a two-track justice 
system depending on who you are and who you are connected to. 
Yet, in this case there was. Based on my experience, I am here 
to tell you that the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office and 
Department of Justice handling the Hunter Biden tax 
investigation was very different from any other case in my 14 
years at the IRS. At every stage, decisions were made that 
benefited the subject of this investigation. For example, 
prosecutors concealed contents of Hunter Biden's laptop from 
investigators, DOJ slow walked steps to include interviews, 
serving document requests, and executing search warrants, 
warrants that were ready as early as April 2020, but were 
delayed until after the November 2020 election and never 
pursued. Investigators were not allowed to follow up on 
WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden's Apple iCloud backup, 
where he suggested he was sitting next to his father. Assistant 
United States Attorney Lesley Wolf cited the optics of 
executing a search warrant at President Biden's residence as a 
deciding factor for not allowing it, even though she agreed 
that probable cause existed.
    Prosecutors instructed investigators not to ask about the 
``big guy'' or ``dad'' when conducting interviews. The Biden 
transition team was tipped off about interviews the night 
before the investigation went over, a fact my FBI counterpart 
confirmed to this Committee in recent testimony, where the 
result was that only one witness spoke to investigators that 
day. These are just some of the examples of how our 
investigation was stymied.
    I am not here to support partisan agendas on either side. I 
am here because our tax system relies on the American people 
having confidence it is administered fairly and equally for 
everyone, regardless of your last name or political 
connections. If the handling of this case was inappropriate, it 
does not matter whether it happened under a Republican or a 
Democrat administration. Whether you agree with my concerns 
about the unethical slow walking and preferential treatment in 
this case, you can be sure that my testimony is true and 
correct to the best of my ability.
    Unfortunately, the way this has already been handled by 
some Members and the media has done immeasurable damage to 
future would-be whistleblowers. I have been attacked as 
incompetent and falsely accused of being a liar, a leaker, or 
both, all by people who know nothing about me or the facts of 
this case. Some question if I should even be called a 
whistleblower, suggesting that my disclosures are not legally 
protected merely because they do not like what I am saying. We 
have seen the shoe on the other foot before and some 
Republicans have made the same error. So, there is plenty of 
blame for both sides. The cycle of villainizing or canonizing 
government employees who report what they believe as wrongdoing 
has to stop.
    When I first started noticing deviations from the normal 
investigative process around June 2020, I did not run to 
Congress to air grievances. Instead, I documented my concerns 
and made internal protected disclosures to my chain of command. 
I tried to give the prosecutors the benefit of the doubt for a 
very long time. After our investigation had largely concluded 
by the end of 2021, the IRS recommended charging Hunter Biden 
with multiple felonies and several misdemeanors for the tax 
years of 2014 through 2019. The Delaware Assistant United 
States Attorneys and Tax Division trial attorneys supported 
charging the felonies and misdemeanors listed in Exhibit 2 of 
my interview transcripts on page 44 and 45, which were 
officially referred to the Department of Justice Tax Division 
in February 2022.
    This case was presented to the Washington, DC. U.S. 
Attorney's Office in or around March 2022. In April 2022, in a 
hearing, Attorney General Garland was asked how the American 
people could be confident the administration was conducting a 
serious investigation into the President's own son. Attorney 
General Garland responded by saying ``because we put the 
investigation in the hands of a Trump appointee.'' He led 
Congress to believe the case was insulated from improper 
political influence because all decisions were being made 
exclusively by Delaware United States Attorney David Weiss, but 
that was not true.
    The Justice Department allowed the President's political 
appointees to weigh in on whether to charge the President's 
son. After United States Attorney for D.C., Matthew Graves, 
appointed by President Biden, refused to bring charges in March 
2022, I watched United States Attorney Weiss tell a room full 
of senior FBI and IRS senior leaders on October 7, 2022, that 
he was not the deciding person on whether charges were filed. 
That was my red line. I had already seen a pattern of 
preferential treatment and obstruction. Now United States Weiss 
was admitting that what the American people believed based on 
the Attorney General's sworn statement was false. I could no 
longer stay silent.
    In November 2022, the statute of limitations was set to 
expire for the 2014 and 2015 charges in D.C., which included 
the 2014 felonies for the attempt to evade or defeat tax and 
fraud or false statement regarding Burisma income earned by 
Hunter Biden in those years. The statute of limitations have 
been extended through a tolling agreement with Hunter Biden's 
defense counsel, and they were willing to extend it past 
November 2022. Weiss allowed those to expire. Prosecutors 
presented the 2017, 2018, and 2019 criminal tax charges to the 
Central District of California around September 2022 only after 
President Biden's nominee, Martin Estrada, was confirmed. In 
January of this year, I learned Estrada had declined to bring 
the charges.
    For all intents and purposes, the case was dead with the 
exception of one gun charge that could be brought in Delaware. 
And yet, when Senator Chuck Grassley asked Attorney General 
Garland about the case in March 2023, Garland testified, ``The 
United States Attorney has been advised he has full authority 
to make those referrals you are talking about or to bring cases 
in other districts if he needs to do that. He has been advised 
that he should get anything he needs.'' After the October 7 red 
line meeting, there was no way to reconcile United States 
Attorney Weiss' statement and his office's actions with 
Attorney General Garland's public testimony. I am 100 percent 
certain of what Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office did in seeking 
approval from political appointees in D.C. and California.
    The New York Times reporter has independently confirmed the 
charges being presented and declined in California. Plenty of 
other witnesses are familiar with these facts in addition to 
those who witnessed U.S. Attorney Weiss' private admission. I 
encourage them to step forward and tell the truth about what 
happened and what they heard.
    Let me be clear. Although these facts contradict Attorney 
General Garland's testimony and raise serious questions for you 
to investigate, I have never claimed to have evidence that 
Attorney General Garland knowingly lied to Congress. Whether 
Attorney General Garland knew his testimony was false is for 
you and the inspector generals to determine, not me. The same 
is true for United States Attorney Weiss' three letters to 
Congress since June 2023. It is for others to investigate and 
determine whether those letters contain knowingly false 
statements. However, it is clear that United States Attorney 
Weiss' story to the American public has evolved. He has gone 
from unequivocally echoing Attorney General Garland to just 1 
month later corroborating the disclosures we made about limits 
on his authority.
    Weiss first said he can charge anywhere and then admitted 
he is geographically limited. To go beyond those limits, Weiss 
later admitted he had to partner or get special authority. 
Garland said Weiss has authority. United States Attorney Weiss 
said he has been assured he would get authority. If he never 
requested or denied special authority from Attorney General 
Garland, as he told us on October 7, the American public 
deserves to hear why he allowed 2014 and 2015 D.C. charges to 
expire. No number of carefully worded denials or evolving half-
truths can overshadow this stark fact.
    United States Attorney Weiss and Attorney General Garland 
will each be sitting before these committees 1 day. They will 
have to admit that, despite all their obfuscation, the absolute 
fact is that this case was presented to two Presidentially 
appointed U.S. Attorneys in D.C. and California. That no 
charges were brought in those districts tells you everything 
that you need to know.
    I do not claim to be privy to United States Attorney Weiss 
or Attorney General Garland's communications, but United States 
Attorney Weiss told us that he was not the deciding person, 
that he had requested and was denied special authority after 
D.C. declined charges, and that if California declines, he will 
have to request special authorities again. I understood the 
gravity of those admissions. Whether full responsibility lies 
with United States Attorney Weiss or Attorney General Garland 
is for Congress, the inspector generals, and, ultimately, the 
public to decide.
    When I decided after October 7 to come forward and began 
researching whistleblower attorneys, I wanted to abide by the 
law in every way as I navigated the complex taxpayer privacy 
and grand jury secrecy statutes. I carefully followed the 
whistleblower process to the letter with the advice of counsel 
at every step. I am fortunate to be represented by Mark Lytle, 
a Federal prosecutor for 25 years, including 5 years with the 
Department of Justice Tax Division. I am also grateful for 
Empower Oversight, a nonprofit whistleblower group, whose 
president, Tristan Leavitt, was previously nominated by 
President Biden to the Merit Systems Protection Board and 
unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. While some have tried 
to paint me with a partisan brush because this charitable 
organization employs some former staffers to GOP Members on 
Capitol Hill, their expertise developed working for the patron 
saint and whistleblower, Senator Chuck Grassley, has been 
invaluable.
    Meanwhile, the Biden family attorneys appear to be 
representing Hunter Biden, President Biden, and the Department 
of Justice, and they are not working for free. It has been 
reported in public sources that there is a large fund paying 
for legal fees for Biden family attorneys. The source of those 
funds is unknown. They have virtually unlimited resources to 
pursue their agenda, while my motives are questioned simply for 
finding competent representation from a small nonprofit that 
helps whistleblowers. Groups such as Empower Oversight and 
Whistleblower Aid are the only path to ensure whistleblowers 
like me are heard and receive competent advice.
    My intention was not to be your sole source of information, 
and I implore you to take the necessary steps to obtain as much 
evidence as possible from as many sources as possible to be 
able to fully inform your conclusions. I am confident that 
after you have done that, both sides will find serious issues 
with the Hunter Biden investigation that closely align with my 
testimony. No matter your party, I am not your opposition. I am 
here with information for you to examine, investigate, and 
determine whether more action is warranted on your part. I am 
on your team, whether we agree on every politically sensitive 
issue or not. There is no benefit for me blowing the whistle on 
this case, absolutely none. I have no book deal, and the only 
money that goes into my bank account every 2 weeks is from my 
employment for the Federal Government.
    I am still a supervisor, leading a group of 12 fantastic 
agents working complex international investigations. 
Unfortunately to this day, my immediate supervisors are 
retaliating against me for making protected disclosures. Even 
last fall, Biden family attorneys attacked investigators in the 
pages of the Washington Post and threatened the prosecutors 
with career suicide if they brought charges against the 
President's son. Then one of the Biden family attorneys sends 
to the press a 10-page error-filled letter that attacked me 
with innuendo, false statements, and baseless speculation that 
I had leaked information to the Washington Post. These 
statements by Biden family attorneys are false.
    In conclusion, the American people for whom this body 
works, I implore you to look at the facts, not agenda-led 
statements from either side of the aisle. I am the average 
American citizen who worries about how I will send my kids to 
college and if I will ever have enough money to retire, just 
like most people watching this today. I am the first person in 
my family to go to college. It was not an Ivy League school, 
and I do not have a network of rich and powerful friends to 
help me weather the storms of retaliation and character 
assassination. I am putting myself at risk for the American 
people who support me and for those who do not. At the end of 
the day, I am just a small-town kid from Norwich, New York, who 
worked hard to get where I am and will never compromise my 
integrity. I will never forget who I am, where I come from, or 
all the people in my life who have made me who I am today. 
Thank you all for your time.

    Chairman Comer. Thank you both for those excellent opening 
statements. We will now begin the questioning phase, and I will 
begin questioning. We will start with Mr. Ziegler.
    Here, on the Committee, we focused on following the 
evidence, specifically the money trail through bank records and 
suspicious activity reports, and I want to discuss with you 
specific payments made to Hunter Biden and the Biden family. 
Democrats and the left-wing media are also saying there is no 
evidence. Let us get into the evidence, Mr. Ziegler. I want to 
direct you to pages 99 and 100 of your transcript. How much 
money did Hunter Biden and his associates receive from the 
Romanian company you identified?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, that amount would be from Romania, so the 
approximate total transfers from the Romania company would have 
been $3.1 million to everyone.
    Chairman Comer. Three-point-one million dollars. How much 
did Hunter Biden and his business associates receive from State 
Energy HK Limited through the Robinson Walker LLC.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, total transfers from State Energy HK to 
Rob Walker was $3 million.
    Chairman Comer. Three million dollars. Was there a $100,000 
payment from CEFC Infrastructure to Owasco P.C., Hunter Biden's 
professional corporation?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. Approximately how much was transferred to 
Hunter Biden and his business associates through Hudson West 
III?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, the total transfers from Hudson West III 
to everyone was $3.7 million.
    Chairman Comer. Three-point-seven million dollars. How much 
money did Hunter Biden and his business associates receive from 
the Ukrainian company Burisma?
    Mr. Ziegler. Burisma paid to everyone involved $6.5 
million.
    Chairman Comer. Six-point-five million dollars. Burisma 
also paid Blue Star Strategies and a law firm hundreds of 
thousands of dollars, bringing the total of Burisma payments to 
over $7 million. Is that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct, $7.3 million.
    Chairman Comer. Seven-point-three million dollars. Between 
2014 and 2019, this brings the total amount of foreign income 
streams received to approximately $17 million, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Chairman Comer. What was the purpose of analyzing money 
from foreign sources, and do you have documents to support your 
findings?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, the purpose of documenting the foreign 
sources, as a part of a normal International Tax investigation, 
we have to figure out where the money is coming from, you have 
to follow the money trail. And as a part of that process, we 
have to follow different transactions, identify different 
foreign entities that might be paying a person, and then we go 
and get those records.
    Chairman Comer. All right, and hopefully, you can provide 
that to the Committee.
    Mr. Ziegler. So yes, any records----
    Chairman Comer. Thank you.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. Regarding those transactions we 
can----
    Chairman Comer. We love evidence on this side of the----
    Mr. Ziegler. We can----
    Chairman Comer [continuing]. Of the aisle. On page 80 of 
your transcript, you identified other Biden family members who 
received relevant payments through your investigation, such as 
the grandchildren. Can you explain why you wanted to interview 
them?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, as a part of the investigation, you want 
to interview people who might have received money, people who 
might have had deductions that were deducted on the tax return. 
So, there are a multitude of reasons why you would want to talk 
to family members.
    Chairman Comer. Is it common for grandchildren to receive 
money from foreign nationals and significant business wires?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I do not know the reason or I do not know 
what is behind any of these payments that might have been made 
to specific family members, but I can just speak to what was in 
our transcript.
    Chairman Comer. All right. Thank you. I would invite the 
media here today to review the Committee's bank records 
memorandum, which closely matches the IRS figures. We will have 
a supplemental memorandum discussing payments from the Ukraine, 
Russia, and other sources very soon based on bank records we 
have recently received but have not disclosed yet. Sir, you 
have confirmed for me what I have been saying all along. The 
Committee has accomplished in 5 months what it took the 
Department of Justice 5 years to figure out.
    Mr. Shapley, I want to turn to President Biden. You have 
stated to CBS Evening News that there were certain 
investigative steps you were not allowed to take that could 
have led to President Biden. Can you tell us what investigative 
steps related to President Biden that you wanted to take but 
you could not?
    Mr. Shapley. So, there are multiple instances in this 
investigation where there are references to the father of the 
subject, President Biden. And in the course of any normal 
investigation, when the subject's father is somehow related to 
the finances of the subject, in a normal course of any 
investigation we would have to go and get that information to 
properly vet the financial flows of money in that investigation 
to determine what we end up charging.
    Chairman Comer. There was a tweet or a message in the 
laptop from Hunter Biden to Kevin Dong, who was with CEFC, and 
it said, ``The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what 
the chairman wants from this partnership.'' Now, the chairman 
he is referring to is Chairman Ye of CEFC. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. In that string----
    Chairman Comer. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. I believe so, yes.
    Chairman Comer. So, can you tell me what the Bidens are 
best at? Do you understand what he would have meant by that? 
This is a Chinese company, and I think the Ranking Member 
referred to it with Gal Luft. It is the same entity that paid 
Gal Luft the money that he got indicted for being an 
unregistered foreign agent, I believe, was the charge. But this 
is another solicitation from Hunter Biden. And he refers to the 
Bidens, plural. And ``they are best at doing what the chairman 
wants,'' I think that is very concerning to our Committee 
because this is a Chinese Communist Party-owned entity. This is 
of concern to our national security, and I did not know, in 
closing, if you had any information with respect to that 
comment there.
    Mr. Shapley. With respect to the WhatsApp messages, it was 
something we clearly needed to follow up on. And that was 
really one of the major deviations in this case, is that 
investigators asked and Special Agent Ziegler asked to take 
some investigative steps to review that, and it just simply was 
not supported by the prosecutors. So further delving into what 
that means, I just simply cannot do.
    Chairman Comer. Well, I can promise you we are not going to 
stop on this Committee until we understand what he fully meant 
by that message to a Chinese Communist Party official.
    Mr. Ziegler. Mr. Chairman, can I say something about that?
    Chairman Comer. Yes, please.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, thank you for that question. There was a 
long WhatsApp message contained in that. That was only a 
portion of it, so what we can do is we can turn that over to 
the House Ways and Means Committee. They can vote to release 
it, and then that information can be available for you.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. Thank you very much. I now yield 
to Ranking Member Raskin.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank both 
the witnesses for their testimony and for appearing with us 
today. It seems to me that a lot of your testimony has been 
about the problem of prosecutorial discretion and the 
traditional tug of war between investigators who 
characteristically want to charge as many offenses as they have 
come across, and prosecutors who are more attuned to the rigors 
of the courtroom and the complexity of forensic evidence. And I 
admit as a former state assistant attorney general, I see it 
more from the prosecutor standpoint than the investigator's 
standpoint. But Mr. Shapley, would you concede that there are 
lots of crimes that are identified by investigators that are 
not actually charged by prosecutors routinely?
    I will give you an example. In the recent indictment of 
Donald Trump for retaining government documents that he 
unlawfully took, according to the indictment, he was charged 
only with possessing those documents that were recovered after 
the August 2022 search warrant. But he had hundreds of 
documents that were recovered before that, 15 boxes that were 
recovered in January and then after the grand jury subpoena in 
June, but the prosecutors decided not to charge any of those as 
offenses. They said they were going to take the most egregious 
offenses and charge those. Is that unfamiliar to you, that kind 
of decision by a prosecutor.
    Mr. Shapley. So, I cannot speak to anything related to the 
Trump investigation, but the issue here with this case is that 
it was not just investigators that agreed with these charges. 
In Exhibit 2, and in my testimony, it clearly shows a 
prosecution recommendation report where it says right in the 
document, it says the Assistant United States Attorneys and 
Department of Justice Tax Division agreed with those 
recommended charges. And then, again, as Special Agent Ziegler 
alluded to, in late 2022----
    Mr. Raskin. And they were recommended to whom?
    Mr. Shapley. To Department of Justice. So, the prosecution 
recommendation report is referred to the Department of Justice 
Tax Division for approval, discretion, or declination.
    Mr. Raskin. Right, but then it all went to the U.S. 
Attorney in Delaware, right?
    Mr. Shapley. So, that is not entirely accurate because, you 
know, Department of Justice Tax Division, up through March 16, 
2023, had not yet approved, provided discretion, or declined 
charges. So, U.S. Attorney Weiss had no authority to charge any 
of those charges without the Department of Justice Tax 
Division's approval beforehand.
    Mr. Ziegler. And I would like to say something about this 
real quick.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. Well, let me come back to you because I 
only have a limited amount of time and I have got questions for 
you. But, in fact, Mr. Ziegler, you say that Hunter Biden's 
unpaid taxes were around $2 million, and he has now paid those 
back taxes as I understand it, and he has been criminally 
charged for not paying taxes. Will you just explain how people 
can be charged for not paying taxes even after they have made 
amends and gone forward to pay them?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, under the statute, when someone fails to 
timely pay their taxes, usually due April 15, once that date 
occurs, they have a known tax liability and they fail to pay 
it. The crime has already been committed. The fact that they 
paid the taxes after, that is a mitigating factor that the 
judge can use their discretion at sentencing. But I would like 
to make one reference that this does not include the over 
$100,000 in additional tax due and owing that was not charged 
related to----
    Mr. Raskin. No, you made yourself clear. You thought there 
were additional charges that were laid on the table and not 
pursued by U.S. Attorney Weiss, the Trump appointee. But, Mr. 
Shapley, you testified that the critical moment in your 
decision to blow the whistle in the Hunter Biden investigation 
was the October 7 meeting, 2022, that you had with U.S. 
Attorney David Weiss. And up until that point, you say you were 
willing to chalk up the differences with prosecutors to the 
typical ``investigator versus prosecutor'' type thing, which is 
what I think this is all about. But you say on page 28 of your 
transcript, ``If I was not in the October 7 meeting, my red 
line might not have been crossed,'' and I think you reaffirm 
that today.
    Now, as I understand it, what crossed your red line is that 
in that meeting, you understood Mr. Weiss to be saying that he 
did not have the authority to bring charges in D.C. or 
California without the approval of the U.S. Attorneys for those 
districts. Is that right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. But in a letter that he sent to Chairman 
Jordan in June, U.S. Attorney Weiss stated, ``I have been 
granted ultimate authority over this matter, including 
responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file 
charges.'' He went on to explain that in considering charges in 
districts outside Delaware, usual DOJ practice would be ``to 
contact the U.S. Attorney's Office for the district in question 
and determine whether it wants to partner on the case.'' Now, 
if that office declined, he would request and be granted 
authority to bring the charge himself under ``special attorney 
status from the attorney general pursuant to 28 USC Section 
515.'' Now to try to clear this up, Mr. Shapley, let us go back 
to March 2022 when, as you explained on page 153 of the 
transcript, the U.S. Attorney for D.C. declined to partner with 
Mr. Weiss to bring the 2014 and 2015 charges in D.C. After that 
decision by the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Mr. Weiss continued to 
discuss those charges with all of you.
    In fact, Mr. Ziegler, on page 39 of your transcript, you 
described how in September 2022, you had a meeting in which 
U.S. Attorney Weiss expressed some concerns about those 
charges, including that in 2015, Hunter Biden was in the throes 
of his drug addiction after the death of his brother, and in 
that meeting, Mr. Weiss tells you, ``I am still weighing it.'' 
Now, Mr. Ziegler, in September 2022, Mr. Weiss was telling you 
that he was the one weighing whether to bring the 2014 and 2015 
charges. Isn't that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Raskin. Now, coming back to the October 7, 2022, 
meeting, Mr. Shapley, according to you on page 155, Mr. Weiss 
said he decided not to charge 2014 and 2015. It seems to me 
this October 7, 2022, meeting, which you have described as a 
red line, is just a misunderstanding that after the U.S. 
Attorney in D.C. declined to partner on the 2014 and 2015 
charges, Mr. Weiss took a good hard look at those charges 
himself and ultimately decided not to charge them and, 
therefore, not to seek this special attorney status. He may 
have been right about that, he may have been wrong as you guys 
make your case for, but it was his decision. Isn't that right, 
Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. No, that is not supported by the facts.
    Mr. Raskin. Really? Well, which facts is it not supported 
by?
    Mr. Shapley. His own admissions in the October 7, 2022 
meeting that I documented contemporaneously. And the only piece 
of information----
    Mr. Raskin. But he contradicts what you are saying. Do you 
agree that he does not agree with what you are saying about 
that meeting? Now, I was not at that October 7, 2022, meeting, 
but what was said at the meeting over 2-and-a-half years ago 
may be a little ambiguous or unclear today, Mr. Weiss' letter 
to Chairman Jordan could not be more clear. He had ``ultimate 
authority over this matter, including responsibility for 
deciding where, when, and whether to file the charges.'' So, if 
there is any ambiguity, it has got to go to U.S. Attorney 
Weiss, Donald Trump's handpicked U.S. attorney for Delaware. I 
yield back, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back, and now I 
recognize Chairman Smith.
    Mr. Ziegler. Can I say something real quick on that? I have 
two things that I wanted to bring up. So, there are a lot of 
different tax cases out there that include misdemeanors and 
felonies, and there are a lot of reasons why we charge the 
felony, we might charge the misdemeanor. But I want to be clear 
on this, that when you have a felony charge with a misdemeanor, 
that you have to charge the felony, and in this case, they did 
not charge that felony. And then there is one more point to 
this. We had a meeting with all four signed prosecutors.
    Mr. Raskin. Excuse me. When you say you have to charge the 
felony, that is a Department of Justice rule you are saying?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is in their manual that you have to 
charge the felony in order to avoid inequitable treatment of 
taxpayers.
    Mr. Raskin. No, but you are saying whether or not the 
evidence supports it.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is a part of that is in that analysis is 
whether the evidence, but that goes back to the point of that 
if the certain deductions that were taken on the tax return, 
that is for you guys to decide whether the felony was there or 
not. But the point is, is that we are bringing----
    Mr. Raskin. That is for the U.S. Attorney to decide, and I 
am afraid we are not going to be able to investigate every tax 
case in America.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired. The Chair 
now recognizes Mr. Smith from Missouri.
    Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Shapley and Mr. 
Ziegler, I want to thank you both again for your testimony and 
your willingness to come forward and tell the truth for the 
American public. And I apologize of the behavior of some of our 
colleagues and how the press has treated you for doing what is 
right so the American people can see it.
    Mr. Shapley, included in the documents you provided to the 
Ways and Means Committee is a document labeled Exhibit 2 in the 
transcript of your testimony, which is a portion of a special 
agent report. This document is located following page 41 of the 
transcript, this one. What is this document, and what 
recommendations are made in this document?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. So, this is the prosecution 
recommendation report that IRS, CIA agents produce at the end 
of an investigation when they are going to recommend 
prosecution to the Department of Justice. This was authored by 
Special Agent Ziegler, and it is an incredibly robust document. 
There are several thousand pages because each of these are the 
facts and the elements in this particular report. The elements 
of each violation show which piece of evidence meets that 
element.
    So, in this report, it recommended felony charges for 2014, 
2018, and 2019, and misdemeanor charges for 2015, 2016, 2017, 
2018, and 2019. And it further shows that Special Agent Ziegler 
spoke with prosecutors and worked hand in hand with prosecutors 
while this was being drafted, and they clearly agreed that the 
elements of these violations were met, and they supported this 
document and when it was sent to the Department of Justice Tax 
Division for approval on February 25, 2022.
    Mr. Smith. Mr. Shapley, what level of confidence does the 
IRS need to have to recommend charges like the felony counts 
listed in this document?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I mean, each violation has each element 
listed in this report, and evidence is shown underneath each of 
it. This report goes through internal departments, IRS criminal 
investigation, and in addition to the prosecutors agreeing that 
the evidence supported charging felony counts, senior 
leadership up to the Director of Field Operations, IRS Criminal 
Investigation also personally reviewed this report and approved 
it to be sent to Department of Justice Tax Division.
    Mr. Smith. So, were you surprised that on June 20, 2023, 
prosecutors announced a plea agreement with Hunter Biden under 
which he would only plead guilty to violations of two 
misdemeanor charges?
    Mr. Shapley. So, the guilty plea is outside of my control, 
but what I can say is it is not what an investigator thought, 
it is not what Special Agent Ziegler and I thought that felony 
charges were proven in this case. The prosecutors again and 
again agreed with that assessment, and United States Attorney 
Weiss also agreed with these because he went to the D.C. U.S. 
Attorney to ask him to partner. You do not ask someone to 
partner with you if you do not yourself agree with those 
charges, and when he got denied that, he requested a special 
authority and was declined, as he said in the October 7, 2022 
meeting.
    Mr. Smith. Yes. In the report that we just highlighted as 
Exhibit 2, it states in there that even Lesley Wolf agreed with 
these charges moving forward, the assistant prosecutor. Mr. 
Ziegler, on page 32 of the transcript of your testimony, you 
discussed the need to interview Hunter Biden's adult children 
regarding certain deductions that you listed earlier of Hunter 
Biden included on his tax returns. You also testified that 
Assistant United States Attorney Lesley Wolf told you that you 
would get into hot water if you interviewed the President's 
grandchildren. In other cases that you have worked over your 
career, have you ever had a prosecutor tell you that you could 
not interview a relevant witness?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, there are certain things that come into 
whether we talk to a witness or not, so if they are an 
attorney, if there is some special situation that might come up 
that might cause caution to interviewing that witness. But I 
have never been told that we could not approach someone to 
interview them as a part of an investigation. I mean, there are 
certain situations to where you have to do a further analysis 
of the information that you might get if they are, like I said, 
if they are an attorney. But, so, in this case, we needed to 
talk to witnesses related to things that were deducted on the 
tax return, and in this case, it was the adult children that we 
needed to talk to.
    Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I see my time expired.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Krishnamoorthi from Illinois for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. 
Shapley, thank you, Mr. Ziegler, for your services to this 
country. I really appreciate you coming here and appearing in 
this capacity.
    First of all, Mr. Ziegler, I see at page 12 of your 
transcript, deposition transcript, you start laying out a 
series of concerns that you had with regard to various people 
and different issues related to this investigation. You say, 
``I started this investigation in November 2018 after reviewing 
bank deposits.'' Then you later say career IRS staff were not 
initially supportive of starting the investigation. Of course, 
in November 2018, Joe Biden was not the President, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. Joe Biden was not the President, correct.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And then at page 20, you lay out 
another concern. You had a concern about Attorney General Bill 
Barr consolidating the series of cases into the U.S. Attorney's 
Office in Delaware. At that point, you said, ``What was the 
potential issue I saw with working the case in Delaware? We 
were working with a small U.S. Attorney's Office who might not 
have ever worked a case of this caliber.'' Now, of course, Bill 
Barr was appointed by Donald Trump, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Now, let me turn to another concern 
that you lay out in your testimony. You were concerned about 
the quality of the prosecutors. On page 14, you say, ``The 
prosecutors were the JV squad, and they were not up to the task 
of handling such a big case.'' Now, sir, U.S. Attorney Weiss 
was also appointed by Donald Trump, right?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, as far as the actual nomination and what 
went into why----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. No, I am not asking you why. I am just 
saying USA Weiss was appointed by Donald Trump, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. OK. Now, another concern you lay out in 
your deposition, at page 21, you talk about your concerns about 
this investigation having been made overt, being publicized for 
the world to know. You said, ``One of the first disagreements I 
recall between the IRS investigators and prosecutors was the 
idea of going public.'' Now, sir, this was in March, April 
2019. Joe Biden was not the President then, was he?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I do not recall the exact date of when he 
announced that he was going to run for presidency, but I know 
he was----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. That is not my question, sir. Joe Biden 
was not the President in March/April 2019, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Now, Mr. Shapley, let me turn to you 
for a second here. You also raise a series of concerns in your 
deposition transcript. One is this: you said you were concerned 
about the complexities of the election cycle and potential 
delays that arose in connection with the election cycle. You 
said, at page 23, ``And I remember there were always times 
where we were always on an impending election cycle. It was 
always the elections being brought up in early 2020. It was the 
Presidential primaries.'' Now, sir, Joe Biden was not the 
President at that time either, was he?
    Mr. Shapley. I mean, the answer to your question is, no, he 
was not, but I do not see where you are referencing it in my 
transcript----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Page 23. You are talking about how the 
election cycle is delaying decisions by the prosecution, and it 
turns out that the delay in the election cycle was happening at 
a time when Joe Biden was not the President.
    Mr. Shapley. I am sorry, sir. That is in Special Agent 
Ziegler's transcript. That is why I could not find it.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. So, Mr. Ziegler, and you shared 
concerns about delays related to the election cycle, but at 
that time, Joe Biden was not the President.
    Mr. Ziegler. I believe at that time he was the nominee for 
president.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. But, well, he was not the President, 
was he? It is just a simple question, sir.
    Mr. Ziegler. Can you rephrase the what time period----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Joe Biden was not the President in the 
Presidential primaries in 2020?
    Mr. Ziegler. Correct. That is correct.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Sir, finally, Mr. Shapley, you said 
that warrants were ready as soon as April 2020 to begin 
searching for records, but actions were not taken with regard 
to those warrants. Again, Joe Biden was not the President in 
April 2020, was he?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I am confused by your line of questioning. 
We are talking about an election to which now President Biden 
was a part of. So, he did not have to be the President to have 
election meddling.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. No, but the question is this. Was he 
the President at that time in April 2020?
    Mr. Shapley. It has been asked and answered.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And what is the answer, sir?
    Mr. Shapley. The election issue----
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. The answer is ``yes'' or ``no.''
    Mr. Shapley. Is no.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Thank you. Thank you. I yield back.
    Mr. Shapley. Mr. Chairman, may I finish?
    Chairman Comer. You may answer the question.
    Mr. Shapley. So, you know, it is clear that he was not the 
President. But an election is for the purpose of electing a 
president, and Joe Biden at the time was a nominee for 
President of United States. Therefore, the election clauses 
with DOJ policy took place and were in effect, and it was not 
until September 4, 2020 that the Department of Justice Public 
Integrity said that we can no longer take any actions on that 
case. And as early as April to June 2020, the Department of 
Justice, Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office was already invoking 
the election as a reason not to perform those search warrants.
    Mr. Krishnamoorthi. And that was Donald Trump's DOJ----
    Chairman Comer. And the gentleman's time has expired. We 
have got a lot of questioners here. The Chair now recognizes 
Mr. Jordan of Ohio.
    Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Last month, David 
Weiss sent me two letters. In the first letter on June 7, he 
said, ``I have been granted ultimate authority over the matter, 
including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether 
to file charges,'' the quote that the Ranking Member just put 
up. Later that same month he sent me the second letter where we 
said, ``No, I do not have that charging authority.'' So, June 
7, he says, ``I am the boss. I can do whatever I darn well 
want, file it wherever I want,'' and then June 30, he says, 
``No, I cannot.'' What happened in between those two events? 
Your testimony went public. He goes, oh my goodness, I got to 
change my story because now the truth is coming out, and it 
sounds like in this investigation, to me, Mr. Shapley, that the 
prosecutors and the investigators were in agreement for most of 
the investigation. And then we get to October 2022--I see Mr. 
Ziegler nodding his head--and that meeting is where David Weiss 
told you something. Is that right, Mr. Shapley? What did he 
say? Can you put your mic on there? What did he say?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, he told me he was not the deciding person 
on whether or not charges were filed. He told us that D.C. U.S. 
Attorney had declined to allow charges. He told us that he had 
requested special counsel authority from Main DOJ and denied 
that authority.
    Mr. Jordan. And was denied.
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. Were you the only guy in that meeting?
    Mr. Shapley. I was not.
    Mr. Jordan. How many other people were there?
    Mr. Shapley. There were seven total people, including me.
    Mr. Jordan. You, and Mr. Weiss, and five others, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. And have any of them come forward and say what 
you just said is not true?
    Mr. Shapley. They have not.
    Mr. Jordan. No one has, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. No one disputed, refuted. No one said what you 
say is not true.
    Mr. Shapley. That is right.
    Mr. Jordan. And did you memorialize what took place in that 
meeting? Did you memorialize that?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I did. That day when I returned home from 
the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, I put it in an email to 
the two senior executives at my agency.
    Mr. Jordan. You put it in an email that day.
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. Contemporaneous with when it happened. I have 
got the email here. It is Exhibit 10 in your testimony when you 
were interviewed by the Ways and Means Committee, October 7, 
Friday evening, 6:09 p.m. That email, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. Sent to Mr. Walden and Mr. Batdorf. Who are 
those individuals?
    Mr. Shapley. Mike Batdorf is the Director of Field 
Operations for Southern Division of IRS-CI, and Darrell Waldon 
was the Special Agent In Charge of the Washington D.C. field 
office.
    Mr. Jordan. These are your bosses, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. Did Mr. Walden get back to you?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, he did.
    Mr. Jordan. Do you remember what he said?
    Mr. Shapley. He said, ``Thanks, Gary. You covered it all.''
    Mr. Jordan. You covered it all. He did not say, thanks, 
Gary, but you are wrong. That is not what happened. He affirmed 
what you said. You covered it all, and you laid it out. You 
spelled that just what you told me a few minutes ago, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Jordan. What Mr. Weiss told you in that meeting and 
when that goes public on June 22, last month, Mr. Weiss says, 
oh, I got to change my story. I better send a letter to the 
Judiciary Committee where he says, I stand by what I wrote, but 
I wish to expand. I wish to fix it. And then he had to go 
further in July when he sent a letter to Senator Graham and 
said to clarify again. They have changed your story. You guys 
have not. What do you think happened? What do you think? Mr. 
Weiss was consistent with the investigators up until this 
October 7 meeting, and then he changed. What do you think 
happened, Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. I mean, I do not know what happened internal 
at Department of Justice. But what I can say is that the story 
has been changing from Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney 
Weiss, and I think the only person that has really had any 
documents that have been corroborated are my own.
    Mr. Jordan. Exactly. I think it is obvious. Anyone with 
common sense can see what happened because he said it in Mr. 
Graham's letter. He said I had discussions with Main Justice. I 
had discussions with the folks, the deputy attorney general, 
the attorney, whoever it was, I do not know, but he had 
discussion with the people at Main Justice, and suddenly things 
change, and that all became evident on October 7. And until 
October 7, the investigators, to Mr. Raskin's point, the 
investigators and the prosecutors, they were in agreement. Here 
are the facts. Here is how we do it. Here is how we have always 
done it. We got the two best agents in the place on the case. 
Let us go.
    And then, shazam, something changes. And I think it is what 
Mr. Weiss conveyed to Senator Graham when he said, ``I had 
discussions with folks at Main Justice.'' We do not know what 
were in those discussions, but it looks pretty obvious what 
happened. Looks pretty obvious. Initially, everyone was 
pounding their chest. David Weiss has complete authority. Now 
suddenly, he does not. He does not because you guys came 
forward and told the truth. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Lynch from 
Massachusetts.
    Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, I want to 
thank the witnesses for their willingness to work with the 
Committee and help us with our work. I am surprised, though, 
there seems to be a new level of hypocrisy here. As a 
longstanding Member of this Committee, I think most of the 
Members who have served a long time here know full well what 
political interference and what sweetheart deals look like, and 
I think context is very important.
    In 2017, we had a situation where a former national 
security adviser and Trump campaign surrogate, Michael Flynn, 
was indicted, indicted by a Federal jury, Federal grand jury. 
He pled guilty twice, and he lied to FBI agents about his 
communications with the Russian Government prior to the 
inauguration of President Trump. He was only National Security 
Advisor for 22 days, but my colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle had no interest, zero, zero interest in looking into that 
case.
    And in response, the President at the time, President 
Trump, repeatedly and publicly attacked the case and the agents 
who brought it, including by claiming that Mr. Flynn was the 
victim of ``dirty, filthy cops at the top of the FBI.'' He also 
described the prosecution as a disgrace and claimed that those 
who investigated Mr. Flynn were guilty of treason. Those are 
public statements made by a sitting President attacking the 
FBI. And despite the fact that Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty twice 
to lying to the FBI, President Trump's Attorney General, 
William Barr, personally intervened in the case, and that led 
the Department of Justice to abruptly reverse course and have 
the case dismissed on grounds that a Federal judge found 
dubious, to say the least, and that is a quote from the judge.
    In the case of longtime Trump associate and advisor Roger 
Stone, a Federal jury found him guilty in 2019 of obstructing a 
congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 
2016 Presidential election by lying to Congress and witness 
tampering. In response, a sitting President, President Trump, 
immediately took to Twitter, attacking the Department of 
Justice and accusing them of employing a ``double standard'' 
and committing a ``miscarriage of justice.'' President Trump 
also publicly attacked the Department's sentencing 
recommendation for Mr. Stone, leading senior officials to 
overrule the Federal prosecutors who had investigated and 
brought the case.
    So, this blatant political intervention, not complained of 
at all by my Republican colleagues at the time, caused those 
prosecutors, some of them, to resign or withdraw from the case. 
President Trump even congratulated former Attorney General Barr 
for interfering. That is what political intervention looks 
like, and we know it on this Committee. And in the case of 
former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who worked to 
elect a pro-Kremlin president in Ukraine and was convicted in 
2018 of bank and tax fraud, ultimately pleading guilty to 
conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct 
justice, President Trump deemed it ``a very sad day for our 
country.''
    And in terms of sweetheart deals, in December 2020, at the 
end of his term, President Trump granted full pardons to his 
close allies, his pals--Flynn, Stone, and Manafort--allowing 
them to escape accountability for their numerous crimes. Now 
that is a sweetheart deal. They got away with everything, not 
like Hunter Biden, who is pleading guilty, suffers the 
reputational damage and embarrassment to his family, the widely 
publicized facts of his drug addiction. And this was a Trump-
appointed U.S. Attorney that prosecuted this for 4 years, and 
President Biden did not seek to remove him, which normally 
happens when a new President comes into office. He has the full 
right to remove him. He never did so. Mr. Chairman, I yield 
back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Timmons from South Carolina.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to try to 
help simplify this for the American people. We are here today 
because our institutions are broken. The DOJ, the FBI, the IRS 
have transformed from a balanced apparatus of justice into the 
political weapon of the left, a process that I believe began 
during the Obama Administration. They actively pursue 
individuals based on their ideological beliefs, specifically 
targeting Donald Trump, who posed a significant threat to the 
political left.
    Upon his election, the bureaucratic resistance did not 
stop. Their hatred for Trump permeated throughout their work, 
attempting to cripple his Administration at almost every turn. 
And for the last 30 months, the DOJ, the FBI, and the IRS have 
worked to not only protect the criminal actions of the Biden 
family, but to continue persecuting President Trump. Some 
describe this as a two-tier system of justice, but what it 
really is, it is a system deliberately and systematically 
prosecuting individuals within the Trump orbit due to their 
hatred for President Trump. Simultaneously, they cover up the 
crimes of the current President and members of his family, all 
while issuing selectively timed and perfectly planned 
indictments against President Trump.
    Today, we are joined by two whistleblowers from the IRS. 
There are also whistleblowers from within the FBI and the DOJ. 
All these people are stepping forward now because after the 
2022 election, the American people have entrusted the House 
Majority to Republicans, granting us subpoena power. With 
gavels in hand, we now possess crucial evidence just months 
into our investigations. The American people can see plain as 
day the corruption, bribery, and criminal actions of the Biden 
family. We are here to do the jobs that the DOJ, the FBI, and 
the IRS refuse to do. They have failed to fulfill their duties 
and properly investigate the Biden family and their 
international bribery schemes, which resulted in million-dollar 
payouts.
    I want to again thank you both for coming forward. I cannot 
imagine how difficult this has been on you and your family. I 
think the best use of my time is to help simplify the complex 
scheme for the American people, help do the job that DOJ, IRS, 
and FBI, they just refuse to do.
    We talk about China, we talk about Romania, Ukraine, it all 
seems complicated, but this scheme was born in 2014 in Ukraine 
and then replicated in other countries. Ukraine is the proof of 
concept, if you will. This is the scheme, simple. Foreign 
client has a problem, pays a Biden. Vice President Biden 
travels to the country. Vice President Biden leverages U.S. 
influence to force a favorable outcome for the client. The 
Biden family earns their fee. That is the scheme. That is the 
scheme. So, let us just start with Ukraine so I can just show 
you the proof of concept. I am going to walk you through the 
timeline.
    In 2014, Burisma has a problem. They want to get their 
stock listed on Wall Street, but the Prosecutor General is 
investigating corruption, and they cannot get the outcome they 
want in New York, so what do they do? They hire Hunter Biden, 
pay him millions of dollars. Mr. Ziegler, my only question for 
you is going to be, if I can direct you to page 99 of your 
transcript, is it accurate to say Hunter Biden received 
millions of dollars from Burisma?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that would be accurate.
    Mr. Timmons. Thank you. To the American people, I want to 
point out briefly that Hunter Biden has absolutely zero 
qualifications in this industry or in business in general, but 
he does have the big guy. November 2, 2015, in an email to 
Hunter, Burisma executive says that he is demanding a high-
level U.S. official visit Ukraine to force out Shokin. This is 
in an email obtained from Hunter Biden's laptop. November 14, 
2015, Hunter Biden confirms the big guy is on the way. Vice 
President Biden is coming. Have no fear. December 7 through 9, 
Biden has an official visit, using U.S. tax dollars, threatens 
President Poroshenko to withhold a billion-dollar loan 
guarantee if Shokin is not fired. He lied about this during the 
campaign. He specifically said it was not true. Sure enough, 
Shokin is fired. If you have any questions about whether he 
fired him, January 23, 2018, he brags about it years later.
    Ladies and gentlemen, American people, that is the scheme. 
That is the proof of concept. They replicated it again and 
again because they never dreamt Biden would be President, no 
one did. But he is our President, and because of his actions, 
because of him selling policy decisions to adversaries abroad 
for personal gain, he is vulnerable. He is vulnerable, and our 
national security is vulnerable because of it. We are not here 
to prosecute Hunter Biden. We do not care about Hunter Biden. 
We care about our country's national security decisions and 
whether our President is compromised. That is why we are here. 
That is why we are here. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlemen yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Connolly from Virginia.
    Mr. Connolly. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you both 
for being here today.
    My friend from South Carolina said he was going to simplify 
it for the American people. I think he succeeded, so simple as 
to be unrecognizable, and if we are going to talk about Ukraine 
and Burisma, let us remember that the President of the United 
States, not Joe Biden, Donald J. Trump, was impeached over a 
phone call to the president of Ukraine wanting to get dirt on 
this very subject, on this very individual, with this very 
company and withheld military equipment desperately needed, as 
we now know, including Javelin missiles, which are very useful 
in anti-tank warfare, to get it, for which he was impeached, 
quite correctly. But my friends on the other side of the aisle 
all voted against that. They had no problem with that kind of 
interference that directly affected national security.
    Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler, you both testified about the 
fact that you have been subject to criticism, ridicule, public 
disclosure, perhaps menacing comments because you have come 
forward. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Medicine comments?
    Mr. Connolly. No, no, no.
    Mr. Ziegler. Menacing comments.
    Mr. Shapley. Oh, menacing comments.
    Mr. Connolly. Menacing comments.
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Connolly. And you, too, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I have.
    Mr. Connolly. Right. That must be a terrible feeling, and 
whoever does that, I think you would probably both agree, is 
doing a disservice to the country and to you individually. You 
are simply doing your duty as you see the light. Fair enough?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mr. Connolly. Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. I am doing my duty.
    Mr. Connolly. Yes. So can you imagine how the district 
attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, must feel, or the district 
attorney in Manhattan must feel, or the special counsel of the 
Department of Justice, Mr. Smith, must feel when the very 
subject of an indictment or pending indictment takes to public 
rallies and ridicules them by name, disparages them by name, 
characterizes them by name, putting them and their families at 
the same risk you are experiencing.
    If it is wrong for these anonymous people to criticize you, 
it must certainly be wrong that the former President of the 
United States would demonize people doing their jobs just like 
you try to do yours, as they see the light. You can disagree 
with their judgment, but it is not right to disparage their 
character. And what is so ironic about this hearing is, again, 
not one mention on the other side of the aisle about that 
maligned behavior by the very subject of the indictment.
    And speaking of interference, the American people know 
President Trump pressured the Justice Department, which we are 
talking about here today, like wouldn't that be wrong if 
someone did that, to go easy on his friend Michael Flynn. We 
know when President Trump's hand-picked Attorney General, 
William Barr, took the reins, he pressured officials to reduce 
their sentencing for Roger Stone and glossed over Robert 
Mueller's 2016 Presidential election report saying it 
exonerated the President, when, in fact, Robert Mueller 
explicitly said, no, it did not, and listed 10 specific items 
of obstruction of justice he recommended be pursued, and 
pointed out, lest we misunderstand the pursuit part, he could 
not indict a sitting President according to DOJ guidelines. 
But, he said in his report, an enterprising district attorney, 
once that President left office, might want to pursue it.
    According to recent reporting in the New York Times, former 
President Trump explicitly told his chief of staff, John Kelly, 
that they ``ought to investigate and get the IRS on former 
civil servants that Mr. Trump considered his political 
enemies,'' explicit testimony from his own chief of staff. But, 
again, absolute silence on the other side of the aisle, 
including from the Ways and Means Committee, which purports to 
be so concerned about any hint of interference by any political 
entity or individual over the pristine work of the Department 
of Justice and the IRS. An agency, I might add, another piece 
of irony of this hearing, that has been disparaged as the 
hobnob boot on the neck of the American taxpayer for so long by 
the Majority and denied resources by the Majority. As we speak, 
they cut $24 billion in the debt ceiling compromise agreement 
out of the $80 billion we provided to, in fact, give you more 
resources to do your job. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back, and we are going 
to have two more questions. And at the request of the 
witnesses, at every 90-minute mark, we are going to take a 10-
minute bathroom recess. So, we will recognize the next two 
questioners and then go to that recess.
    Right now, the Chair recognizes Representative Turner from 
Ohio for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Turner. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. I 
appreciate your courage, and I appreciate your dedication to 
the truth and your sense of obligation.
    Surprisingly, my questions are actually going to be about 
your testimony and the subject matter as to why we are here. We 
are going to have a little shift to actually talk about what 
you are here for. I am going to cite specific spots of your 
transcript testimony for each of you, but I do not think you 
will have to read along. I am going to do it for the purposes 
of the record. If I ask a question after having cited one and 
you want to refer to it and take a pause, please let me know, 
but I think pretty much we will be able to follow along.
    Mr. Ziegler, you had stated on page 17 of your transcript 
that you started this investigation in November 2018 after 
reviewing bank reports related to another case that you were 
working on, 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. Mr. Ziegler, when you make 
the statement, did you actually review these bank statements? 
This is not knowledge, in other words, that you got from 
someone else, that someone is relating to you, what they said. 
You have actually looked at these documents.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct. I actually looked at them.
    Mr. Turner. Mr. Shapley, you testified on page 57 
concerning the 2014 tax report that what Hunter Biden did is 
that he told Burisma to send that income to Rosemont Seneca 
Bohai, and that when the money came back to him, he booked it 
as a loan. You then go on to testify that it should have been 
taxable as soon as it became income from Burisma to Hunter, and 
whatever he did with it after that was really just a scheme to 
evade taxes for that year. You add that Rosemont Seneca Bohai 
did not book this as a loan itself so Biden is treating it 
differently than they did. Did you look actually at those 
records? Is this actually your viewing of them to create the 
testimony?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I looked at the evidence. Special Agent 
Ziegler will be the expert that saw every single piece, but, 
yes, I saw that evidence.
    Mr. Turner. So, Mr. Ziegler, you also looked at these bank 
records, with respect to the 2014 tax payment from Burisma?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Turner. Mr. Shapley, you went on to say ``this is like 
textbook I learned at basic training nominee stuff, and in all 
of these defenses, it was a loan. You got to have a promissory 
note, you have got to have defined interest, and you have got 
to have repayments and none of them were included.'' So, Hunter 
Biden claimed this is a loan, but the company he got it from 
does not claim it as a loan. There is no promissory note, there 
is no interest, there are no repayments. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. And they actually booked it--Rosemont Seneca 
Bohai booked it as a deduction.
    Mr. Turner. As a deduction, meaning it would have been a 
payment to him, and so it would have been deductible to them.
    Mr. Ziegler. Correct.
    Mr. Turner. Income to him, then payable with tax. 
Excellent, but it was not just the bank documents that you 
looked at. You also had the opportunity to look at a memo from 
Eric Schwerin, and Eric Schwerin was actually Hunter Biden's 
accountant. And, Mr. Shapley, on your testimony, page 57, you 
included Exhibit 4, a memo from Hunter's accountant saying, you 
are going to owe tax on this $400,000. So, you have got the 
accountant even agreeing with your position that this is income 
and that there should have been income tax paid on it.
    Mr. Shapley. Correction to that is that I did not provide 
this document. This was provided by the Committee.
    Mr. Turner. OK. Excellent. Well, we have it then in the 
public record of his accountant agreeing. So, both of you, I 
think, indicate that the taxable amount of the $400,000, would 
have been about $125,000 that Hunter Biden would have had to 
pay on the $400,000 of income. Is that correct, Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Turner. Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Turner. And you have had no evidence in all the records 
that you have looked at that those taxes were ever paid?
    Mr. Shapley. No, they were not.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, no, they were not paid by Hunter Biden.
    Mr. Turner. And since the statute of limitations was 
allowed to run, Mr. Shapley, you go on to state that in order 
for him to pay this, he would have to pay it voluntarily, that 
the government does not have a way to compel him to pay it 
because they have allowed the statute of limitations. It is not 
just he got out of criminal, he got out of having to pay the 
tax, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct. The civil and criminal 
statute of limitations have expired for that tax year.
    Mr. Turner. So, he has in his pocket $125,000 of money that 
should have gone to the Federal Government as taxes. In the 
state of Ohio, you have got an average family earning about 
$62,000 a household. That is, like, two full households of tax 
income that he got to keep in his pocket. The thing I wonder 
is, is that he could pay that today, right? Voluntarily.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley. If he chose to voluntarily, yes, he could.
    Mr. Turner. And perhaps, Mr. President, who is supposed to 
be in charge of taxes coming to our Nation, and who so 
frequently tells us that the American people are not paying 
enough taxes, might want to wander down the hall at the White 
House and turn to his son and say, Hunter Biden, why don't you 
pay your taxes for 2014, because I have got two men who just 
testified there is $125,000 owed and he ought to cut the check. 
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Ms. Norton from Washington, DC.
    Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Shapley and Mr. 
Ziegler, thank you for being here today.
    We are obviously going to talk a lot in this hearing about 
the investigation into Hunter Biden's taxes, so I think it is 
important that we set the scene and make it clear what type of 
investigation we are talking about. Mr. Ziegler, what year did 
you open the Hunter Biden investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. That was 2018. November 2018.
    Ms. Norton. 2018. Thank you. The Department of Justice 
announced a plea agreement with Hunter Biden last month, so I 
estimate that you spent 4 or 5 years on this investigation, Mr. 
Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. That would be correct.
    Ms. Norton. Mr. Ziegler, in your testimony before the Ways 
and Means Committee, you said that when your time working on 
the investigation ended, it was both ``99.9 percent done'', and 
that you had ``worked to complete 95 percent of the 
investigation.'' Given this testimony, is it fair to say, Mr. 
Ziegler, that in the years that you spent on the investigation, 
you saw it nearly to completion?
    Mr. Ziegler. So that reference was to the tax case. So, the 
tax investigation, as far as all the work that we had done 
regarding that, 99 percent of that had been done to that date.
    Ms. Norton. Exactly. Mr. Shapley, on page 12 of the 
transcript from your interview with the Ways and Means 
Committee, you describe the IRS team that worked on this 
investigation as consisting of, and here I am quoting, ``12 
elite agents who were selected based on their experience and 
performance in the area of complex, high-dollar international 
tax investigations.'' Mr. Shapley, how serious are the 
investigations undertaken by these elite agents?
    Mr. Shapley. I am not sure I understand how to answer your 
question. How serious?
    Ms. Norton. Yes. Do they have to be very serious to be 
undertaken by such elite agents?
    Mr. Ziegler. Well, I think I can answer this. So, we have 
got to treat each taxpayer the same. That is the most important 
part. We are kind of the agents with the international tax 
group that come in there and that we have the expertise to work 
these complex financial investigations. So, whether they are 
more serious, we have to treat each person, each taxpayer the 
same, and that is what I try to do in my job.
    Ms. Norton. Yes. I was referring to these particularly 
complex, high-dollar tax concerns. I understand you have to 
give equal treatment. Mr. Ziegler, you called Hunter Biden 
investigations a ``complex criminal tax investigation,'' and I 
understand that it was an interagency effort involving the IRS, 
the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware, and DOJ's Tax 
Division in D.C. Mr. Ziegler, is it fair to say that this sort 
of interagency team is only assembled for serious and complex 
investigations?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I can only speak to what happened in this 
particular investigation. The reason why other agencies might 
join an investigation, that just depends on the crimes we are 
investigating. Us at the IRS, we are the only agency in the 
Federal Government that is allowed to investigate tax crimes, 
so that is why if you have a tax crime case, you have to have 
the IRS on that case.
    Ms. Norton. Yes, and you had lots of other agencies as 
well. Look, it sounds like Hunter Biden's taxes were subject to 
a great deal of scrutiny and rigorous review by a large team of 
expert investigators who had experience working complex cases. 
This investigation occurred over several years, spanned 
multiple agencies and divisions, and had an expert team. The 
time, personnel, and other sources devoted to this 
investigation make it abundantly clear that this investigation 
was taken seriously by both the IRS and DOJ. While our 
witnesses here today may disagree with the U.S. Attorney's 
decisions, it is undeniable that Hunter Biden was subject to a 
thorough and rigorous investigation. I thank you, and I yield 
to the Ranking Member.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back, and as we 
promised the witnesses, we are going to take a 10-minute recess 
at which point we will reconvene in approximately 10 minutes. 
The House is now in recess.
    [Recess.]
    Chairman Comer. The Committee will reconvene and is now 
back in order.
    The Chair recognizes Mr. Palmer from Alabama for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Palmer. I thank the Chairman. I want to welcome the 
whistleblowers and thank you for your courage, but more than 
that, for your fidelity to your duty to faithfully enforce the 
laws of the United States.
    Mr. Shapley, the statute of limitations has run out on a 
number of possible felony charges for tax years 2014 and 2015. 
Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Palmer. And there were huge tax liabilities for those 
tax years, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. There were tax liabilities, yes.
    Mr. Palmer. But you did not have access to all of the 
evidence related to those sources of income, did you?
    Mr. Shapley. Based on the limitations placed on us by 
Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, that is very likely.
    Mr. Palmer. OK. Well, the Oversight Committee recently 
reviewed a non-classified document from the FBI called an FD-
1023 Form, which is a form used by the FBI to memorialize 
information relayed to it by confidential human sources. A FD-
1023 form was created in June 2020. This is not a tip sheet. It 
is not a hotline. It is not a suggestion box. It is a 
legitimate source used by the FBI, and it was used here. Mr. 
Shapley, did you ever review the June 2020 FD-1023 Form with 
the information about Hunter Biden and President Biden?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I did not.
    Mr. Palmer. I reviewed the form, and there are startling 
allegations in it. What would you have done if presented with 
this piece of evidence regarding this potential stream of 
income? Would that have constituted an additional area of 
investigation?
    Mr. Shapley. Since I have never seen the document, I only 
know what has been reported.
    Mr. Palmer. Right.
    Mr. Shapley. So, I can say that there were investigative 
steps that involved President Biden that were not allowed to be 
taken, and that information like this would have been really 
helpful to have from investigators when we received any 
pushback. When we were asked to take names, document requests, 
or search warrants, it would have been nice to have information 
that helped prove why those names needed to be in those 
requests.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, I think it is material to your 
investigation because it was after all other information led 
you, you know, related to Hunter Biden's lifestyle that led you 
to launch the investigation to begin with. Was there other 
evidence in this investigation that you were denied access to?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, there was.
    Mr. Palmer. Do you want to elaborate on that?
    Mr. Shapley. So, one piece was the Hunter Biden laptop. 
There is a memorandum that I documented contemporaneously in my 
House Ways and Means Committee testimony that states what 
Assistant United States Attorney Lesley Wolf told us on that 
day. I think it was September 3 of 2020, and that is they had 
information from the laptop that they were not providing to the 
investigators.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes. Can I add something on that?
    Mr. Palmer. Yes, sir. Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, when it came to questions, as a part of 
the investigation, we interviewed a lot of people, and as a 
part of that investigation, you want to feel free to ask 
questions. It should be an open environment. I realize that 
there are some attorney-client privileged information involved 
in this, but there was an environment when we were interviewing 
witnesses where you were afraid to ask questions, questions 
that could lead to the Presidential campaign, and this is after 
the campaign is over. So, questions like that was restricted, 
so things like that we were limited to talking about.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, it appears to me that you learned about 
the FD-1023 Form through public domain sources, and I can only 
imagine how you felt about having been denied another piece of 
relevant information. And I think it is important that the 
Committee understand that you guys who were trying to do due 
diligence, who were trying to faithfully execute the laws of 
the United States, were denied evidence relevant to your 
investigation. I think the 1023 Form is a very important piece, 
Mr. Chairman.
    I want to ask Mr. Ziegler, at one point you wanted move the 
investigation to the District of Columbia. Is that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. From the very onset of the investigation, yes.
    Mr. Palmer. Why did you want to move it to D.C.?
    Mr. Ziegler. There are two different scenarios where D.C. 
is involved. So, when we first initiated the investigation and 
then when we referred prosecution. So which time period? So, as 
far as venue for the tax case, we saw that when we did our 
analysis that venue was either in California or D.C. Well, I 
guess at the time, in the beginning, it was D.C. That was where 
we wanted to start our investigation was in D.C.
    Mr. Palmer. But you were told that Attorney Weiss could 
bring charges anywhere. Was that your understanding?
    Mr. Ziegler. OK. So, fast forward to March 2022, I had a 
phone call with the prosecutors assigned to the case. They said 
that our prosecution report went to low-level people at the 
D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office. Those low level people reviewed 
it, said, hey, we are going to assist you with this. Here is 
what we are going to do to help you finish the case here in 
D.C. A few days later, I get another phone call and it is from 
the same assigned attorney, and they tell me that now that the 
U.S. Attorney has reviewed it, that not only is it a no, but it 
is a, no, you should not work this investigation in the 
District of Columbia.
    Mr. Palmer. Well, Mr. Chairman, it appears to me that Mr. 
Ziegler was misled and that his instincts were right that it 
should have been moved to the District of Columbia. And again, 
I want to thank you for your courage and your fidelity to the 
law. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Khanna from California for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Khanna. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. 
Shapley, for being here. I understand you see it as your duty 
to have the strict enforcement of tax laws. Is it true that you 
have often disagreed with charging decisions before?
    Mr. Shapley. I have agreed with charging decisions before--
--
    Mr. Khanna. I am saying is it true that you have often 
disagreed? Your recommendations have often been disregarded 
before when it comes to charging decisions? Is that true?
    Mr. Shapley. I do not think disregard is an accurate 
representation.
    Mr. Khanna. People in your own IRS have disagreed with your 
decisions often before. Is that accurate?
    Mr. Shapley. That is not accurate.
    Mr. Khanna. Is it not true that the tax counsel in the 
Criminal Department has disagreed often with your decisions in 
the past?
    Mr. Shapley. Oh, criminal tax attorneys?
    Mr. Khanna. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, and, you know, as I stated in my----
    Mr. Khanna. And how often have they disagreed in your 
opinion with your recommendation decisions?
    Mr. Shapley. Very often, criminal tax attorneys, yes.
    Mr. Khanna. Can you give us a percentage of how often you 
have said we ought to charge someone, and they said, no, that 
may not be a good idea?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. I mean, just ballparking, a vast majority 
of what we do, and that is why they are advisory and----
    Mr. Khanna. And do you have respect for them?
    Mr. Shapley. And they are advisory----
    Mr. Khanna. Do you have respect for them?
    Mr. Shapley. Most prosecutors that I work with----
    Mr. Khanna. It is a simple question, sir. Do you respect 
those colleagues or not?
    Mr. Shapley. Often their opinion is not respected by me----
    Mr. Khanna. Do you respect them?
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. And the prosecutors.
    Mr. Khanna. So, do you have more respect for them or Mr. 
Weiss?
    Mr. Shapley. I do not----
    Mr. Khanna. I just think because you have a history of 
wanting to charge people, and by your own testimony under oath, 
you said about 90 percent of the time people are pushing back 
on what you want to do. I mean, you are a stickler for the law. 
You know, it reminds me of Les Miserables, you know, the famous 
person who wanted to get the person who had a sandwich, I mean, 
and then all these times, you have got people pushing back on 
you and you say, well, they are not very well respected. Do you 
respect Mr. Weiss?
    Mr. Shapley. So, the criminal tax attorneys, you know, I 
have never had a case that they declined, that they did not 
concur with, that we did not ignore their requests and move 
forward with----
    Mr. Khanna. But 90 percent they have disagreed with you, 
correct, by your own testimony?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I established that, but they are 
advisory----
    Mr. Khanna. And let me just ask you on the media. You have 
given testimony under oath that you have never spoken to the 
Washington Post, any reporter on this matter, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Khanna. Have you spoken to any media outlet on this 
matter?
    Mr. Shapley. I have spoken after the House Ways and Means 
Committee----
    Mr. Khanna. Before that, have you spoken to any media 
journalist on this matter?
    Mr. Shapley. Absolutely not.
    Mr. Khanna. Do you know if any colleague of yours at the 
IRS who has spoken to any journalist on this matter?
    Mr. Shapley. Absolutely not.
    Mr. Khanna. Do you know of any investigation into the leaks 
on this matter?
    Mr. Shapley. So, the October 6 leak, I was the person who 
referred it to our inspector general. There was also a leak on 
December----
    Mr. Khanna. Do you know any of your colleagues who are 
under----
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. Ninth of 2020 around the day of 
action----
    Mr. Khanna. Do you know if any of your colleagues are under 
investigation----
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. That I know that the IRS 
inspector general and the DOJ OIG was looking into.
    Mr. Khanna. Sorry, if I could finish. Do you know of any of 
your colleagues who are under investigation for that leak?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I know of no colleague under investigation 
for that leak.
    Mr. Khanna. And just for the record, then it is your 
testimony under oath that you have never spoken to any media 
person before the House testimony about this matter?
    Mr. Shapley. It is not only my testimony under oath today. 
I provided an affidavit to the House Ways and Means Committee 
stating the same. I have said it to our inspector general's 
office as well.
    Mr. Khanna. And I appreciate it.
    Mr. Shapley. And I also said to the House Ways----
    Mr. Khanna. I just want to make a final point on this. I 
mean, one I think would----
    Mr. Shapley. Mr. Chairman, do you mind if I respond----
    Chairman Comer. Yes. Can the gentleman answer the question 
you asked, Mr. Khanna?
    Mr. Khanna. I just do not want my time to be affected.
    Mr. Raskin. If you are granting him the time, Mr. Chairman, 
but that is unusual. I have never----
    Mr. Khanna. I want a minute to wrap up. If you want to give 
him----
    Chairman Comer. OK. OK. You have a minute.
    Mr. Khanna. OK. Here is the point. Ranking Member Raskin 
summarized this. I do not disrespect you, sir. I think you have 
a tough view on what you think the law should be, and this is 
why we have a prosecutorial system, where you do not get to 
decide. I do not get to decide. We have a whole system, and it 
turns out that often your recommendations on who should be 
charged differ from some of the other folks, and that is what 
has happened in this case.
    As your testimony here, you yourself said you think Mr. 
Weiss should come and explain his decision. You do not question 
him. And I think on the optics issue that some of my colleagues 
have brought up, I mean, obviously, Attorney General Barr is 
going to be concerned with the optics. When you have a Donald 
Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney potentially bringing charges 
against his rival's son that is a real legitimate thing to do. 
So, I guess my view here is, we are spending hours on a 
disagreement about whether to charge someone. We have a whole 
democratic process that does that.
    My final question, Mr. Shapley. Do you think you should 
decide who gets charged, or do you think that should be the 
charging officer?
    Mr. Shapley. So, each time you say this is a disagreement, 
you can say it multiple times, it does not make it true. We 
have testified under oath here about the prosecutors agreeing 
with charging felony charges on multiple occasions. And, you 
know, just to say this is a disagreement would be a 
misrepresentation of----
    Mr. Khanna. My last question, though. Do you think you 
should have that final decision, or a prosecutor should have 
the final decision?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I am a special agent for IRS Criminal 
Investigation. I do not make the final decision on whether to 
charge or not.
    Mr. Khanna. I appreciate that.
    Mr. Shapley. Mr. Chairman, may I have a second?
    Chairman Comer. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley. So, in terms of our criminal tax----
    Mr. Raskin. A point of order, Mr. Chairman. Are we 
instituting a new rule in the Committee because I have seen 
this happen before.
    Chairman Comer. OK. I did not know if it was to answer Mr. 
Khanna. Are you finished, Mr. Khanna?
    Mr. Raskin. Someone else can follow up. I think someone 
could give them that question.
    Chairman Comer. All right. OK. You are correct. Rules----
    Mr. Raskin. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired. The Chair 
now recognizes Ms. Greene for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before we begin, I 
would like to let the Committee and everyone watching at home 
that parental discretion is advised.
    Ms. Greene. I would also like to remind everyone that on 
our Oversight Committee we provide oversight to all parts of 
the Federal Government, including their Department of Justice 
and their willingness to prosecute and their unwillingness to 
prosecute, and whether it is politically motivated. I would 
also like to say that when evidence and proof of a crime is 
presented, no prosecution should be denied no matter who the 
person is.
    To the whistleblowers today, I thank both of you for your 
courage to come to the Committee today and your commitment to 
truth. I have great respect for it. So, thank you.
    I would like to talk with you both about Hunter Biden and 
his tax write-offs with his law firm Owasco. I would like to 
ask, Mr. Ziegler, when did you start your investigation? In 
your testimony, it was November 2018. Is that correct? Yes or 
no.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that is correct.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you. During your testimony with the House 
Ways and Means Committee, you stated that through bank records 
you identified Hunter Biden was paying prostitutes related to a 
potential prostitution ring. Is that correct, yes or no?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that is correct.
    Ms. Greene. I have also reviewed those same bank reports, 
commonly referred to as SARs, suspicious activity reports, and 
I am very troubled by them. We read thousands of them in the 
Treasury. This particular excerpt from a SARs report talks 
about human trafficking in regards to Hunter Biden and Owasco 
and payments he was making. What is even more troubling to me 
is that the Department of Justice has brought no charges 
against Hunter Biden that will vindicate the rights of these 
women who are clearly victims under the law.
    I would like to talk about in your prior testimony, you 
stated that the prosecutorial team was investigating violations 
of the Mann Act. Is that correct, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Ms. Greene. Regarding the Mann Act, if a person is 
transported across state lines for sexual activity such as 
prostitution, that could be a violation of a Federal law. Is 
that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. I actually recently looked at the Federal law 
regarding Mann Act, and I believe that that is correct, but I 
would refer you to the DOJ manual.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you. I would like to present this to the 
Committee. This is showing Hunter Biden paying for a victim's 
United flight from L.A. to Dallas. I believe this is a 
violation of the Mann Act. This is his proof that he bought the 
ticket. He bought it for this woman right here. He flew her 
from Los Angeles to Washington on June 14, flew her back to Los 
Angeles, California on June 15 of 2018.
    And I would like to point out that if he was purchasing her 
a plane ticket for sex and traveling across state lines, do you 
believe that to be a violation of the Mann Act, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I can talk to specifically what is in my 
transcript regarding the Mann Act. So, I know we were compiling 
the information together. We----
    Ms. Greene. Yes. But, Mr. Ziegler, by the code of the law, 
it states paying someone to go across state lines is 
prostitution. It is a violation of the Mann Act. Let me just 
move on. Just one more second here. So, when Hunter Biden paid 
for this woman to do this with him, to travel across state 
lines from California to Washington, DC. on June 15, this is a 
violation of the Mann Act. This was prostitution. Let me 
continue. Did Hunter Biden also use his company, Owasco P.C., 
to pay prostitutes?
    Mr. Ziegler. Can you hold on 1 second?
    Ms. Greene. Chairman?
    Chairman Comer. Yes, we will give you the additional time 
back that was----
    Ms. Greene. Thank you.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, regarding Mann Act violations, what we can 
do is, given by the statute, we can turn those over the House 
Ways and Means Committee, and then they can decide to vote to 
turn them over to you regarding Mann Act.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Ziegler. So, talking about 
Hunter Biden using his company, Owasco P.C., to pay 
prostitutes, this is also a suspicious activity report showing 
that Victim 1, the woman that was paid for prostitution that 
traveled from California to Washington, DC. paid for by Hunter 
Biden, this is an excerpt from a SARs report that we have read 
in the Treasury--and I think you all have looked at these, 
too--showing that Victim 1 was supposedly an employee of 
Owasco.
    But I would like to point out this is not really what most 
paralegals do for law firms. And it is very serious that Hunter 
Biden was paying this woman through his law firm and then 
writing it off as business tax exemptions. Most people write 
off things for their taxes through their businesses, like a 
meal or, say, office supplies, but can you confirm for me that 
Hunter Biden had written off payments to prostitutes through 
his law firm Owasco?
    Mr. Ziegler. I appreciate the question. Given by the 
statute, I am limited in my testimony today, and I, 
respectfully, would need to turn those records over to the 
House Ways and Means Committee.
    Ms. Greene. OK. Thank you, Mr. Ziegler. One last question. 
You referred to one of the assistants as ``West Coast 
assistant.'' I believe this is the West Coast assistant. Could 
you agree with that?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I can tell you that there were deductions 
for what we believe to be escorts, and then that $10,000 golf 
club membership, yes, that was not a golf club membership. That 
was for a sex club payment.
    Ms. Greene. That was for a sex club payment, payments such 
as this from Hunter Biden to prostitutes. Also Mr. Shapley----
    Mr. Raskin. Mr. Chairman, we are 1 minute and 53 seconds 
over. As long as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez can get equal time----
    Chairman Comer. I will let Ms. Greene wrap up in 5 seconds, 
and then I will give Mr. Mfume additional time.
    [Chart]
    Ms. Greene. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Shapley, you 
started an investigation into Hunter Biden, code named 
Sportsman, which opened in November 2018. It was an offshoot of 
an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based 
amateur online pornography platform. This is evidence of Hunter 
Biden making----
    Mr. Goldman. Mr. Chairman, it is over time and----
    Ms. Greene. Excuse me. This is my time.
    Mr. Goldman [continuing]. It is unbecoming of Ms. Greene.
    Ms. Greene. Making pornography----
    Mr. Raskin. Should we be displaying this, Mr. Chairman, in 
the Committee?
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady's time has expired and it 
went two-and-half minutes over. If Mr. Mfume wants the two-and-
half minutes, he can have it. If he wants to yield some to Ms. 
Ocasio-Cortez when she goes, she can have it. We will make it 
right. You all have an extra two-and-half minutes. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Mfume for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Goldman. Mr. Chairman, a point of order. A point of 
order, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Comer. State your point.
    Mr. Goldman. My understanding is that this Committee was 
provided the suspicious activity reports on the condition that 
it not publicize them for the reason that they are not actually 
even allegations, much less evidence of anything, and my 
colleague from Georgia has now just revealed it publicly.
    Chairman Comer. That is a good point. However, that 
suspicious activity report has been public for years. That 
suspicious activity report was on the internet long before I 
became Chairman of this Committee. So that particular 
suspicious activity report has already been publicized.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you for that clarification. She had said 
it was part of the thousands she reviewed, but I appreciate the 
clarification.
    Ms. Greene. Public, and that we all reviewed in the 
Treasury.
    Chairman Comer. All right. Got it. The Chair has reclaimed 
the time.
    The Chair recognizes Mr. Mfume for 5 minutes, and if you 
want more time, we will work with you.
    Mr. Mfume. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I am going 
to claim my 5 minutes and yield the two-and-half additional 
minutes that you have given me to my colleague from New York, 
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
    I am glad somebody brought up the words ``suspicious 
activity'' because that is just what is taking place in this 
room, make no mistake about it. And I want to congratulate my 
colleagues from across the aisle for gathering us here today, 
almost distracting us from the biggest investigation that is 
going on right now in our country and in our Nation's history, 
involving the former President and the front runner for the 
Republican nomination, who is currently facing a 37 count 
indictment this week, and maybe 2 weeks from now, more, and 
maybe 2 weeks from then, more. But we are spending our time 
talking about Hunter Biden, someone who has already pleaded 
guilty to not filing his taxes, having a gun charge, and now I 
hear also paying for prostitution. But let us just remember 
that there was a case in New York not too long ago where our 
former President also got into trouble regarding payments and 
regarding a stripper and was found guilty of a violation in 
civil court.
    Now, there seems to be a lot of hemming and hawing about 
special treatments, special treatments. When the President just 
a couple of days ago tried to delay his Federal documents trial 
and requested the U.S. District Judge, Aileen Cannon, whom he 
appointed, to somehow or another consider the fact that he was 
a candidate, and, therefore, maybe, maybe, maybe his trial 
should be put off until after the election, that seems to me 
like special treatment, if I have ever heard of it before. But 
I am grateful that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle 
are taking at least tax evasion very seriously. And I would 
welcome also a hearing on the former President's history of tax 
evasion and how long it took to see his tax returns covering 10 
years and what was the outcome of that decision. You know, the 
Trump organization was hit with $1.6 million in Manhattan State 
Court being convicted of a tax scheme.
    So, let us be real when we talk about this. It is not just 
Hunter Biden, but as long as we are saying Hunter Biden, we 
forget everything else. And again, Hunter Biden did step 
forward and said I did not file taxes in 2 years, and, yes, 
this gun charge, I will take responsibility for.
    Now, I love the fact that we are so much in love with the 
IRS. In fact, Speaker McCarthy said when he was elected on the 
15th vote that the first bill that he would repeal funding for 
was the bill that would provide for 87,000 additional IRS 
employees. My, don't we love the IRS. We are just going to cut 
their budget. In fact, there is a Member of this Committee who 
on their own website said that they are proud to have voted to 
strip away the plan to empower the IRS with additional funding.
    So, I am going to get back to those two words again about 
keeping it real, and I think we really have to do that. Mr. 
Shapley, two quick things. Did Hunter Biden in any way in your 
knowledge, not Hunter, but did any of his children receive 
money? Yes or no.
    Mr. Shapley. I think Special Agent Ziegler would be better 
to----
    Mr. Mfume. Yes or no.
    Mr. Shapley. Special Agent Ziegler will be----
    Mr. Mfume. Either one, yes or no.
    Mr. Ziegler. Congressman, thank you for your question. 
Given by the statute, I am limited in my testimony----
    Mr. Mfume. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. That I can give here today, but 
we can turn over any of the records that relate to the adult 
children----
    Mr. Mfume. Yes, we would like to see those.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. To the House Ways and Means 
Committee----
    Mr. Mfume. Right. We would like to see those, really, I 
would since we are so concerned about tax evasion, and we have 
got people at the highest levels of government doing it and we 
do not want to talk about that at all.
    Now, here is what galls me. I do not like these attacks on 
the Department of Justice, the FBI, the IRS, as if they are 
somehow anti-U.S. agencies. Those agencies keep this democracy 
in check. It keeps it afloat. They provide the checks and they 
provide the balances. And we could be, quite frankly, using our 
time to better talk about crime in America that is affecting 
everybody, attacks on women's health, the economy, budgetary 
issues, public education, housing, the need for senior citizens 
to be able to pay for prescription drugs, child poverty, and 
mental health, to name a few. And yet, we are doing this all 
over again for the Hunter Biden show, to someone who has 
pleaded guilty and has taken responsibility for not filing 
taxes for 2 years. This is ludicrous. Beam me up, Scotty. There 
is no intelligent life down here. None. I yield.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired. The Chair 
now recognizes Mr. Armstrong from North Dakota.
    Mr. Armstrong. Well, if I could plead guilty to 2 years of 
tax evasion when I was accused of 6, I might consider that to 
be a pretty good plea deal, and let us talk about what this is 
and what it is supposed to be.
    Mr. Shapley, I think you were going to testify that IRS 
criminal tax attorneys are advisory only and often DOJ 
prosecutors disagree with the IRS tax attorneys. Is that 
probably an accurate statement?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, it is accurate statement.
    Mr. Armstrong. And I think this is important because 
everybody continues to go after you two like you are the only 
two people who were involved in this. You went to work for the 
IRS in 2008?
    Mr. Shapley. 2009, correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. 2009. Mr. Ziegler, 2010?
    Mr. Ziegler. 2010.
    Mr. Armstrong. So, you started under President Obama, 
continued your career under President Trump, and are continuing 
your career under President Biden. Is that accurate?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is accurate.
    Mr. Armstrong. And in your entire career, excluding today, 
how many times have you talked about who appointed the U.S. 
Attorney?
    Mr. Shapley. I have not.
    Mr. Armstrong. In the course of any investigation, have you 
talked about whether it was a Democratic appointee or a 
Republican appointee?
    Mr. Shapley. I have not, no.
    Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not.
    Mr. Armstrong. Because it is not supposed to matter, right? 
And that is why you have line U.S. Attorneys that also go 
across Administrations and work through Republican 
Administrations, Democratic Administrations, and that is the 
part of your investigative team. Now, that investigative team 
recommended that you charge Hunter Biden for every tax year 
from 2014 until 2019 and felonies for at least 2014 and 2018. 
And this included income from Burisma and a scheme to evade 
taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon. Is that 
accurate?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, it is accurate.
    Mr. Armstrong. And the total amount of taxes not paid over 
that period, or not paid timely, was over $1.5 million, and 
that did not include interest and penalties or other 
enhancements that are typically involved in this case, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Ziegler, your testimony identifies two 
separate criminal violations, which is an attempt to avoid 
taxes and filing false tax returns, and they both carry a 6-
year statute of limitations.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. And, Mr. Shapley, you stated that the 
purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 tax year sanitized 
the most substantial criminal conduct and concealed material 
facts. Can you expound on that a little bit?
    Mr. Shapley. So yes. That statement made to the House Ways 
and Means Committee was in reference to the income from Burisma 
that was not reported, and, therefore, if it was not reported, 
it would not be on a statement of facts and it would be 
completely left off the official record.
    Mr. Armstrong. And as far as you are aware, that is not 
part of any plea deal, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. I cannot speak to the plea deal. I do not 
believe so.
    Mr. Armstrong. I want to talk about something that is a 
little unique to this investigation. I want to take you back to 
December 7 and 8 of 2020. Your investigative team, right, this 
is the whole team, East Coast, all across the country, numerous 
interviews are going to be conducted, and Hunter Biden was 
going to be the subject of one of those in L.A., correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. And this is unique because Joe Biden has won 
the election. We are walking into this. I mean, if they are 
Secret Service protectees, I am assuming you have to contact 
the Secret Service. You are not walking up with armed FBI 
agents to a Secret Service protectee.
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. We had a plan on how to approach Hunter 
Biden that day.
    Mr. Armstrong. Could you briefly explain that plan?
    Mr. Shapley. So, the FBI SSA and I were assigned with 
interviewing Hunter Biden that day. And the day previous, we 
went to the L.A. FBI Field Office and the Special Agent In 
Charge to contact the Secret Service, Special Agent In Charge 
for the L.A. Field Office at 8 a.m. on the morning of December 
8 and tell them that two agents were going to approach Hunter 
Biden as part of an official investigation, and the night 
before, all of that changed.
    Mr. Armstrong. And all of that changed because FBI 
headquarters and Secret Service headquarters coordinated, and 
that information had gotten out to everybody the night before. 
And we can talk about whether it is a highly political 
investigation and all of those different things, but there is 
another group of people that was made aware of that the night 
before, was not there?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. And that would be the transition team?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Armstrong. And the transition team is a political 
operation set up to help the President-elect vet Cabinet 
employees, work on inauguration, do all of those things. I 
mean, is that your understanding?
    Mr. Shapley. Generally, yes.
    Mr. Armstrong. Do they have any special investigative 
powers that I do not know about?
    Mr. Shapley. Not that I would know of.
    Mr. Armstrong. In your entire history and working and 
history with the IRS, have you ever worked with a transition 
team of resident to help set up an interview with a subject of 
a criminal investigation?
    Mr. Shapley. I have not.
    Mr. Armstrong. Last question. Did you ever get to interview 
Hunter Biden?
    Mr. Shapley. We did not interview him.
    Mr. Armstrong. Thank you. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for 5 minutes plus the 2-and-a-
half minutes that we went over.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you, very much, Mr. Chairman. Good 
afternoon, Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler, and I want to thank you 
both for appearing before us today. I understand that this is 
not easy, and it is very important that both of you are 
respected during the course of this hearing.
    Mr. Ziegler, in your deposition to the Ways and Means 
Committee, I believe you said that you began this investigation 
in 2018, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And so, some of the events that you 
discuss in your deposition took place 2, 3, 4 years ago, 
correct, over the last several years?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, that would be correct.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. In your deposition in front of the Ways 
and Means Committee and in your testimony before us today, you 
have relayed your memory of events that occurred over the 
course of a nearly 5-year investigation. And, Mr. Ziegler, when 
you testified before the Ways and Means Committee, you also 
testified that you were told that it was then Attorney General 
William Barr who made the decision to merge the D.C. and 
Delaware Hunter Biden investigations, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. I did testify to that, correct.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And a few weeks after that testimony, 
your attorney wrote in a letter to Congress, ``Mr. Ziegler is 
confident he was told by his supervisor that the merging of the 
cases was at the direction of an official at the Department of 
Justice. However, on further reflection, Mr. Ziegler cannot 
definitively state that his then supervisor said that the 
Department of Justice official directing the merger of the 
cases was Attorney General Barr'', correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct, and I can tell you that I 
actually refreshed my memory from looking at my emails. And 
there was an email that I found from my supervisor at that time 
that stated what had happened, and I can turn that over to the 
House Ways and Means Committee at some point.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And in that updated email, does it 
include Attorney General Barr or not----
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I cannot speak to the contents of that 
email, but----
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. No problem. I think in light of the 
correction, and truly in good faith, these things happen all 
the time, right? The recollection of these investigations 
require an extraordinary amount of detail, and the charges of 
what is being brought forward today are extremely serious, 
which require a high threshold of evidence, including 
investigations and depositions. But, you know, I hope you would 
agree that even the best memory can be fallible at times, and 
that is the widely understood reality in our justice system.
    Mr. Shapley, from your testimony today, I think you would 
agree that it is important that criminal investigations be 
conducted fairly and free from political influence. That is why 
we are here today, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Now, as you stated and as was kind of 
discussed with Mr. Khanna and with others, there are often 
disagreements. It seems as though within some of the 
transcribed interviews that we read, it says, yes, about 90 
percent of the time, IRS reviewing attorneys disagree with the 
charging decisions of the agents in the group, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That was part of the testimony, not all of it.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. In some of your comments, you have made 
reference to a special counsel in this situation, but I believe 
what there might be a reference to here is the question of a 
special attorney, not a special counsel, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. So, if you are speaking about the October 7, 
2022 email that I documented contemporaneously on that day, you 
know, that is why I documented on that day, so that, you know, 
9 months later I am not trying to recall a specific word, and 
so it says, ``special counsel authority.'' That is what he said 
that day. That is what a senior executive IRS corroborated when 
he responded to my emails.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And I do think that that distinction is 
important because in this letter to Chairman Jordan, the issue 
at hand seems to be a special attorney, not a special counsel, 
which are two distinct different legal authorities. And there 
also may be some confusion, I think, with respect to that as 
well, which brings me to the point of political influence. 
Where there actually is a set of breadcrumbs, however, is in a 
set of tweets and letters sent from former President Trump to 
several Chairs, to the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, 
that we see here.
    In fact, according to New York Times article, which I would 
like to present to the record today, President Trump's attorney 
wrote to the Judiciary Committee chairman urging him to 
investigate what he called ``a rogue local district attorney.''
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. And after New York DA convened a grand 
jury that ultimately indicted Donald Trump, Chairman Jordan 
complied with that letter shortly after President Trump's 
attorney sent that letter to the Committee, which is highly 
unusual, a very highly unusual act.
    And, in fact, after that, on March 20, Chairman Jordan, 
together with the Committee on House Administration Chairman, 
Bryan Steil, as well as the Chairman of this Committee, wrote 
to District Attorney Bragg and then demanded a sweeping series 
of documents, including communications between the DA's office 
and the Department of Justice, also highly unusual. In fact, on 
his Truth Social account later on, Donald Trump claimed that 
the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, a U.S. Attorney, 
by the way, that Donald Trump appointed ``was a coward.'' And 
then in that, he then urged that maybe the presiding judge will 
have the courage and intellect to break up this ``cesspool of 
crime.''
    Curiously, just a few days after this tweet, the Chairman 
of the Ways and Means Committee, Jason Smith, sent a letter to 
U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland, 
who are implicated in this hearing, explicitly asking them to 
place the whistleblower testimony from the Committee's 
depositions into the court record which were addressed during 
the Chairman's opening statements before Hunter Biden's plea 
hearing at the end of the month. And as you can see right here, 
Chairman Smith explicitly said, ``entering this information 
into the formal record.'' Additionally, those two Chairmen 
waved onto this hearing today. Highly unusual.
    Mr. Raskin. Will the gentlelady yield?
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. One moment. And when we talk about 
political influence, we are not here today, unfortunately, 
because the facts have brought us here. We are here today 
because Donald Trump is exerting an influence campaign in 
Congress when he is no longer President of the United States.
    In addition to that, if we want to talk about charges that 
have been dismissed and if we do want to follow the evidence, 
perhaps we should discuss Ivanka Trump's investigation being 
charged, who was close to being charged with felony fraud. 
After Donald Trump's personal attorney provided political 
contributions to the local DA, those charges were dismissed. 
And ultimately, we saw that DA Vance, President Trump's 
attorney, provided over $50,000 in political contributions 
after the case was dismissed. So, when we talk about political 
contributions, I would hope, if we are following the evidence, 
that if this Committee is going to go there, that they will be 
willing to open investigations into the dismissal of charges 
against Ivanka Trump. And by the way, if the gentlelady from 
Georgia wanted to follow evidence, we should also take a look 
at, hypothetically, a case where sex trafficking charges 
against a 17-year-old girl potentially----
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady's time has expired.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. Thank you. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Gosar of 
Arizona for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Gosar. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Comer and his 
team have done an outstanding job of uncovering the millions of 
dollars sent to Hunter Biden from foreign sources located in 
places like China, Romania, and the Ukraine. It is pretty 
obvious that the Hunter Biden's only avenue for making money is 
the influence over his father. Now, the only thing missing is 
direct evidence that Joe Biden knew and participated in these 
bribery schemes. That is where you brave men have come in. Your 
investigative efforts have the potential to uncover direct 
evidence in a pay-to-play, and, in some cases, it did. Yet they 
are very hindered in doing their jobs by the Department of 
Justice's Deep State. As Mr. Shapley said, put it, ``At every 
stage, decisions were made to benefit the subject of this 
investigation.'' That is Hunter Biden and, by extension, Joe 
Biden. Now these men are not political people. They are 
hardworking agents. The last thing they want to do is 
speculate. I am going to stick to confirming the most egregious 
examples of the DOJ's prosecutorial misconduct, abuse, and 
favoritism detailed in their testimonies, and leave it up to 
the American people to draw their own conclusion.
    Mr. Shapley, under U.S. tax law, taxes owed are on all 
income received from legal and legal sources, right?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, yes.
    Mr. Gosar. Hypothetically, if a person is subject to U.S. 
taxes, receives $1 million for serving as a director for, let 
us say, an oil company, they would owe taxes on that $1 
million, perhaps as much as 38 percent, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. If they are a U.S. taxpayer, yes.
    Mr. Gosar. Failure to declare the receipt of such income 
violates the U.S. Tax code, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, it would.
    Mr. Gosar. Failing to timely pay the tax owed is what, in 
whatever amount, violates the tax code, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, it does.
    Mr. Gosar. And the tax code has criminal and civil 
penalties for these violations, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Gosar. So now, hypothetically, if a person receives $1 
million payment and then conveys 10 percent of that amount to 
another person, that person making that payment may have to pay 
a gift tax on that amount, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. If they say it is a gift, yes.
    Mr. Gosar. Yes. Or conversely, the person receiving the 
money has to pay income tax on the money as well, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. On the gift portion or on the income portion?
    Mr. Gosar. Yes. No, on the gift portion.
    Mr. Shapley. They would have to report the gift on their 
tax returns, but I do not believe it would be taxable to them.
    Mr. Gosar. And then the failure to do is subject to 
criminal or civil penalties, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Filing false tax returns is against the law, 
yes.
    Mr. Gosar. Yes. Now, there is definite confirmation that 
all evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop has been reviewed by 
Federal agents and prosecutors?
    Mr. Shapley. The prosecutor stated that evidence was 
withheld from the investigators. We do not know how much.
    Mr. Gosar. Did DOJ prosecutors allow your team to access 
the laptop?
    Mr. Shapley. I am sorry. Could you repeat the question?
    Mr. Gosar. Yes. Did the DOJ prosecutors allow your team to 
access the laptop? DOJ prosecutors.
    Mr. Shapley. So, when the laptop comes in, there are 
computer investigative specialists that review the laptop, and, 
you know, they create reports and pull stuff from----
    Mr. Gosar. And you were prohibited from looking at anything 
on the laptop, right?
    Mr. Shapley. We saw some, but not all.
    Mr. Gosar. OK. Got you. Is it normal for the DOJ to deny 
this type of access to investigators?
    Mr. Shapley. No. That is the first time I have experienced 
being limited to evidence.
    Mr. Gosar. Did Assistant Attorney Wolf collaborate with the 
data on the laptop?
    Mr. Shapley. Did she----
    Mr. Gosar. Collaborate the data.
    Voice. Corroborate.
    Mr. Shapley. Oh, corroborate. I would not know.
    Mr. Gosar. OK. And the reason I went down this rabbit hole 
is that, is it your conclusion that you were interfered with 
and that those that interfered with you are as guilty as those 
creating the problem? Are they accessories to a crime is what I 
am getting to?
    Mr. Shapley. Well, I would agree that there were 
investigative steps that were definitely obstructed by DOJ that 
I had never seen in my 14 years and, honestly, just makes no 
sense that we would not want to collect all of the evidence 
available. I cannot opine on the second part of your question.
    Mr. Gosar. Got you. Mr. Ziegler, did the DOJ prosecutors 
deny your request to look into the famous, ``I am sitting here 
with my father,'' text from Hunter Biden. Did they allow you to 
obtain the location information to see where the text was sent 
from?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I know it was an issue that came up, 
whether we can get the location data, and I know that that was 
a conversation that I would have had with the assigned 
prosecutors. I recall them saying to me that, how do we know 
that he is there, how do we know that that is true, the 
statement that is being made there, and then I said, well, we 
would get the location data. So as a part of my normal 
investigation, that is what I would do.
    And what I can tell you is I know I did not do it. I do not 
know if the FBI ever ended up doing it. It was kind of like a 
let us wait, or I need to think about it, I guess is the proper 
response.
    Mr. Gosar. Got you. My time is up. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlemen's time has expired. The Chair 
now recognizes Ms. Brown. It looks like she is next. Ms. Brown 
for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Brown. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The American people 
have lost track of your supposed investigation of President 
Biden, or is it an investigation of his son who does not and 
has never worked at the White House, or another family member. 
We cannot even follow which investigation we are discussing 
today. Is it the FBI, the IRS, XXX, or something new? I know 
the American people are confused because we are all confused 
what we are doing here. Nothing this Majority has claimed about 
the President or his family has merit. No wonder the folks back 
home are tuning out of this confused mess. My colleagues on the 
other side of the aisle have shredded all their credibility in 
this Committee. They simply grasp at straws that do not exist.
    In this Congress so far, we have held more hearings on gas 
stoves than gun violence and culture wars than kitchen table 
issues. So, let us talk about the real two-tier justice system, 
the one in which big corporations pollute the air we breathe 
and that big banks cause meltdowns with their negligence, and 
not one person is held criminally liable. They are certainly 
not called by the Majority to sit before this Committee, or, 
Mr. Chairman, what if we talked about the other unspoken two-
tier justice system in this country, the one where people of 
color are subject to a deliberately harsher system at every 
turn from policing, to prison, to parole?
    In this country, a Black person is 5 times more likely to 
be stopped without due cause than a White person, and Black 
defendants are 25 percent more likely to be held pretrial. 
Meanwhile, the twice-indicted former President is out 
campaigning around the country and did not even have to post 
bail, yet hundreds of thousands of Americans sit behind bars 
waiting for their day in court.
    These are the types of lived experiences we should be 
addressing in this Oversight Committee. This is the real two-
tiered justice system, and it is the justice system Democrats 
are trying to fix after 4 years of Donald Trump's misuse. 
Congressional Republicans, however, are working to make these 
inequalities worse through their efforts to defund the IRS and 
other Democratic priorities included in the Inflation Reduction 
Act. So, since my colleagues claim to want stricter IRS 
enforcement, you would think we would at least agree on giving 
the IRS its proper funding. So, let me conclude by asking a 
simple question. Mr. Shapley, yes or no, do you know the rate 
at which Black taxpayers are audited as compared to taxpayers 
who are not Black?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I do not know.
    Ms. Brown. Well, the answer is Black taxpayers are audited 
at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. Another 
question for you, sir. Yes or no, will this hearing help 
alleviate the racial disparity in the rates of the IRS audits?
    Mr. Shapley. That is not the topic.
    Ms. Brown. No. Thank you. And with that, I will yield----
    Mr. Raskin. Will the gentlelady yield?
    Ms. Brown. I will yield the balance of my time to the 
Ranking Member.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you kindly and for your excellent 
questioning and statement there. The Chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee, when he was here, invited us to believe that the 
U.S. Attorney for Delaware had changed his tune or changed his 
story. But when you look at the letters he actually sent, he 
did not change his tune at all. He said the exact same thing 
every time and even expanded the answer to be perfectly clear.
    In his June 7 letter, he says, ``I have been granted 
ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility 
for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for 
making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the 
prosecution consistent with Federal law, the principles of 
Federal prosecution, and departmental regulations.'' In other 
words, it is up to him. It is up to the U.S. Attorney.
    Then on June 30, in the letter to Chairman Jordan, he says, 
second, ``In my June 7 letter, I stated, `I have been granted 
ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility 
for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges, et 
cetera.' I stand by what I wrote and wish to expand on what 
this means.'' And this gets to the heart, I think, of what we 
are doing here today. ``As the U.S. Attorney for the District 
of Delaware, my charging authority is geographically limited to 
my home district. If venue for a case lies elsewhere, common 
departmental practice is to contact the U.S. Attorney's Office 
for the district in question to determine whether it wants to 
partner on the case. If not, I may request special attorney 
status from the Attorney General pursuant to 28 U.S.C 515. Here 
I have been assured that, if necessary, I would be granted 
Section 515 authority in the District of Columbia, the Central 
District of California, or any other district where charges 
could be brought in this matter,'' OK? And it is the 
difference, as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was saying, between special 
counsel and special attorney, which might explain the confusion 
or the disagreement here.
    In any event, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware had all of the 
authority he needed to bring whatever charges he wanted, 
wherever he wanted, and he is the witness for that. Thank you, 
Mr. Chairman, and I will yield back to the gentleman.
    Mr. Ziegler. I would like to be clear that he was assured 
that authority. He was assured that----
    Mr. Raskin. Yes, he was, and he said he was assured the 
authority.
    Mr. Ziegler. And he is limited within Delaware. The charges 
were not in Delaware.
    Mr. Raskin. Well, that is right, but that is just the 
rules. You are just restating what the rules are. That is what 
he explained. You are not a lawyer, right? You do not work in 
the Department of Justice, correct? He is explaining what the 
rules are----
    Chairman Comer. The gentlemen's time has expired.
    Mr. Raskin. OK.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Dr. Foxx from North 
Carolina for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Shapley and Mr. 
Ziegler, thank you for being here today. Blowing the whistle 
against a man as well connected as Hunter Biden is a truly 
courageous act, and I hope that all of my colleagues can 
appreciate that as well.
    Mr. Shapley, I would like to start with a simple question. 
When did you start your career as an investigator with the IRS?
    Mr. Shapley. In July 2009.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you. And in what year were you promoted to 
a supervisory role?
    Mr. Shapley. In 2018.
    Ms. Foxx. So that is 14 years of service at the IRS, with 5 
of those years in a senior leadership position, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Ms. Foxx. Did you ever in your 14 years of experience see 
an investigation be handled in the same manner as the one we 
are here to discuss today, the one in Hunter Biden's taxes?
    Mr. Shapley. I have not, no.
    Ms. Foxx. And when were you made supervisor of the 
investigation in Mr. Biden's operation sports fund?
    Mr. Shapley. In January 2020.
    Ms. Foxx. By your estimate, at that time, when did you 
initially believe that the evidence was sufficient to request 
physical search warrants in California, Arkansas, New York, and 
Washington, DC.?
    Mr. Shapley. So Special Agent Ziegler drafted an affidavit 
in April or May, and that was when, for the search warrant.
    Ms. Foxx. Of 2020.
    Mr. Shapley. Of 2020, yes. I am sorry.
    Ms. Foxx. And it was a short time after that you began to 
suspect that career officials at DOJ were ``dragging their 
feet'' regarding the next steps in the investigation, is that 
correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Ms. Foxx. And 2 months later, in June 2020, you came to the 
belief, expressing as such in communications with the IRS CL 
leadership that if normal procedures had been followed, that 
these search warrants would have already been executed. Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct, yes.
    Ms. Foxx. Was this within the typical timeframe for the 
self-imposed investigative pause that DOJ historically tends to 
implement in cases preceding elections?
    Mr. Shapley. It was not. The official Department of Justice 
Public Integrity stand down came on September 4 of 2020.
    Ms. Foxx. After the initial steps were inexplicably denied, 
prosecutors continued to decline to advance on promising leads. 
There were, for example, many problematic text messages and 
emails on the infamous laptop in August 2020. When were you 
informed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Wolf that the DOJ would not 
allow physical search warrant on Hunter Biden?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I do not recall the exact date. Do you?
    Mr. Ziegler. And I do not think that that is in the 
confines of our testimony, but we can provide that information 
to the House Ways and Means Committee, a clarification to that, 
and then that can clarify that issue.
    Ms. Foxx. My understanding is that it was October 2020, but 
we appreciate your clarification of that. Did Assistant U.S. 
Secretary Wolf's decision not to execute a search warrant on 
Hunter Biden strike you as atypical, Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. Generally, any other investigation, if we have 
probable cause and we believe there is evidence in that 
location that could help prove our violations, then we would 
execute that search warrant.
    Ms. Foxx. So, it was an unusual action?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. Yes, Congresswoman.
    Ms. Foxx. Thank you. Is it fair to conclude that this 
pattern of odd, atypical, and sometimes bewildering actions 
taken by DOJ techs and the District Attorney's Office happened 
over the course of the entire investigation and not just one or 
two occurrences?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct, and it was the pattern that 
was one of the things that drove me to come forward, of that 
deviation from normal investigate processes.
    Ms. Foxx. In your opinion, did these odd, atypical, and 
bewildering actions bolster or harm the investigation?
    Mr. Shapley. I believe they hurt the investigation.
    Ms. Foxx. To our Chairman, I would say that there is 
something rotten in the state of Delaware, and that what has 
happened here with Hunter Biden would not have happened to 
other Americans. And this is totally unfair, and I think it is 
very important that we get to the bottom of this investigation 
and find out who has been obstructing this sense of justice. 
The American people demand justice, and this Committee demands 
justice along with the other committees involved, and I thank 
you for this hearing. I thank our witnesses.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady's time has expired. The 
Chair now recognizes Ms. Stansbury from New Mexico for 5.
    Ms. Stansbury. Thank you. I would like to get right into 
some basic vetting questions as, unfortunately, our colleagues 
across the aisle failed to do so with some of the previous 
witnesses that they called. And so, Mr. Ziegler and Mr. 
Shapley, I am hoping that these are very simple, very 
straightforward questions, so I would like to ask that you 
answer them with a ``yes'' or ``no'' answer. Mr. Shapley, are 
you now or have you ever acted as an unregistered foreign agent 
for the Chinese government or for any other government?
    Mr. Shapley. No.
    Ms. Stansbury. And, Mr. Ziegler, are you now or have you 
ever acted as an unregistered or registered foreign agent?
    Mr. Ziegler. No.
    Ms. Stansbury. And, Mr. Shapley, have you ever participated 
in illegal arms trafficking?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I have not.
    Ms. Stansbury. And, Mr. Ziegler, how about yourself?
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not.
    Ms. Stansbury. And, finally, Mr. Shapley, have you ever 
been indicted of a crime, lied to investigators while under 
oath, or run from the law?
    Mr. Shapley. No, I have not.
    Ms. Stansbury. And Mr. Ziegler, same question to you. Have 
you ever been indicted, lied to investigators, or run from the 
law?
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not.
    Ms. Stansbury. Thank you for answering those questions. 
Obviously, it would seem strange to have to ask these 
clarifying questions, but given the Majority's track record in 
calling witnesses on this matter, not to mention their own 
Presidential candidate, it seemed necessary to clarify for our 
American folks who are listening today.
    So, let us get into the kinds of crimes that the Majority 
claims that they are interested in investigating here in the 
Oversight Committee, namely political influence, abuse of 
power, and other alleged crimes by a President and their 
relations. And again, because our time is limited, I would like 
to ask our witnesses to stick with very simple, straightforward 
``yes'' or ``no'' answers.
    Now, Mr. Ziegler, you are aware that Mr. Jared Kushner 
received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Government 
after working for his father-in-law at the White House, 
correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. Congressman, I thank you for the question. I 
am here to talk about the Hunter Biden investigation.
    Ms. Stansbury. It is a widely known fact, and I appreciate 
your response. Mr. Zeigler, you are aware that while serving as 
a senior advisor to her father, Ivanka Trump had a number of 
trademarks fast-tracked by the Chinese government, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. Again, I have to stick to the confines of my 
transcript, so.
    Ms. Stansbury. I appreciate that. And finally, I want to 
remind everyone that the person who appointed U.S. Attorney 
General David Weiss to handle the matter that we are here to 
discuss today was Donald Trump. But this would be the same 
President, Donald Trump, the man twice impeached for abuses of 
power and, of course, recently indicted for 37 counts of 
criminal activity. Now, one would think that here in the 
Oversight Committee we would want to investigate such blatant 
acts of criminal activity. And I truly could not agree more 
with our witness, Mr. Shapley, that there should not be a two-
tiered system of justice for those who are powerful and those 
who are wealthy, and those who are not. But that is not 
actually what this hearing is about here today because it is 
clear that this is yet another attempt by the Majority to turn 
this Committee into another in-kind donation to the Trump 
Campaign.
    Now, this follows on an earlier attempt this past month to 
undermine the FBI with a controversial markup, which, 
thankfully, did not occur, the very same day that Donald Trump 
was indicted under those 37 counts. In fact, if you look across 
the aisle, we have 13 Members who have already endorsed Donald 
Trump. And now here we are trying to distract the American 
people once more, even though it was a political appointee 
appointed by Donald Trump, who was at the helm of this effort 
when the issues we are discussing today occurred. And yet we 
are using the Committee's resources to advance this agenda.
    But I think it is important that the American people 
actually understand that the real criminal and the actual 
threat to our democratic institutions is Donald Trump: the man 
found legally liable for sexual abuse, the man who refused to 
return classified documents to the government, the man who was 
inciting an insurrection that led to the deaths of five people 
and threatened the lives of people in this very room, and to 
threaten the very foundation of our democracy.
    So, I find it hard to believe that Members who witnessed 
the insurrection, who have witnessed these criminal indictments 
continue to stand here today with Donald Trump and prop him up 
using Committee resources, and I urge my colleagues to take a 
hard look in the mirror and to really reflect on what our oath 
of office means. And with that, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Higgins from Louisiana for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Shapley, Mr. 
Ziegler. We are going to be moving fast here. Let me make a 
statement.
    To begin, let us just clarify for America, Republicans are 
only interested in Hunter Biden's deceptions regarding his IRS-
confirmed receipt of $17.3 million from shady sources in 
Ukraine, and Romania, and China while his father was Vice 
President because Hunter Biden had nothing to sell. He had no 
product, no service, no skill. All Hunter Biden had to sell was 
corrupted access to his father, the big guy. And how dare 
Congressman Higgins call the President of United States, may I 
say, the inaugurated President of the United States, I would 
call him a big guy. Let us go.
    December 30, 2020, this Investigator Shapley and 
Investigator Ziegler, IRS criminal investigation team at a 12-
hour long meeting with U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware, the 
prosecution team Wolf and Weiss are in attendance. Shapley 
shares an IRS-planned interview--Biden associate, Rob Walker, 
Wolf objects to this plan to the dismay of those in the room, 
but she said we do not want to ask about the big guy and stated 
she did not want to ask about dad. December 8, 2020, 
Investigator Shapley, Investigator Ziegler, meeting with 
Special Agent Joe Gordon, received a call from Hunter Biden's 
attorneys stating that they would accept service for document 
requests, but decline requests for the interview. The IRS 
investigators were only able to conduct one meaningful 
interview, that with Biden associate Rob Walker. That day, 
investigations revealed to the press, December 9, 2020, Wolf 
gets involved again to interrupt the investigation. December 
14, 2020, it says that U.S. Attorney Wolf tips off Biden 
counsel about an IRS plan. They had reached the threshold of 
probable cause to execute a search warrant on a storage unit in 
Northern Virginia. U.S. Attorney Wolf calls Hunter Biden's 
attorney and alerts him to the pending search warrant being 
executed.
    You stated, Investigator Shapley, that at every stage 
during your investigation, decisions were made that benefited 
the subject of the investigation. Who is the subject of the 
investigation, good sir?
    Mr. Shapley. Hunter Biden.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you very much. And I think I clarified 
for America why we were interested in Hunter Biden because he 
sold access to his father, the big guy. And you Americans out 
there may have a compromised President in your White House. You 
should certainly be concerned. Mr. Ziegler, how did the IRS 
investigation regarding Hunter Biden begin? Tell us briefly, 
sir.
    Mr. Ziegler. It was a review of bank records regarding 
another investigation I was working.
    Mr. Higgins. So, it was ancillary to another criminal 
investigation. Is that correct, sir?
    Mr. Ziegler. Correct.
    Mr. Higgins. And you are a criminal investigator. Is that 
correct, sir?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Higgins. Not civil?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you very much. Investigator Shapley, in 
a September 3, 2020 meeting with the prosecution team for the 
Hunter Biden case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf told 
your team there was more than enough probable cause for the 
physical search warrant of the guest house at then former Vice 
President's Delaware residence where Hunter Biden stayed for a 
time. Did U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf confirm your investigative 
effort that you had sufficient probable cause for search?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, she did.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you very much. You have told Congress 
that Assistant U.S. Attorney Wolf also said that the question 
was ``whether the juice was worth the squeeze'', and that 
``optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to 
execute a search warrant.'' Optics? Have you ever run into that 
Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. I have not, no.
    Mr. Higgins. Have you, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not.
    Mr. .Higgins. Now, why do you think the Department of 
Justice might be concerned about optics in a search of the 
President's son residence during the course of a criminal 
investigation? Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. I mean, just the sensitivities involved with 
that search warrant, and it would be----
    Mr. Higgins. Pretty clear, isn't it?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mr. Higgins. There is another search warrant I am going to 
touch on in my remaining section. I am going to have my time 
expired here. Let me just say, gentlemen, you are courageous 
for coming forward, and let me ask you, did your job begin with 
an oath?
    Mr. Shapley. It did.
    Mr. Higgins. Have you upheld that oath?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I have.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I have.
    Mr. Higgins. And is it your core principles that have 
driven you to reveal the corruptions that you have witnessed in 
your criminal investigations coming before Congress today?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, it was.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, it was.
    Mr. Higgins. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I yield.
    Chairman Comer. Very good. The Chair now recognizes Mr. 
Gomez for 5 minutes. Garcia for 5 minutes. Sorry.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, let us first zero 
in on the bottom line. What we have is two IRS investigators 
who clearly worked very hard on the Hunter Biden investigation, 
and thank you both for being here today. You both gave 
recommendations to prosecutors based on your work, which you 
have described today, and then Donald Trump's hand-picked 
prosecutor then made recommendations to charge Hunter. He acted 
independently, and he himself has confirmed this. You did your 
job making recommendations, and then the prosecutor did his 
job. You do not have to agree with his conclusions, but that is 
the bottom line of what we have today at this hearing.
    But today's hearing is like most of the Majority's 
investigations and hearings: a lot of allegations, zero proof, 
no receipts, but apparently some dick picks. Now at a certain 
point the American people will need some actual evidence, 
actual evidence, but we have seen absolutely none. So, let us 
go back and review what has gone over the course of the last 7 
months of this smear campaign against this White House.
    First, the Committee is clearly obsessed with Hunter Biden, 
massively obsessed with him. Now, keep in mind there has been 
no evidence of any wrongdoing or transactions of the person 
that is actually in government, Joe Biden. A lot about Hunter, 
not a lot about Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden, I want to remind 
the Majority, is actually not the President of United States. 
And I want to point out that no Biden family members hold 
government positions of any kind.
    Now, this is, of course, in stark contrast to the Trump 
crime family. The Majority conveniently glazes over the Trump's 
family's foreign dealings. The Trump family, of course, were 
actually appointed to White House senior jobs, from Ivanka's 
Chinese trademarks to Jared's Qatari real estate bailout and $2 
billion in Saudi private equity money. So where is that 
investigation? They were actually in the White House. And I 
think Chris Christie, one of the Republicans running for 
President, said it best, of course, and the former Governor--
this is his quote, not mine
    --``The grift from the family is breathtaking. It is 
breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the 
White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis.'' 
Continue: ``You think it is because it is some kind of 
investigative genius or investing genius, or is it because he 
was sitting next to the President of the United States for 4 
years and doing favors for the Saudis?'' Now, these are quotes 
from a man who has known Trump and the Kushners for years. 
These people were in the White House every day formerly making 
policy, unlike Hunter Biden.
    [Chart]
    Mr. Garcia. Now, the Biden family attacks, of course, went 
nowhere. And so, they tried of course to create a new storm, a 
new conspiracy theory with a so-called FBI Ukraine document, 
another fake scandal. This new fake scandal had a lot of hype, 
a lot of scary headlines from our Chairman, from a lot of 
Members of this Committee, but a lot of us actually read the 
document. And when you read the document, it was pretty clear 
this was all hype, just a wild accusation being passed along to 
the FBI with zero proof. And where did this accusation actually 
come from? Rudy Giuliani. Just another Rudy Giuliani tin foil 
hat conspiracy theory that went nowhere.
    Giuliani, by the way, whose law license is being 
recommended to actually be removed. Now, Rudy Giuliani's 
longtime associate, Lev Parnas, just said that he is prepared 
to testify under oath that there is no evidence that the 
President or his son, Hunter, interfered with Ukrainian 
politics, and there never has been. The Republican U.S. 
Attorney Scott Brady, handpicked by Donald Trump, determined to 
not having sufficient evidence to further investigate Rudy's 
claims. But Members of this Committee, even today, repeat this 
narrative over and over again, more accusations, no proof, no 
receipts.
    So, what is next on this witch hunt? This man, Gal Luft. 
The Republicans were so desperate just last week to find 
someone who could tell them what they wanted to hear, that he 
promoted and collaborated with a Chinese spy trying to 
influence U.S. policy while selling weapons to Iran and Libya. 
So, why is the so-called whistleblower missing? We do not know. 
Skipped his bail, being searched upon after being arrested. Now 
he is so desperate to cling to this narrative for defending 
this alleged crook.
    I want to know, we have questions, was the Chairman, was 
the Committee staff in contact with Mr. Luft when he was a 
fugitive? Do we know where he is? What vetting does the 
Majority do to make sure that there are not targets of foreign 
influence on this Committee? These are the real questions that 
we need answered.
    Chairman Comer. If you are willing to yield, I will answer 
that question.
    Mr. Garcia. Sure. I just want my time.
    Chairman Comer. I have never met Gal Luft in my life. All I 
know is he was getting money from the same company that the 
Bidens were getting money from, CEFC. I yield back.
    Mr. Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am looking forward 
to also if anyone from the Committee, or any Committee Members, 
or Committee staff had any contact with who is now obviously a 
Chinese spy, which you and the Committee have been hyping up 
for weeks.
    Chairman Comer. Well, is the President's son a Chinese spy? 
The only difference is the President's son took a hell of a lot 
more money than Gal Luft.
    Mr. Goldman. What does taking money from the same company 
mean?
    Mr. Garcia. Sir, Mr. Chairman, you were the one hyping up a 
Chinese spy and arms dealer for weeks, so this is just another 
example.
    Mr. Goldman. Who cares if they had money from the same 
company?
    Mr. Garcia. So, just to finish up my time. Let me just say 
that it is clear to me that this Majority will stop at nothing 
to try to impeach President Biden, the Attorney General, 
Secretary Mayorkas, and the list goes on and on. This is just 
another witch hunt that the Majority continues to do week after 
week. The Majority is trying to interfere in ongoing legal 
proceedings to cause chaos and to try to reelect Donald Trump, 
who obviously is pulling this extremist agenda. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Sessions from 
Texas for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Sessions. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Gentlemen, 
welcome, and thank you very much for taking time. We have been 
sitting here listening and strongly identify that both of you 
have chosen to do this as strong people who have an ethical and 
moral idea about your service to this country. We want to thank 
you.
    Today, we have examples of the Department of Justice and 
the IRS that have not just given special treatment to those who 
committed tax evasion and financial fraud with the President's 
family, but I think there is another point that we would want 
to make today. And that is that I believe that a taxpayer 
system where the Agency that is tasked with enforcing the laws 
fairly on regular citizens is also seeking the chance to shield 
those well connected to the President of United States from 
consequences of illegal behavior in direct opposition to our 
Nation's founding principles. We have established that. I think 
that is pretty clear what you have said today.
    But I have a question for both of you because I believe 
today's hearing goes beyond that, and that is that there are 
strong whistleblower protections under 5(c) U.S.C Section 2302, 
the Whistleblower Protection Act, that afford you and any other 
person who works in this government the protection from 
retaliation after making a legally protected disclosure. In 
doing your job, you felt like there was something wrong, you 
said something about it, and you filed for whistleblower status 
because you believed that something was being held against you. 
In fact, both of you had made several legally protected 
disclosures during this time for the record. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Sessions. So, after making this disclosure to the 
Committee, did the IRS comply with the statutorily required 
whistleblower protections? How were you treated in this 
endeavor?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I will start. So, since I made these 
protected disclosures that are legally protected, the IRS has 
chosen to retaliate against me in multiple ways. Even now, 
there is a major case initiative that actually Special Agent 
Ziegler started as well, that are now being, you know, being 
put on the back burner and just being slow walked. My immediate 
supervisor and two levels above them have not spoken to me 
since June 1, 2023. Even though I am sending them emails and 
trying to conduct my business on a daily basis, they literally 
have not spoken to me. You know, there is----
    Mr. Sessions. Would that be normal?
    Mr. Shapley. No, absolutely not. I mean, we are running 
undercover operations, we are doing interviews across the 
world, and when senior leadership really cuts off communication 
like that, you know, increases the chance of, you know, some 
officer safety type issue when we cannot communicate those 
types of issues with senior leadership and we have no support 
from them.
    Mr. Sessions. And, so, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. To be completely honest with you, this is 
going to make me a little bit emotional. But----
    Mr. Sessions. And I am sorry because I know this 
personally. You spoke about that in your opening statement.
    Mr. Ziegler. It is essentially like being left out on an 
island. And I do not know if that is done purposefully, but I 
essentially made disclosures up to the Commissioner of the IRS. 
I said, what happened, and the response I got a few days later 
was I may have broken the law and do not ever do this again, 
your emails need to go through your leadership. So, to have 
that come to me was chilling. I cannot even put words to it, 
but what I can say is there are some people within my Agency, 
some people in leadership that have been a person that I can go 
to for support, but the vast majority of it--the impact on the 
person, it is awful.
    Mr. Sessions. Well, retaliation is many times seen by 
people who know it when they see it, and that is why the law 
exists. And I want both of you to know, as Chairman of 
Government Operations Subcommittee for this Committee, 
Government Reform and Oversight--Government Accountability, I 
will be coming to the IRS and I will be going to other 
agencies, specifically about their retaliation under the law 
within their agencies that we should take as a Committee, a 
whole Committee and a Subcommittee, very seriously because this 
could be a number of matters that are taking place where people 
have chilling impact against the laws of the United States of 
America.
    Gentleman, I have been taking notes. I want to thank you 
for being here today. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I yield back my 
time.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mr. Frost from Florida.
    Mr. Frost. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First off, thank you 
two so much for your service working at the IRS. Very important 
work.
    Let us get right into it. Mr. Shapley, you are blowing the 
whistle today because you feel like the Department of Justice 
provided preferential treatment to Hunter Biden. Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Frost. Yes or no? That is correct. And you believe that 
Hunter Biden received that preferential treatment because his 
father is the Democratic President, Joe Biden. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. I cannot conclude why he is receiving the 
preferential treatment, but that is one conclusion you can come 
to.
    Mr. Frost. Yes. I mean, it is evident in your deposition 
that you believe that. Mr. Ziegler, did any of your supervisors 
explicitly tell you, you are not allowed to investigate Hunter 
Biden because he is the President's son? Yes or no.
    Mr. Ziegler. I was never told that.
    Mr. Frost. You were never told. Thank you. I mean, nowhere 
in your deposition did you suggest that there is some larger 
conspiracy at play here, which is what my colleagues on the 
other side of the aisle would have us believe, that there is a 
two-tiered justice system that privileges Democrats over 
Republicans, and that is what my colleagues are doing. They are 
using you, and using your story, and using your work to make 
this argument for themselves.
    And since January 6, these Republicans and Trump have 
complained about a two-tiered justice system, co-opting the 
language of the decades-long Civil Rights Movement for Black 
lives and Black freedom--a movement that they actually are 
actively looking to eliminate. There is a two-tiered justice 
system, but it is not about Democrats versus Republicans. This 
language, ``two-tiered justice system,'' has a real history.
    [Chart]
    Mr. Frost. It has a real history of Emmett Till; it has a 
real history with Breonna Taylor; it has a real history with 
George Floyd; the Central Park Five; Derek Diaz, a young man 
who was just an unarmed young man who was just killed in 
Central Florida not about a week ago; and it has a real history 
with the Groveland Four, four Black boys from Central Florida, 
who were falsely accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting 
a White woman when they pulled over to help her when the car 
was broken. The fourth boy, who is not pictured here, Ernest 
Thomas, was not apprehended initially. He was actually shot to 
death in his sleep. A 100-person mob wanted to get their hands 
on the remaining three Black boys and could not, and so they 
took it out on the predominantly Black town, shooting 
residents, looting, setting fire to their homes. Charles 
Greenlee was sentenced to prison for life. He was 16 years old.
    Now, just a quick trigger warning here for Black death and 
trauma, but it is an important story to tell when we talk about 
the two-tiered justice system because on the way back from the 
courthouse, the sheriff took it upon himself to shoot the two 
remaining individuals, Walter Ervin and Samuel Shepard. Walter 
Ervin actually ended up living because when he was shot, he 
played dead, but the other one was shot and killed, Samuel 
Shepard. They were both handcuffed, as you can see in the 
photo, and were shot to death. They all died in either prison 
or on parole as convicted criminals. And in 2021, 72 years 
later, a judge exonerated them and the trial was considered a 
fraud.
    In closing, there is a two-tiered justice system. It does 
exist, but it is not what my Republican colleagues want to say 
it is, using your story for that. It is not Republican versus 
Democrat. It is Black, Brown, and poor people versus everyone 
else. And I will not accept when Republican politicians look to 
appropriate the language of the movement for Black lives and 
civil rights to fit a political agenda to defend Donald Trump. 
This is the two-tiered justice system. This is the two-tiered 
justice system. And so, we have to continue to fight for a 
world where this does not happen. This case about Hunter Biden 
is a case closed.
    And, you know, I will close with a question of the 
Chairman, considering the ``falsehoods, abuses, and 
misrepresentations'' of sensitive information that you 
presented here. When we are done with this made up 
investigation, are you expecting to be censured by the House? 
The reason I ask is because it is in line with the logic and 
actions of the Republican Party here in the 118th Congress. 
Thank you, and I yield----
    Mr. Raskin. Would the gentleman yield?
    Mr. Frost. I yield to the Ranking Member.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you very kindly. Mr. Ziegler, you 
referred to an FBI supervisory special agent who went with you 
to try to interview Hunter Biden. Is that someone that you 
respect?
    Mr. Ziegler. That was not me. That would have been my 
supervisor.
    Mr. Raskin. OK. Sorry, Mr. Shapley, you went with this SSA. 
Was that someone that you respect?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I respect the FBI SSA.
    Mr. Raskin. Because he came and did an interview with us, 
and he testified that over his decade of experience with the 
Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office, the FBI agent never knew the 
assistant U.S. Attorneys in office or U.S. Attorney Weiss to 
allow any political considerations to influence their 
prosecutorial decisions in any case. Do you accept his 
judgment, or you disagree with his judgment about that?
    Mr. Shapley. So yes, the FBI SSA I respect and, you know, 
it is a matter of timing. He retired in June 2022. And at that 
time--I have not even overcome the burden that it took me to 
say that this has been political and been politicized, so it 
was not until October 7, 2022. So, you know, the FBI SSA, you 
know, he came to his conclusions, and he was not there for that 
October 7----
    Mr. Ziegler. Can I mention something regarding that?
    Mr. Raskin. Let me just say, I respect very much your 
service, and I respect very much your testimony today, but I 
think it is completely within the realm of prosecutorial 
discretion, and just subjective differences of opinion that 
people have. And those of us who have been----
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired.
    Mr. Raskin [continuing]. In prosecution understand that 
happens all the time with prosecutors and investigators.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona, Mr. Biggs, for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Biggs. Thank you. It is good to have you here. 
Appreciate it, and I appreciate your courage and your 
willingness to testify.
    Mr. Shapley, I am going to go to pages 18 through 20 of 
your testimony, and, Mr. Ziegler, I am going to go to about 
page 104 to 105 of yours to start with, but while you are going 
there, I am going to ask this question. We have heard a lot 
about this, well, you know, this 2014, 2015, 2016 tax things. 
We have heard a lot about Trump, but in 2014, 2015, and 2016, 
those tax years, Donald Trump was not elected, but who was the 
Vice President of the United States, if you know?
    Mr. Ziegler. Joe Biden was the Vice President of the United 
States.
    Mr. Biggs. Right. I think that is right, and when the 
statute of limitation ran on those 2014 and 2015 years, who was 
the President of the United States when the statute expired?
    Mr. Ziegler. I do not remember. So, that was President 
Biden.
    Mr. Biggs. Under President Biden. But there is some indicia 
in the statements and testimony that you made that I want to go 
over. Mr. Shapley, why did you want to interview Rob Walker?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I think Special Agent Ziegler would be 
better to answer that question.
    Mr. Biggs. All right. So, I am going to click on page 18 of 
your testimony, Mr. Shapley.
    Voice. Can you repeat the question?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. Can you repeat the question, please?
    Mr. Biggs. I will tell you what. I will rephrase the 
question. On the day of action, you guys were intending to 
interview 12 people. One of whom was Rob Walker, a business 
associate of Hunter Biden and, in particular, you wanted to 
talk about, I think the quote is, ``10 held by H for the big 
guy.''
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Biggs. Right? So, who did you infer that the big guy 
may be?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, all I can do is speak to the evidence 
there. What I can say is, I think I know what you are referring 
to is, when we are preparing for that interview and we were 
referencing that email, ``10 held by H for the big guy,'' and 
from what I understand that to be his dad, President Biden.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. So, I am sorry. I just want to ask Mr. 
Shapley a similar question because the AUSA Wolf interjected--
and I am reading from your transcript now--and said she did not 
want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to 
ask questions about ``dad''. Who did you take ``dad'' to be 
when she refers to dad?
    Mr. Ziegler. The father of the subject is President Biden.
    Mr. Biggs. President Biden. And so, even by her response, 
she is inferring that Joe Biden may be involved in Hunter 
Biden's transactions. And then you get to the FBI agent and you 
give some detail. Mr. Shapley, you give some detail about what 
he is saying in the transcript, if you will, of his interview. 
And, in particular, the FBI agent asked Mr. Walker, ``So you 
definitely got the feeling that that was orchestrated by Hunter 
Biden to have, like, an appearance by his dad at that meeting 
just to kind of bolster your chances of making the deal work 
out.'' Walker answered, ``Sure.'' The FBI agent continued, 
``Any times he was in the office, sir, did you hear Hunter 
Biden say that he was setting up a meeting with his dad with 
him while dad was still in office?'' Walker answered, ``Yes.''
    That is the quote that you gave in your transcript, and 
then you said the FBI agent inexplicably ceases that line of 
questioning. I want to know what you thought the FBI agent was 
inferring. What did you think? What do you think when you read 
them, when you heard that, of the relationship between Joe 
Biden and Hunter Biden and his business transactions when he is 
still in office?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. So, I cannot go beyond what you have 
quoted me as saying in my testimony, so I will just leave it 
there.
    Mr. Biggs. OK. Thank you. And, Mr. Ziegler, on page 104 of 
yours, you mentioned that Mr. Biden, Hunter Biden, attempted to 
obtain a business tax deduction on his return for hotel rooms 
that were used by his father, Joe Biden. Tell us about that, 
please.
    Mr. Ziegler. So yes, on his tax return, he deducted a hotel 
room for his dad, so Joe Biden, and we actually got the invoice 
from the hotel that showed the dad's name on it.
    Mr. Biggs. So, for that to be a valid business deduction, 
he would have to be doing business with Hunter Biden. Is that 
not true?
    Mr. Ziegler. A typical part of the process would be to 
interview that person to find out what might have happened, why 
did you go to that hotel room, and based on statements he made 
in his book, I mean, you can correlate to what was kind of 
going on around that time.
    Mr. Biggs. But how does it become a valid business 
deduction if Joe Biden is just there on vacation?
    Mr. Shapley. You know, generally speaking, to be a valid 
business deduction, it would have to be some type of business 
activity being conducted at that time.
    Mr. Biggs. And the last one is the WhatsApp, and I will not 
get into it because just about out of time, but I would just 
say, the WhatsApp where he says ``my dad is sitting next to 
me,'' and you remember that. And that is on, I want to say, 
what, page 105, that is where you talk about it, Mr. Ziegler, 
in page 105 of your transcript. I guess the question there is, 
how would you be able to determine whether he was actually next 
to Hunter Biden? How would you be able to determine that?
    Chairman Comer. And the gentleman's time has expired, but 
you could please answer the question.
    Mr. Ziegler. So typically, in that situation, you would 
want to get location data, contemporaneous data that would show 
where that person is at, so that is what we would typically 
look to.
    Mr. Shapley. That is right, yes. That is right.
    Mr. Biggs. Yes. Thank you so much.
    Chairman Comer. Very good. The Chair now recognizes Ms. Lee 
from Pennsylvania.
    Ms. Lee. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Republicans have been 
invoking this term ``two-tiered system of justice'' a lot 
recently, so I want to talk about what the real two-tiered 
justice system is where Black and Brown people are over-
criminalized and over-incarcerated.
    On June 20, Chairman Comer claimed in a Committee press 
release, ``The Department of Justice's charges against 
President Biden's son, Hunter, reveal a two-tiered system of 
justice.'' As you see or have seen from the knockoff social 
media site, former President Trump has also used this phrase in 
connection with the Hunter Biden investigation. I would like to 
address the way my Republican colleagues are attempting to co-
op the phrase ``two-tiered justice system'' to make it sound 
like Trump and his cronies are somehow the victims here when 
the reality is that the term, ``two-tiered system of justice,'' 
is meant to refer to the very real system that exists in the 
United States and which affects Black and Brown folks, not 
powerful former Presidents and their political allies.
    The real two-tiered system of justice is one in which, in 
2021, according to the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the 
imprisonment rate for Black men aged 18 and 19 was 11.6 times 
the rate for White males. The real two-tiered justice system is 
one in which, in 2021, according to those same statistics, the 
imprisonment rate for Native-American males aged 18 and 19 was 
5.1 times the rate for White males. The two-tiered justice 
system is one in which, according to a May 2018 Vera Evidence 
Brief, ``Black men comprise about 13 percent of the male 
population but about 35 percent of those incarcerated.'' One in 
three Black men born today can expect to be incarcerated in his 
lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 White men. 
The two-tiered justice system is one in which an analysis of 
nearly 100 million traffic stops across this country found that 
Black drivers were about 20 percent more likely to be stopped 
than White drivers.
    My Republican colleagues seem to think that using criminal 
law as a weapon or a political tool is objectionable only when 
directed against someone who should be out of reach of the 
criminal system, someone too rich, too powerful, or too White 
to be charged, but let us face it: that same system has been 
used as a weapon and a political tool against Black people 
since the Emancipation Proclamation. These racial disparities 
are rooted in a two-tiered view on race, the belief that Black 
people were inferior that was created to justify the 
enslavement of Black people, which has now evolved into include 
the belief that Black people are more prone to criminality.
    During the decades of lynchings that followed enslavement, 
White people defended the torture and murder of Black people as 
necessary to protect property, families, and a way of life from 
Black criminals. In 1980's, Nixon's War on Crime evolved into 
Reagan's War on Drugs, and we saw harsher and more frequent 
punishments and the start of mass incarceration. In both cases, 
it was Black people who were targeted and suffered under those 
policies.
    There is a reason that crack cocaine, which carries a 
stereotype of being used by Black people, was at one point 
punished far more harshly than powder cocaine. Prior to 2010, 
that ratio was 100 to 1, meaning someone convicted in the 
Federal court of possessing crack cocaine will receive the same 
sentence as someone who possessed 100 times more powder 
cocaine. And I want to say that PA's extreme sentencing 
practices have overwhelmingly impacted people of color, but 
most specifically Black people who make up less than 11 percent 
of the population in Pennsylvania, but more than 65 percent of 
those serving life without parole sentences and 58 percent of 
those serving non-life sentences of 20 years or longer. How 
many times have our elected officials and judges ran on the 
promise of a tough-on-crime approach? Even now, Republicans 
still tout that they are the party of law and order, while in 
the same breath claiming that Donald Trump should not be 
prosecuted.
    Do not get it twisted. Republican efforts to use the term 
``two-tiered justice'' is to distract from those who are truly 
the victims of a disparate treatment in our criminal justice 
system, and whether we say it out loud or not, we all know who 
those people are. I yield the remainder of my time to the 
Ranking Member.
    Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Lee, for that very eloquent 
statement. I wonder if you remember, you might be too young for 
this, but when there was this horrific assault, a gang rape in 
Central Park, Donald Trump ran ads in the New York Times saying 
that the Central Park suspects should be given the death 
penalty, and, of course, they turned out to be completely 
innocent of the offense, so I think that is just to reinforce 
your point. There is a history of profound racism in the 
criminal justice system and in the rhetoric around it, and 
there is something very disappointing about our colleagues co-
opting, as you say, in prostituting the critique of the system 
as two-tiered on behalf of Donald Trump. I yield back to you.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Grothman from 
Wisconsin for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this 
important hearing. I found it interesting that of the 12 
witnesses the FBI and the IRS wanted to interview on December 
8, 2020, including Hunter Biden, they only got one interview. 
That was Rob Walker, a friend of the Biden family, and whose 
company, Robinson Walker LLC, sent millions of dollars to the 
Bidens that originated in Romania and China. President Biden 
said his family did not receive money from China, but that was 
not true. Mr. Shapley, according to your testimony before Ways 
and Means, on page 18, on December 3, 2020, did you have a long 
meeting with the prosecution team at the U.S. Attorney's Office 
in Delaware?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct, on December 3, 2020.
    Mr. Grothman. And is it true that U.S. Attorney Weiss was 
in and out of that meeting?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is true.
    Mr. Grothman. And during the meeting, did you share your 
plan to interview Hunter Biden's associate, Rob Walker?
    Mr. Shapley. All the interview outlines for the witnesses 
were discussed that day, yes.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. And you wanted to question Walker about 
the email that said, ``10 held by H for the big guy.'' Is that 
correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That was included in the interview outline, 
yes.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. But U.S. Attorney, Lesley Wolf, told you 
she did not want you to ask questions about dad, meaning Joe 
Biden. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. So Assistant U.S. Attorney General Wolf 
was, you felt, conceding that the big guy was Joe Biden? Do you 
think that is accurate?
    Mr. Shapley. I mean I do not want to conclude what she was 
thinking.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. You did have an interview with Rob Walker 
in Arkansas, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. I did not, but agents did, yes.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. And did Rob Walker tell you that 
President Biden had ever showed up to a meeting with his son's 
business associates?
    Mr. Shapley. He told us that he had shown up at the 
meetings, yes.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Can you elaborate on that at all?
    Mr. Shapley. I can only stick to what is in the transcript. 
And the witness described an instance where CEFC executives 
were, or people on the CEFC were meeting at the Four Seasons 
and that the subject's father, President Biden, showed up at 
that meeting.
    Mr. Grothman. So, President Biden was there physically?
    Mr. Shapley. That is what the witness said, yes.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Mr. Ziegler, maybe I am going back here a 
little bit further, but earlier today you wanted to elaborate 
on one of your questions and you were cutoff by one of the 
Democratic Congressman. Is there anything that you want to say 
that you could remember that you were not able to say?
    Mr. Ziegler. I appreciate that. So, I wanted to say that 
one thing that was mentioned regarding the retired FBI 
supervisory special agent, I have actually recently reached out 
to some of my former colleagues that I worked this 
investigation with at the FBI, and I have asked them was there 
anything I misstated in my transcript? They said, no, from 
their best understanding of reading it. So, I want to be clear 
on that, that they have read my transcript or they have 
referenced that they did, and that they have said that they did 
not see any issues with what I said in my transcript.
    Mr. Grothman. OK. Thank you. Mr. Shapley, anything else 
from you?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. I want to speak briefly about our 
criminal tax attorneys at IRS Criminal Investigation. So first, 
there are only advisory. And, you know, I cannot recall an 
instance where they non-concurred with any of my actions within 
the group and that we did not send it forward anyway with our 
senior leadership approval. The issue here was the manner in 
which it became a non-concur, the line CT attorney who took 
more than 50 days to review all the evidence, she concurred 
with all of the charges in that prosecution report. This is 
Exhibit 2. When she sent it forward, a panel of five lawyers at 
the national office of criminal tax attorneys, they concurred 
with the line attorney's assessment that it was concur on all 
the charges that were recommended. It then went to the senior 
leadership at CT counsel, and the top said that you need to 
change this to a non-concur, so even something like that could 
happen in practice.
    The issue here was that I contacted the line attorney's 
manager, the area counsel, and I said that, you know, we did 
not know this is going to be a non-concur. She has been saying 
it is going to be a concur. And she told us that it had always 
been a non-concur, basically obfuscating the entire events that 
occurred at the senior levels with the panel agreeing with the 
law and recommending concurring those charges.
    So, I do not know why CT counsel would lie to us or provide 
false information about it being a non-concur the whole time. 
And Special Agent Ziegler had some communication with that line 
attorney and said do you know that they are saying that it has 
always been a non-concur, and she confirmed. She said, ``What? 
No, I sent a yellow light,'' which is a concur. And so that was 
the issue with CT counsel that really perplexed me, and that is 
something that I wanted to add to the Congressman back there, 
so thank you for the extra time.
    Mr. Grothman. Thank you. And just one other thing. I think 
with regard to what happened in Central Park years ago, the 
mischaracterization of what happened there is, I am sure, very 
hurtful and harmful to the Central Park jogger, that there is 
more to that story that you know very well. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. Very good. At the request of the witnesses, 
we are going to take two more questioners, and then we will 
have another 10-minute recess. So, I will just recognize Mr. 
Casar and then Mr. Donalds. Right now, the Chair recognizes Mr. 
Casar from Texas for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Casar. It is clear from this hearing that Democrats are 
pro-accountability, equal treatment under the law, and for 
paying your taxes. In the Hunter Biden case, we have heard that 
a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney took the extensive work of the 
IRS investigation and got the most severe penalty that he 
thought was possible, and he was held accountable. But there 
are so many millionaires, and billionaires, and big 
corporations that are never held accountable for tax evasion, 
and, in fact, they are shielded by this GOP Majority.
    Republicans are not interested in that kind of 
accountability. Instead, they are interested in trying their 
hardest to embarrass the President and prevent our government 
from operating as it should. If Republicans were truly 
interested in holding the powerful accountable, we would be 
holding hearings on making sure the IRS has the resources to 
investigate every billionaire and every big corporation who 
cheats on their taxes.
    But instead, the first bill that I voted on, the first bill 
brought forward by this Republican Majority, was to slash 
funding dedicated to the IRS in order to chase down billionaire 
tax cheats. If we spend some money on the IRS to chase down tax 
cheats, that would have brought, ultimately, more revenue to 
the United States and reduced our deficits and improved 
programs for the American people. A 2021 Treasury Department 
paper found that the wealthiest 1 percent may owe more than 
$160 billion in uncollected taxes. According to the New York 
Times, ``Tax compliance rates for high and low''--or, sorry--
``are high. Tax compliance rates are high for low-and middle-
income workers, who have their taxes deducted automatically 
from their paychecks. The rich, however, are able to use 
accounting loopholes to shield their tax liabilities.'' So, I 
would like to reiterate. Low-and middle-income Americans have 
high tax compliance rates. They pay their taxes. It is the very 
wealthiest and the biggest corporations who refuse to pay their 
fair share and rig the system here in D.C. in their favor.
    So, Mr. Chairman, I am interested in whether you could 
commit in short order to holding a hearing about holding 
billionaires and big corporations accountable for evading their 
taxes. I think this could be a bipartisan hearing. It could 
result in reductions to the deficit. And if we have interest in 
holding folks accountable on tax evasion, I think we should be 
looking at the biggest fish we can across the board.
    Chairman Comer. We are starting here today.
    Mr. Casar. No, we are having a hearing about 
accountability, but what I want to know is, why it your folks 
have voted for cutting billions of dollars in order to let 
folks off the hook? So, I would be interested if we can have a 
hearing on the fact that the IRS has lost to attrition 
thousands of employees, including those with sophisticated 
skills.
    It used to be that 41,000 audits happened a year for 
millionaires. That was 10 years ago, but in Fiscal Year 2020, 
the IRS only audited 11,000 millionaire returns. Only about 
7,100 of those returns were audited by revenue agents who are 
the most highly qualified auditors. So, I want to know, Mr. 
Chairman, can we have a hearing? I think this is something we 
could all get behind, have a hearing about billionaires and big 
corporations at large scale potentially getting away with, from 
the latest reports, we are talking about $160 billion in 
uncollected taxes. I would like to see whether there might be 
interest from anybody on the other side of the aisle on us 
having that kind of a hearing. Any interest? Really, I have 
over a minute of time.
    Mr. Sessions. Count me in.
    Mr. Casar. Mr. Sessions, that would be great. I think that 
that would be a good hearing for us to have.
    Mr. Sessions [continuing]. Follow the law.
    Mr. Casar. Yes, we want everybody to follow the law. I 
agree, and with that, I yield back my time to the Ranking 
Member.
    Mr. Goldman. Will you yield?
    Mr. Casar. Yes.
    Mr. Raskin. Will you yield to the gentleman from New York?
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you. I appreciate the gentleman from 
Texas yielding. I want to bring up that October 7 meeting real 
quick in just the minute we have. You are familiar with an 
October 6 Washington Post story entitled ``Federal Agents See 
Chargeable Tax, Gun Purchase Case Against Hunter Biden.'' Is 
that right, Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. I am familiar, yes.
    Mr. Goldman. And then this meeting occurred October 7, the 
day after this, right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Goldman. Was this article discussed at that meeting?
    Mr. Shapley. It was.
    Mr. Goldman. And what was the nature of the discussion?
    Mr. Shapley. It is in that document, the email that 
basically says that we got to keep the sphere small, and that--
--
    Mr. Goldman. You would agree it was pretty clear that this 
was a leak to the Washington Post by law enforcement agents 
since it describes what Federal agents believe, right?
    Mr. Shapley. So, it was not actually clear to me that it 
was because usually they will say that it is a law enforcement 
source that provided it. And if you see in the bottom, it says 
that they corroborated independently, and they did not mention 
law enforcement.
    Mr. Ziegler. And there was----
    Mr. Goldman. So, you do not think it is the Federal agents, 
the agents who leaked this when the headline says, ``Federal 
Agents See Chargeable Tax, Gun Purchase Case Against Hunter 
Biden?''
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired, but feel 
free to answer the question.
    Mr. Ziegler. Prior to that, if you go back to December 
2020, there was another leak to the Washington Post, I mean 
that we had to get Department of Justice OIG involved, TIGTA 
involved. So, there was other leaks that happened prior to this 
to the Washington Post that I think are important for us to 
understand as well in that situation.
    Mr. Shapley. It had similar information as----
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. The October 6 leak.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Donalds from 
Florida.
    Mr. Donalds. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the witnesses, 
thank you for being here today. I want to get right to it 
because we have a lot to cover.
    Mr. Ziegler, you are the agent that opened up this 
investigation. From your transcript, page 17, what it says is, 
is that you are investigating a social media company, and 
through the process of that investigation, you found out that 
Hunter Biden was paying potentially for prostitutes in a 
potential prostitution ring. Is that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. You also say that in the beginning phases 
of that investigation, reviewing bank reports, that there was 
evidence that he was living lavishly through his corporate bank 
account. Is that correct? And when I say him, I mean Hunter 
Biden. Is that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. A question for you, and also for Mr. 
Shapley, is it a clear line of potential investigation if 
somebody is charging up massive living expenses through a 
corporate account and not doing that through their own personal 
accounts and accounting for that properly on your income tax 
returns? Is that the basis of a criminal investigation?
    Mr. Shapley. Generally speaking, that would definitely be 
factors that would spur a criminal investigation. Yes.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. Let me ask you this question. Let me ask 
you this question real quick. So, there was reference to the 
WhatsApp text message referring to, and everybody knows it now, 
hey, I am sitting here with my dad. Tell the chairman to give 
me my money because we remember and we are not going to forget 
it because we are the Bidens and we have all these connections, 
yada, yada, yada. We all know that text message now.
    Mr. Ziegler, on page 105 of your testimony, page 105, 
gentlemen, you state, ``I know we wanted to get location data 
because I went to the prosecutors with this, and they again 
came back at me with, well, how do we know that? He could just 
be lying and claiming that dad,'' Joe Biden now, ``that dad was 
there and dad was not there.'' Were you allowed to get location 
data, dealing with the WhatsApp text message?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, from my memory of it and from the notes 
that were taken, I never obtained location data regarding that 
message.
    Mr. Donalds. Did Ms. Wolf, the AUSA in Delaware, did she 
say, oh, wow, look at this text message, let us figure out the 
location data and see where Hunter Biden was when he sent said 
message? Was she, like, excited about this as a prosecutor?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I mean, when I asked her about the 
location data, in her response right here it was her responding 
with, well, how do we know that. It was not, yes, let us try 
and figure that out. It was like, well, how do we know that?
    Mr. Donalds. Well, did she read the text message because if 
I read that text message as a prosecutor, I am saying, wait a 
minute, dad is sitting next to him and dad happens to be the 
now President, then-Vice President of the United States. 
Shouldn't we find out where Hunter was when he sent the text 
message? I mean, that is, I am not a prosecutor, I am a finance 
guy, but that just seems like commonsense to me.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes. And I think with the previous email that 
was referenced ``10 held by H for the big guy,'' now that you 
have those two things kind of correlating with each other, as a 
normal process or procedure that we would go through, you would 
want to figure out, is that information truthful in that 
WhatsApp message?
    Mr. Donalds. I totally agree with you Mr. Ziegler, which is 
why I think it is the view of Members on this Committee and, 
frankly, a lot of Americans at this point, that there are 
elements at the Department of Justice who did not want this 
information out, who did not want to go down the line of 
actually going through the evidence-gathering process to 
deceive the depths to which this international pay-for-play 
scheme was actually happening around Joe Biden going through 
Hunter Biden, and all the money that the Biden family was 
occurring. That is not a question for you. That is just a 
statement from me.
    Last question. Through your investigation, how much money 
did you uncover was coming from Ukraine, Romania, and China?
    Mr. Ziegler. If you hold on 1 second, let me reference--
$17.3 million, approximately.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. So, $17.3 million through your 
investigation. You and Mr. Shapley, you are the guys that 
investigate criminal tax evasion on an international scale. Is 
that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. Question for the Chairman. Mr. Chairman, 
through the investigation of the Oversight Committee, about how 
much money have we seen come from Ukraine, Romania, and China?
    Chairman Comer. Over $10 million.
    Mr. Donalds. OK. So we have two separate investigations, 
one done by the investigative branch of the IRS that is charged 
with doing these types of investigations, these are the people 
you want doing them, and an independent investigation by the 
Oversight Committee, and we are coming up with the same amount 
of money, give or take a couple of million, going through the 
same person in Hunter Biden, and his investigation is slow-
walked, and we are supposed to sit here and think that Joe 
Biden knows nothing?
    I think, for the record, Mr. Chairman, that the relevant 
committee needs to have questions for Lesley Wolf, the AUSA of 
Delaware; for David Weiss, the Attorney General of Delaware; 
for Lisa Monaco, who is the Deputy Attorney General; and for 
Merrick Garland himself, the Attorney General of the United 
States, because if this action is allowed to occur and 
investigations are slow-walked with this level of detail, this 
is not Donald Trump, you all. These are facts. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. Great job, and I will add we 
just got bank records for Ukraine. So, we will be going through 
that.
    At the request of the witnesses, we are going to recess for 
10 minutes, and then we will promptly reconvene. The Committee 
in recess.
    [Recess.]
    Chairman Comer. The Oversight Committee will reconvene. We 
are now back in order.
    The Chair recognizes Ms. Crockett for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Crockett. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. The problem 
with going this late in the game is there is so much that has 
been put out there, you are just kind of all over the place, so 
just rock with me for a little bit.
    First of all, I want to get the elephant out of the room. 
Just to be clear, both of you provided a deposition testimony, 
and in your depositions, neither one of you ever stated that 
President Joe Biden interfered with your investigations, 
correct?
    Mr. Shapley. The transcript does not include that, no.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, the transcript does not include that.
    Ms. Crockett. Nor does it include that Merrick Garland 
interfered with your investigations, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. The transcript does not say that, no.
    Ms. Crockett. Thank you. The reason that I say that is 
because it is the insinuation that this Committee is trying to 
make, or at least one side of this Committee is trying to make, 
is that for some reason, there was interference, and my 
colleagues continue to make sure that they outline the fact 
that this investigation actually started under the Trump 
Aministration, so that is the reason about who appointed who 
comes up. But at the end of the day, we have no evidence 
whatsoever that the President nor the Attorney General of the 
United States interfered.
    But I also want to make sure that we outlined some legal 
principles, since we have gotten so many new found prosecutors 
today on this Committee. No. 1, just to be clear, just because 
you investigate something, it does not necessarily mean that 
there will be a conviction, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Ms. Crockett. OK. In fact, in our criminal justice system, 
you are cloaked in a presumption of innocence. That is what 
happens under the Constitution, OK? So, we all have a role to 
play. Your role is investigative, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Correct.
    Ms. Crockett. All right. So, then you have an AUSA, who 
usually is the one that is responsible for taking the evidence. 
Actually, they probably have an investigator in their office. 
There is usually an investigator that is directly within their 
office that will review any documentation that you provide and 
then they will sit down and talk to the AUSA's office about 
recommendations, like what the charges will look like and 
things like that. Is that not correct?
    Mr. Shapley. If that is correct, I have never seen that.
    Ms. Crockett. OK. Well, let me be clear. There is a level 
after you get done with your investigation in which the U.S. 
Attorney's Office then will look at the evidence that you have 
provided and they will make decisions, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. And all four assigned attorneys agreed 
with recommending felony and misdemeanor tax charges.
    Ms. Crockett. I heard your testimony before. I am not going 
to dispute that. The difference is I have done the defense side 
of this before, so as far as I am concerned, it sounds like a 
sweetheart deal because I have never played anyone to every 
single count of a Federal indictment in the first place, unless 
they only have one count. I have always negotiated. And unlike 
on the state level, I typically do my negotiations a lot of 
times before there is even an indictment because a lot of times 
my clients are actually turning evidence over in all kinds of 
things. But the thing is, those conversations have never taken 
place with an investigator. They always take place with the 
U.S. Attorney. So, the point is, you do not have the ultimate 
charging authority. The people that did they decided to do what 
they decided to do for whatever reasons, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. So, in my experience, I have always been a 
part of that, at that table talking to the AUSA and talking 
about the charging decisions. So that is not accurate to say 
that I am not----
    Ms. Crockett. So, for this----
    Mr. Shapley. [continuing] Investigators not involved, and I 
apologize.
    Ms. Crockett. So, this time it was a little different for 
you, and that is why you felt as if something was wrong, but I 
want to get to something else really quickly. I want to talk 
about what we should be prosecuting. We should be looking at 
the fact that in 2017, Trump's first year in office, he also 
made $6.5 million from China, his tax returns show. The source 
of the China payments is not clear from the returns. The 
payments were a surprise since Trump is an outspoken critic of 
the $5.8 million that Hunter Biden made. The difference is 
Trump was our President when he made this money from China, 
whereas I am sure you would agree with me, Hunter Biden has 
always been a private citizen. We have got a lot of other 
stuff. In fact, it is clear that Trump never paid more than 
$750 in taxes for, I want to say, a total of like 2 years of 
his taxes, which is absolutely insane. But we also know that it 
showed that Trump claimed large cash donations to charities, 
but the report said the IRS did not verify them. The report 
also said that while Trump's tax filings were large and 
complicated, the IRS does not appear to have assigned experts 
to work on them. That is shameful.
    In addition to that, we heard testimony earlier that talked 
about whether or not you executed a search warrant under 
Section 9-13.420 of the DOJ's Justice Manual. It specifically 
states that when searching the premises of an attorney that is 
a subject of an investigation, prosecutors are expected to take 
the least intrusive approach consistent with vigorous and 
effective law enforcement. It is kind of what they did for 
Trump, when they gave him a number of opportunities to turn 
over the documents, our National secrets that he kept in the 
toilet, but he chose not to. And that is why he is facing 
Federal charges down in Florida.
    And finally, I just want to make sure that we clear up 
something about the Central Park Five because I do not think my 
colleague from the other side of the aisle understands that not 
only were they found to be not guilty, they were paid $41 
million in a 2014 settlement because their civil rights in that 
lawsuit were violated. In addition to that, we do know that one 
of the Central Park Five now serves on City Council, Yusef 
Salaam. So, I ask unanimous consent that I allow that, that 
this New York Times article be admitted.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Chairman Comer. And the lady's time has expired, but would 
the lady yield a quick question?
    Ms. Crockett. For who?
    Chairman Comer. Would you yield to a question?
    Ms. Crockett. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. You made the argument that Trump received 
$6 million from China or something and Hunter Biden received 
the money from China. Do you know exactly what Hunter Biden did 
to receive the money from China because that is something we 
have had a hard time trying to figure out. I think I know what 
Trump's businesses were. I am not saying it is right or wrong. 
I just know what his businesses are. I do not know what the 
Biden's businesses are.
    Mr. Goldman. And you do not know what it is not.
    Chairman Comer. I am sorry?
    Mr. Goldman. And you do not know what it is not either.
    Ms. Crockett. But what I would say is----
    Mr. Goldman. So, you have no idea why or why not he 
received that money.
    Ms. Crockett. What I will say is----
    Mr. Goldman. You have no evidence about it.
    Ms. Crockett. Can I submit this MSNBC or this NBC article 
for the record as well?
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Crockett. And I will say that in this article it 
specifically says that the source of a number of Trump's 
moneys, it was unclear.
    Chairman Comer. OK.
    Ms. Crockett. It did say that he did have businesses there. 
He did say that he had opened some bank accounts in China, but 
they could not find the source of the moneys that were paid to 
him from China.
    Chairman Comer. OK. All right. The Chair recognizes Mr. 
LaTurner from Kansas for 5 minutes.
    Mr. LaTurner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you both for 
being here today. There is a lot of information. Let us try to 
quickly lay this out for the American people. OK? So quick 
answers. How long have each of you worked for the IRS? Mr. 
Shapley, you first.
    Mr. Shapley. Fourteen years.
    Mr. Ziegler. Thirteen years.
    Mr. LaTurner. Is it fair to say that you both have had 
successful careers at the IRS? You both been recognized for 
your achievement there?
    Mr. Shapley. I believe so, yes.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, absolutely.
    Mr. LaTurner. Are either of you overly partisan people?
    Mr. Shapley. I am not. No.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I have made an effort to not or to not be 
overly. Like, I have made an effort to be nonpartisan. I 
apologize.
    Mr. LaTurner. Do either of you have a burning desire, or 
have you ever, to be a spectacle at a congressional hearing? 
Are you wanting to be on TV? Are you looking for your 15 
minutes of fame here?
    Mr. Shapley. I would prefer not to be here.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I had never imagined that this would 
happen, but here I am.
    Mr. LaTurner. Then quickly, for the American people, why 
did you step forward?
    Mr. Shapley. Because we need the equal application of 
justice. And we hear all these stories about, you know, these 
crimes that are committed that are horrible. But without the 
equal application of justice, I do not understand how we move 
forward, and I do not understand how I meet my oath of office 
if I do not do what I can to ensure that occurs. You know, 
there are 300 million taxpayers out there that they think that 
this hearing is a big deal, because they are paying their taxes 
and they see someone who is not.
    Mr. LaTurner. And Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, it is a matter of accountability. So, it 
is twofold. The matter of accountability. We need to hold those 
accountable who basically, for the last 5 years has not been 
following proper procedure. And the second part of this is that 
I think we need to have some reform or something that is built 
in there that this does not happen to people again, 
investigators.
    Mr. LaTurner. Let us get the facts out. The Biden family 
and their associates received millions in global payments from 
companies linked to Ukraine, Romania, and China funneled 
through various shell companies. Mr. Ziegler, is that correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct. It is $17.3 million.
    Mr. LaTurner. Quickly, Mr. Shapley. What is a special agent 
report?
    Mr. Shapley. It is the report that recommends prosecution 
for various charges, each of which are been proven each 
element.
    Mr. LaTurner. Approximately how many of these, over your 
career, have you been a part of or have you prepared? Guess?
    Mr. Shapley. Hundreds.
    Mr. LaTurner. Hundreds. Did you complete a special agent 
report for the Hunter Biden case?
    Mr. Shapley. Special Agent Ziegler authored that report.
    Mr. Ziegler. I completed that report.
    Mr. LaTurner. And when this special report was sent up the 
chain of command just like you all have been involved with, in 
your case, Mr. Shapley, hundreds of times, did you notice 
anything outside of the normal process that you have grown used 
to over the years?
    Mr. Shapley. So, the changing criminal tax attorneys was 
definitely inappropriate and out of the norm. But no, after 
that, the senior leadership quickly trumped CT counsel, and 
they concurred with the charges. So, we sent it forward to the 
Department of Tax Division for their approval.
    Mr. LaTurner. And Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. Everything that he just said was correct.
    Mr. LaTurner. Now, Mr. Shapley, you recommended felony 
charges in the special agent report. And we all know the 
answer, but was Hunter Biden ultimately charged with those 
felonies?
    Mr. Shapley. No, he was not.
    Mr. LaTurner. Mr. Ziegler, what role did Lesley Wolf play 
in the investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, she was an Assistant United States 
Attorney out of the district of Delaware assigned to the 
investigation.
    Mr. LaTurner. You met with her and her team during the 
Hunter Biden case, correct?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. LaTurner. In your testimony to Ways and Means, you 
described Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, who was once 
again overseeing the case out of Delaware, as saying during a 
meeting that she did not want to ask about the big guy and 
stated she did not want to ask questions about dad. Is that 
statement accurate? And I want to remind you that you are under 
oath. Is that accurate, your testimony to Ways and Means?
    Mr. Ziegler. Can you ask that question one more time, so I 
can----
    Mr. LaTurner. She said, Lesley Wolf said, during a meeting 
that she did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she 
did not want to ask questions about Dad.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, there is twofold to that. That line in the 
email that said, ``10 held by H for the big guy,'' that was 
something that came up as a part of us reviewing what we were 
going to say during that day, and she immediately says, no, we 
are not going to ask that. And then we essentially had to argue 
our stance on why we should ask it, and then it was ultimately 
that we did not know. It was unknown.
    Mr. LaTurner. I appreciate that. Mr. Shapley, you stated in 
public interviews that you and your team were stopped from 
taking certain investigative steps that you believe could have 
potentially connected this Hunter Biden case to President 
Biden. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. LaTurner. Now, I just want to summarize as quickly as I 
can here. We have two credible nonpartisan IRS investigators 
confirming that there are millions of dollars and foreign 
payments to shell companies to the Biden Administration. We 
have Hunter Biden, who most of us would not hire to dog sit, 
receiving these millions of dollars for services that they 
cannot come forward and tell us about. And that potentially 
this is linked to President Biden, but we do not know that for 
a fact, because you were shut down. You were not allowed to 
pursue the investigative angle that you wanted to.
    This is something that we have to get to the bottom of. It 
is shameful what is happening. And I want folks to mark my 
words that we will not be stifled, this Committee will not be 
stifled by the Department of Justice, or anyone in the Biden 
Administration. We are going to pursue this and get to the 
bottom of this, no matter what. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I 
yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Gomez for 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Gomez. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. I just want to 
be clear. Whistleblower allegations should be taken seriously, 
period. I had a whistleblower approach my office during my 
first term, but one of the things I learned from that is that 
there is a clear fact-based process that needs to be followed 
to ensure a whistleblower investigation is executed properly 
without political interference. This is not what is happening 
here today. Where this originated in Ways and Means, 
Republicans threw that process into the gutter. Here is how.
    One, there were more than 50 people identified in the Ways 
and Means Committee's depositions on the same topic that were 
not spoken to and not interviewed before the Republican 
Majority released these allegations to the public. They did not 
take the time to check their facts, and that the Republicans 
even admitted during questioning that they never interviewed or 
asked questions or sought to ask questions of these 
individuals. Instead, Republicans cherry picked 13 people who 
they knew agreed to corroborate their claims. Why would not 
they conduct a thorough investigation and interview all people 
identified who might have information in this case. There are 
more than 50 people who were not given the opportunity to 
defend their names, respond to allegations, or give this 
inquiry important context and facts.
    Two, the whistleblower transcript contains unauthenticated, 
unverified documents from unknown searches on the internet. The 
exhibit used by the gentleman from Ohio in the early part of 
this hearing is one of those unverified documents pulled from 
the internet, yet they treat it as a smoking gun. You can 
literally find anything on the internet. That does not make it 
true, and Republicans refused to verify their sources. They are 
trying to give the appearance that these documents are from IRS 
files provided by the whistleblower or from some trusted 
source, but, in fact, they are not. These documents are 
unauthenticated, and we do not even know their real source. 
What kind of basis is this for a serious investigation?
    Three, the Majority released this transcript with all these 
errors I cited to the public before verifying any of these 
allegations. They put the cart far before the horse, declining 
to speak to over dozens of valuable witnesses, refusing to 
verify the information they pushed to the public, throwing this 
whole process and its credibility out the window. Additionally, 
this process has been tainted by the fact that one of these 
whistleblowers' attorneys has made substantial contributions to 
the Republican Chairman of Ways and Means, as recently as 
February of this year.
    And one of these whistleblowers did not even come 
voluntarily. He was asked to testify by his supervisor. None of 
this inspires confidence in these efforts of my colleagues 
across the aisle or in a process that has been taken. If my 
colleagues were serious about these allegations, they would 
have gone through the proper steps to ensure this investigation 
was done correctly, but they did not. They would rather drag 
this investigation and this Committee into the gutter, and that 
was proved by the gentlewoman from Georgia. If the gutter is 
where they choose to live and the only purpose of this hearing 
is to drag us all down there with them, I do not want any part 
of it.
    I ask for unanimous consent to submit for the record a 
letter from Ways and Means Ranking Member, Richard Neal, 
outlining improper steps taken by the Majority in this 
investigation.
    Chairman Comer. Without objection, so ordered.
    Mr. Gomez. Thank you. With that, I would like to yield my 
remaining time to Mr. Goldman of New York.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Gomez. Gentleman, I want to 
return to the Washington Post October 6 article, and I would 
ask unanimous consent to enter it in the record.
    Mr. Goldman. In your testimony, Mr. Shapley, before the 
Ways and Means Committee, you stated, ``There was a leak. It 
appeared to come from the agent's level, who was critical of 
the prosecutors for not charging the case.'' What you testified 
earlier was a little different. Which one do you stand by 
today?
    Mr. Shapley. I am sorry. Could you repeat that?
    Mr. Goldman. ``There was a leak. It appeared to come from 
the agent's level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not 
charging the case.''
    Mr. Shapley. Yes. So yes, it appeared because it said it 
came from the agent's level, but the source was a source 
familiar with the topic and it did not say it was a law 
enforcement source.
    Mr. Goldman. OK. It seems to be a distinction, I think, 
without a difference. And then you understand that obviously, 
leaks of grand jury information is a felony, right?
    Mr. Shapley. Leaking an investigative information including 
6103 would be felony, yes.
    Mr. Goldman. Well, that is true as well. So, would you 
agree that there would be some skepticism from any prosecutors 
about which of the agents may be the source of a leak?
    Chairman Comer. And the gentleman's time has expired, but 
feel free to answer the question.
    Mr. Shapley. Oh. Since there have been multiple leaks in 
this investigation and the one on December 8 or December 9, 
2020 that appeared to have come from someone, as Lesley Wolf 
stated, were----
    Mr. Goldman. I was just asking about October 6, 2022.
    Mr. Shapley. So, you know, I would have to----
    Mr. Goldman. It would cause anyone suspicion, right?
    Mr. Shapley. If it says it comes from an agent level?
    Mr. Goldman. Yes, that is what you said.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman's time has expired. You are 
the next questioner after, Mr. Fallon, from Texas for 5 
minutes.
    Mr. Fallon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am, you know, we are 
just talking about obfuscating and diverting and distracting 
and spin and a whole lot of word vomit from the other side of 
the aisle. It makes no sense as to what we are here for today. 
And you hear a lot of Trump, Trump, Trump, Rudy Giuliani, 
Giuliani, Giuliani. We are not talking about either of those 
gentlemen today. I want to thank both the witnesses for being 
here. I think it has been established that you are very 
credible, you are very experienced, you are subject matter 
experts at what you do.
    Mr. Shapley, you lead a team of 12 elite agents in this 
investigation. How long were you investigating the sportsmen, 
that Hunter Biden investigation. How long did you lead it for?
    Mr. Shapley. I started in January 2020.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. So, 2 to 3 years?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. You both, I am sure, are aware that one of 
Hunter Biden's lawyers has accused you of having axes to grind 
and that you are disgruntled agents. Mr. Shapley, are you a 
political activist?
    Mr. Shapley. I am not. No.
    Mr. Fallon. You are not. Mr. Ziegler, are you a part of the 
MAGA movement?
    Mr. Ziegler. I am not.
    Mr. Fallon. You are not. OK. Thank you. So, I have to ask a 
direct question and it is an important one. Are you two out to 
get Hunter Biden or are you out to get justice?
    Mr. Shapley. It is all about justice here and that is why, 
you know, a plea agreement, people asked me to comment about 
the plea agreement. It is just, you know, it is outside of my 
control.
    Mr. Fallon. Mr. Ziegler, justice or you want to get Hunter?
    Mr. Ziegler. It is justice.
    Mr. Fallon. Thank you. OK. So, the Ranking Member who was a 
rather skilled orator, bombastically claimed when he was 
speaking earlier, that this is all ``normal stuff, and there is 
no evidence that Hunter Biden received preferential 
treatment.'' So, Mr. Ziegler, do you agree with those 
statements? That this investigation was normal stuff, nothing 
out of the ordinary, and that Hunter Biden did not receive any 
preferential treatment?
    Mr. Ziegler. Based on my transcript, I would believe that 
that question would be incorrect.
    Mr. Fallon. Would it be fair to say that you vehemently 
disagree with those statements?
    Mr. Ziegler. I do not think it changes my perspective of 
it. All I can say is that we came forward with the information 
of slow walking, not following the investigative steps and----
    Mr. Fallon. So, it was out of the ordinary?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. Mr. Shapley, do you agree with those 
statements or disagree with them?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, this is out of the ordinary.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. So, when you read your transcribed 
interviews, which are pretty massive in and of themselves, it 
is clear that the levels of interference and roadblocks that 
the DOJ and other Federal Government personnel put in front of 
you was astounding, if not unprecedented., In these pages, I 
was literally shocked to see how an assistant U.S. Attorney 
stonewalled and scuttled your investigation.
    So, let us go back. It is December 2020. The prosecutorial 
team is meeting to discuss next steps. Hunter Biden has 
received millions of dollars in foreign payments, one of his 
shell companies, Wasco, to this day, no one can tell what the 
hell that ever did, other than accept money. So, nobody knows 
what services the companies ever provided, and it is December 
2020. Hunter is vacating a Wasco's D.C. offices, and he is 
moving those documents to a storage unit in Northern Virginia.
    Mr. Shapley, were you pretty interested in what some of 
those documents might reveal?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, we were.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. And maybe possibly could have shed light on 
criminal activity, felony, criminal activity?
    Mr. Shapley. Unfettered access to the documents there 
before defense counsel can filter them would have been very 
advantageous----
    Mr. Fallon. It could have been a treasure trove, we do not 
know. OK, because of what happened later. So, I am going to get 
that in a second. So, did you prepare an affidavit to search 
that storage unit?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I was the one that put on that.
    Mr. Fallon. Did U.S. Attorney Weiss agree that if the unit 
was not accessed for 30 days, then you could execute the 
warrant?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. So, now that in and of itself seems kind of 
weird though, doesn't it? To have to wait 30 days. How are you 
going to know if somebody accesses it? Is it going to be on a 
24-hour surveillance? Is it going to be a stakeout or are we 
going to have to call Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss, and 
have them there with the binoculars checking things out?
    Mr. Shapley. So it was not in the transcript, but this was 
a little bit unique location where it would have been easier 
than what you just described, see if it was accessed.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. But you did not have to wait for 30 days, 
did you? Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lesley Wolf, what did she do 
when she learned that you wanted to execute the search warrant 
on this storage unit?
    Mr. Shapley. So, she actually first approved and was saying 
that it is going to take approvals for us to get this done. But 
then came back a few days later and said, no, we are not going 
to move forward with this. And I was the one who proposed well, 
let us just wait 30 days, we will get the approvals, we will 
make sure that the storage unit is not accessed, and then we 
can move forward with the warrant. Her response was, I am going 
to think about it. And then, we come to find out a few days 
later that they had let defense counsel know that we know about 
the storage unit.
    Mr. Fallon. OK. In that case, so a U.S. Attorney tipped off 
the lawyers of a person who was a subject of a years-long 
criminal felony investigation. Is that what you are saying? Did 
Lesley Wolf tip off Hunter Biden's lawyers?
    Mr. Shapley. Regarding the storage unit.
    Mr. Fallon. That storage unit, that you guys had interest 
in the storage unit? Because once you know that, if you are the 
subject of criminal investigation, any of those documents that 
can incriminate, they are probably going to meet a match and 
some gasoline. So, that is astounding to me, that that is 
direct evidence clearly of preferential treatment, and that is 
not normal stuff. Is that normal?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I can tell you that that was actually my, 
kind of, red line situation a little bit different than how 
Shapley refers to it, but I did not think we had a seat at the 
table. It disappointed me so badly, but I knew this was 
something that we were up against and that it was like, OK, 
that is what they decided to do.
    Mr. Fallon. Have either of you ever seen anything like that 
before in your decades of experience?
    Chairman Comer. And the gentleman time has expired, but 
please feel free to answer the question.
    Mr. Shapley. No, I have not.
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not either.
    Mr. Fallon. Well, I want to thank you. I think you are both 
excellent public servants and you are courageous. And justice 
is the only thing I want to be blind, not our Democratic 
colleagues, not the legacy media, and certainly not top 
Administration officials. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Goldman from New 
York.
    Mr. Goldman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would love to get 
the extra minute that Mr. Fallon got as well. Thank you guys 
for being here today. We do not have a lot of time here. I have 
a lot of questions. If I cut you off, I am not trying to be 
rude, I am just trying to get through them. And I want to talk 
a little bit about the actual evidence you did have.
    Mr. Ziegler, you were the case agent. So how many documents 
would you say you gathered during the 5 year investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, however, I do believe I may have 
documents. I am limited by the statute, but I would be more 
than welcome to turn those documents over to the----
    Mr. Goldman. No, no, I do not need them. How many? Just the 
number?
    Mr. Ziegler. It was a significant amount of documents. I 
apologize.
    Mr. Goldman. Hundreds or thousands? Millions?
    Mr. Ziegler. I do not want to put a number to it, but there 
was a lot.
    Mr. Goldman. Bank records, right? You had a lot of bank 
records?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Mr. Goldman. Both domestic and foreign?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Goldman. And you conducted search warrants?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, there was reference in our transcripts to 
conducting electronic search warrants.
    Mr. Goldman. And did you do other search warrants as well?
    Mr. Ziegler. When you say, ``other search warrants,'' what 
do you mean?
    Mr. Goldman. Any other search warrants, electric, 
otherwise, physical?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I am going to stick to what I stated in my 
transcript. There were multiple electronic search warrants that 
we----
    Mr. Goldman. And you said that you conducted more than 60 
interviews as part of this investigation, is that right, in 
your----
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Goldman. That is a lot for any investigation, right, 
for a tax investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. I would not say that. I would say that----
    Mr. Goldman. Alright, in my 10 years, I do not know how 
many investigations I did with 60 interviews. So, I want to 
focus though, for a second, on the WhatsApp that we went 
through. And, Mr. Shapley, in your testimony, in your opening 
statement, you said that the text message, the WhatsApp message 
that we have been talking about shows Hunter Biden discussing 
business with his father. Could you show me where in the text 
message it says anything about discussing business with Joe 
Biden?
    Mr. Shapley. So, if you would like me to go through it, I 
mean, I can take time to review it, if you would like me to.
    Mr. Goldman. Well, I do not have the time, unfortunately, 
as you point out. I will tell you, the only thing that says 
about it is that Hunter Biden was sitting with his father. It 
does not say anything about discussing any business. And, Mr. 
Shapley, you also said in your testimony, and we talked about 
this a bunch, that the agents were prohibited from pursuing 
leads related to Joe Biden, and the big guy, but the agents did 
that anyway, right, investigating Rob Walker?
    Mr. Shapley. The agents that interviewed Rob Walker did not 
use----
    Mr. Goldman. And they asked him about that, right?
    Mr. Shapley. The word ``big''----
    Mr. Goldman. Right. They did not use the word ``big guy,'' 
but they asked about it in reference to that text. And do you 
recall that Rob Walker actually said in response to that, that 
he was not aware that Joe Biden was ever a part of anything 
that he and Hunter were doing?
    Mr. Shapley. That is what the witness said, yes.
    Mr. Goldman. Yes. And then you describe a lunch, we talked 
about earlier, where Joe Biden came to say hello at the Four 
Seasons Hotel to lunch that he was having with CEFC executives, 
right?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Goldman. But what you did not talk about is what Rob 
Walker said the origination of that lunch was, and you 
testified that Hunter told his dad, according to Rob Walker, 
``I may be trying to start a company or try to do something 
with these guys.'' Now, let me ask you something. That does not 
sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter Biden 
was doing with the CEFC if Hunter Biden is telling him that he 
is trying to do business with them, does it?
    Mr. Shapley. No, but it does show that he told his father 
he was trying to do business and he was talking to his father--
--
    Mr. Goldman. OK. Well, that is true. Hunter Biden does try 
to do business. That is correct. So, you not only have no 
direct evidence connecting Joe Biden to any of Hunter Biden's 
business deal, you actually had proof that he was not involved. 
That is the proof that you had. And in the end of the day, that 
this was a 5-year criminal investigation with tens of thousands 
of documents, maybe hundreds of thousands, unusual warrants, 
aggressive techniques. You wrote a report recommending felony 
charges. It went to DOJ Tax. They wrote a 99-page memo, 
approval memo, right, and neither of you saw that, did you?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Goldman. And what was their recommendation?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, all I know is----
    Mr. Goldman. Approval, discretion, or declination?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I have to stick to the confines of----
    Mr. Goldman. OK. You testified that it was discretion, 
which means that it was not an approval. It was to the 
discretion of the U.S. Attorney's Office, which had that DOJ 
Tax memo, which had information from the defense lawyers that 
they spoke with, and they are the ones who have to prove this 
case in court. And I will tell you as a Federal prosecutor for 
10 years, and I worked with many of your colleagues who do 
great work and I am sure you do great work as well, but I never 
met an agent who did not want to charge every possible case. 
But what I noticed in 5 hours of testimony today is that 
neither one of you has ever mentioned a portion of the case 
that may not be so strong or maybe suspect or may have a 
defense. And that is because that is what the prosecutor has to 
think about before charging a case, and that is not what the 
special agent report does.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman time has expired. You went a 
minute over. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Perry from 
Pennsylvania.
    Mr. Perry. I thank the Chairman. Mr. Shapley, if you can 
turn to page 30 of your transcript and I want to say that Mr. 
Shapley and Mr. Ziegler, we sure appreciate you coming forward. 
I think we have heard of alleged so called whistleblowers in 
the past, they could not reveal themselves. And it led to an 
improper impeachment of a president that was unjustified and 
unsubstantiated. So, I really do credit you. I think this has 
probably been very, very difficult and a hard choice for you 
make, but I think it was the right one, and I commend you for 
it.
    Mr. Shapley, page 30, your transcript. Let me see. Middle 
of the page, last sentence, second paragraph, starting with 
``every single day''. Every single day was a battle to do our 
jobs. Now I understand that in Congress, but you are following 
the letter of the law. You are taking in information. You are 
prescribed you do this, you do this, and you get that. That is 
a chilling line. What do you mean when you said that?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, every time when we tried to communicate 
investigative steps and get support for investigative steps, it 
was always slow-walked, it was always pushed off that we needed 
a PINS--DOJ Public Integrities approval--or DOJ OEO's approval, 
and it was just used as a crutch. The process was really used 
to stall the investigation. And, you know, ultimately, as you 
know, these which some people seem to be overlooking is that 
these prosecutors agreed with these charges.
    Mr. Perry. And you finally reached your red line. You said 
previous in answer to Mr. Fallon's question, you were seeking 
justice, I believe you were. I do not think you were picking 
winners and losers. You are just seeking to see who is 
following the rules. You finally reached your red line, October 
7 of 2022 at the meeting with U.S. Attorney Weiss. Is that a 
reasonable characterization?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Perry. And what did you mean when you say you reached 
your red line?
    Mr. Shapley. So, throughout the investigation, starting in 
the summer of 2020, my case agents were coming to me with 
certain concerns, and because we were worried about the 
discovery process, with agents turning over documents at the 
end of the investigation, we want to protect that 
investigation. So, I documented them on a recurring basis, 
issues that we are having, and it was after discussions with my 
agents. I also saw these things firsthand, so we got to the 
point where it is a heavy burden. Like, I have a very deep 
respect for the Department of Justice, and AUSA, and U.S. 
Attorneys I have worked within the past, and I just could not--
to ultimately conclude that they were doing the wrong thing was 
just such a high burden.
    Mr. Perry. Yes, you concluded that. And, Mr. Ziegler, your 
red line, I think you said--I do not want to mischaracterize--a 
little later December 14, 2020, when AUSA Wolf tips off the 
Biden counsel about your plan to search the storage unit. Is 
that right or----
    Mr. Ziegler. Absolutely, because that storage unit, the 
method that we were planning to do was the least intrusive, it 
was a storage unit. We needed to get those records.
    Mr. Perry. And again, you were just seeking justice, right, 
seeking the truth?
    Mr. Ziegler. Absolutely.
    Mr. Perry. Truth is going to take you wherever it takes you 
to make decisions based on what you learned. Turning back to 
you, Mr. Shapley, what was your Agency's leadership's response 
when you tried to alert officials outside your chain of 
command?
    Mr. Shapley. So, most recently, when Special Agent Ziegler 
emailed the Commissioner, they basically threatened and 
intimidated Special Agent Ziegler that he had violated some 
type of law----
    Mr. Perry. Threatened and intimidated?
    Mr. Shapley [continuing]. And forced him, you know, this 
chain of command requirement did not meet the legal 
requirement.
    Mr. Perry. So, you are trying to seek justice, you are 
trying to seek the truth, and they are throwing an obstruction 
in front of you. They are obstructing you from doing it, aren't 
they?
    Mr. Shapley. So, my complaints for IRS criminal 
investigation and senior leadership is not necessarily for 
blocking this investigation. You know, I do believe that we 
raise things on a continual basis and they just stuck their 
head in the sand, and took no action. But in terms of the 
retaliation, that is when they first reared their head, and, 
you know, there is no doubt about it that after protective 
disclosures were made, that they took primitive personnel 
practices against me.
    Mr. Perry. Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler, have you ever been 
threatened before in an investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. I have not, and I have come to learn that that 
this 6(e) grand jury threat may have happened before to other 
people inside the IRS.
    Mr. Perry. Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. No, not from my own Agency. Not from the team.
    Mr. Perry. Yes. So, when my friends on the other side of 
the aisle say that Treasury has not retaliated against you, 
simply not true. There is a law of 5 USC 2303(b)(13), and they 
placed, unlawfully, you and your fellow supervisors under a gag 
order. Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler, my time has expired, but 
what we are talking about here is obstruction of justice. You 
were seeking justice and you were obstructed. It is against the 
law. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Moskowitz from Florida.
    Mr. Moskowitz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen, 
thank you for appearing today. Thank you for being a public 
servant, and there should be no retaliation against you as 
whistleblowers, unlike my colleagues that said nothing and 
supported President Trump when he retaliated and fired Vindman, 
and escorted him from the building for appearing in an 
investigation. That should not happen to you, but, of course, 
they said nothing, when it happened to other people.
    We have heard a lot about the Bidens, the Bidens, the Biden 
family, Biden associates, right? ``Bidens'' plural, the ``s'', 
what does the apostrophe mean? But not Joe Biden. Did not hear 
a lot about Joe Biden. Why? Because he did not do anything. It 
has nothing to do with him.
    You know, our colleagues talked about foreign countries, 
you know, foreign entities trying to make it all scary for the 
American people. Of course, President Trump got $5.4 million 
from the Chinese while he was President because they were 
leasing space in Trump Tower. He goes out and air kisses 
President Xi, totally perfect. Jared Kushner gets $2 billion 
from the Saudis even though he oversaw Mideast peace, totally 
kosher. Ivanka Trump, you know, she is doing business with the 
Chinese while she is working in the White House. Totally 
beautiful, right?
    Why do I bring that up? They want to say you have 
credibility. The problem is they have none. They have no 
credibility, and because you are here at their behest, their 
lack of credibility, questions your credibility, not because of 
you personally, but because of what they have done over the 
last several years.
    So, the Chairman says you are credible. You want to know 
actually what they feel about you, people like you who work in 
Government? I got pages of it. It goes on for years, but you 
know what? I will just read a couple of adjectives. Trump has 
called people like you, ``so-called whistleblowers,'' ``fake 
whistleblowers,'' ``partisan people,'' ``political hack jobs,'' 
``scams,'' ``frauds,'' ``traitors,'' ``coward,'' ``spies,'' 
``losers,'' ``clowns,'' ``thugs'' ``puppets,'' ``unelected 
bureaucrats,'' ``the swamp,'' and my favorite, ``the Deep 
State.''
    By the way, are you members of the Deep State? You are 
members of the Deep State? Did you stop paying? It is a 
rhetorical question. Did you stop paying your Deep State dues? 
You did not attend the latest Deep State meeting. Is that why 
you are not in the Deep State? I cannot tell when they want 
people like yourself to be in the Deep State, not in the Deep 
State, depending upon what the Deep State is saying. Again, it 
undermines their credibility. It undermines government. It 
undermines the Americans' trust in government. It undermines 
our institutions, and throughout all of this for years, 4 years 
of it, they said nothing. And now, you know, in an effort to 
own Hunter Biden, OK, they are assembling nude photos of him, 
right? Having some intern have to sit in a room and blow up 
these photos and put it on poster board and figure out, oh, 
which ones, are beyond the pale.
    Mr. Shapley, you said that the DOJ was slowing down the 
investigation, but some of that happened when President Trump 
was President. And I found it strange that when my colleague 
tried to ask both of you these questions about when your 
perceived slowness of this happened, you all struggled for a 
period of time to admit that it started under President Trump. 
Was President Trump directing that DOJ to slow down the 
investigation? He was not, just like President Biden is not 
now. So, if there are any perceived issues with DOJ, it is with 
DOJ. It is not with the President.
    Mr. Ziegler, you said no one is above the law regardless of 
political affiliation. Do you think the President's son-in-law, 
not as an IRS agent as a person, do you think the President's 
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who worked in the White House, could 
not get security clearance until the President made it happen, 
was put in charge of Mideast peace, and with no investment 
experience got $2 billion from the Saudis? You guys made a lot 
of noise today about $17 million, but what about $2 billion? Do 
you think he is a person that should be looked at? Sounds a 
little strange.
    Mr. Ziegler. Congressman, thank you for that question. 
Given the statute, I am limited to my testimony.
    Mr. Moskowitz. I understand. I got it. But think about it: 
$2 billion from a foreign country that he was put in charge of 
their policy while he worked in the White House. They got no 
questions about that. That is totally great, totally wonderful, 
right?
    You know, Joe Biden has been in Washington for almost 50 
years. We did not hear about Hunter just until, like, a couple 
of years ago. Why? Because it is a pay no attention to the man 
behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, right? Donald Trump 
is in so much trouble, and they cannot save him, but what they 
can do is they can spend taxpayer money and all the time while 
they control these hearings to convince the American people 
that somehow Joe Biden has done something wrong, but there is 
no evidence, none, zero, zilch, nada, zippo.
    And you know how I know that? Because they could not even 
bring up their own impeachment, they had to bury it in 
Committee. On immigration, not on this topic, right? There are 
Members of this Committee that filed articles on impeachment. 
Did not bring it up for a vote, buried it in Committee. Again, 
not on this topic, because there is no evidence on Joe Biden. 
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mrs. Boebert from 
Colorado.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you, 
gentlemen, for being here today. I appreciate you.
    Now, if Mr. Shapley or Mr. Zeigler, if you could each just 
quickly, maybe 20 seconds or less summarize, what did each of 
you find when you criminally investigated Hunter and Joe Biden 
particularly, as it relates to China?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, specifically related to China, there is 
CEFC, Hudson West III, State Energy HK. Yes, those are, I 
believe, the three entities in my transcript.
    Mrs. Boebert. Uh-huh. Mr. Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. So yes, I mean, I would just echo the same 
thing that is in my transcript.
    Mrs. Boebert. And so there is a Ye Jianming, a Chinese 
billionaire, and he is tied to a CCP intelligence gathering 
agency, and his company is CEFC. What is the connection between 
Hunter Biden and CEFC?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I am going to have to stick to the 
confines of my testimony. But what I can tell you is that there 
may be some documents that are responsive to that, and then I 
can turn those over the House Ways and Means Committee and then 
get those over----
    Mrs. Boebert. I welcome those, yes.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. If they would vote to get those 
released.
    Mrs. Boebert. Yes, we would love to get those in. And I see 
that Hunter Biden received more than $8 million in foreign 
payments, including $100,000 made from CEFC directly, $664,000 
from State Energy HK, as you mentioned, another Chinese 
company. And a $325,000 capital contribution made into Bohai 
Harvest, on Hunter's behalf, a Chinese equity investment fund. 
Were you shocked to find that the then-Vice President's son 
received all of these payments, particularly the ones from 
Chinese entities?
    Mr. Ziegler. Well, as I tried to state earlier, in this 
position you have to be nonpartisan. It is not a matter of 
shock. It is just you follow----
    Mrs. Boebert. Well, it is not the political position, not 
the party, but just the Vice President's son. So, I am not 
accusing you of a political bias here.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, it is just follow the evidence, see where 
the transactions are coming from, interview witnesses, and try 
to figure out what the purpose of those transfers of money were 
for.
    Mrs. Boebert. And Mr. Shapley in March 2017, Robinson 
Walker, LLC, received a $3 million wire from a Chinese company, 
State Energy HK Limited, which took place just 2 months after 
Joe Biden left office as Vice President. And I believe it was 
in your testimony that you said that it seemed that this would 
be getting into place--it was in a testimony that was said 
today--this would be being assembled before he left office and 
then just shortly after it came to fruition. So, can you 
quickly discuss the Robinson Walker connection to the Biden 
family?
    Mr. Shapley. So yes, I mean, I have to defer to Special 
Agent Ziegler.
    Mrs. Boebert. OK.
    Mr. Shapley. I do not think I spoke about the $3 million.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes. So, any of that information related to 
the $3 million, we can turn over the House Ways and Means 
Committee and they can vote to release that to you.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you. And I see that Hunter Biden and a 
Gongwen Dong, a CEFC associate, establish Hudson West III, LLC, 
and each owned 50 percent of the company. Between August 2017 
and October 2018, Hudson West III sent over $4 million to 
Hunter Biden and over $75,000 to James Biden, Hunter Biden's 
uncle. Now can you discuss these payments? Because my 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle are wondering what 
the apostrophe is when we are talking about the Bidens'. And it 
seems there are more Bidens right here who are receiving money.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, in an answer to his question regarding 
President Biden and in an answer to this question, any 
documents that we believe that we may have in our possession, 
we can turn over the House Ways and Means Committee, they can 
vote to release it to you guys.
    Mrs. Boebert. OK. I request that you release those to them. 
And then also we have the situation with Gal Luft that he was 
doing business with CEFC and I guess, that makes you a Chinese 
spy. So, I guess Hunter Biden is a Chinese spy according to 
their allegations, but do you have any information regarding 
Gal Luft that you could also turn over to the Ways and Means 
Committee?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, any information that I have in my case 
file at the direction of my attorney, we can turn over to the 
House Ways and Means Committee.
    Mrs. Boebert. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, 
gentlemen, for being here, your bravery, your courage for 
standing up. You know, we saw a lot of evidence today about 
millions of dollars being shuffled through these shell 
companies. We have seen delayed warrants to impact a 2020 
election, prosecutors instructed not to involve the big guy 
because optics. Well, the optics are very, very clear. Hunter 
Biden sold access to his father with an influence peddling 
scheme, which in my opinion, compromises the current President 
of the United States. The Biden family has never sold anything 
in their life, but their influence in Washington, DC, every 
business they have is monetizing their grift of the American 
people. Thank you for making that very clear today, gentlemen. 
I yield.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back. The Chair now 
recognizes Mrs. McClain from Michigan.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you guys for being here. I know it has 
been a long day, but we appreciate you, the American people 
appreciate you, to get some truth and honesty back in the 
American justice system, I think is great. So. thank you again. 
We have heard a lot of rhetoric today. And I just want to talk 
about it as much as we can just the facts, just stick to the 
facts.
    So, Mr. Shapley, in August 2020, your team obtained a July 
2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Zhao, a Chinese 
businessman, and I want to read a few lines from that message. 
I am sure you remember it, but I will just refresh your memory, 
and I quote: ``Z, please have the director call me, not James 
or Tony or Jim, have him call me tonight. I am sitting here 
with my father and we would like to understand why the 
commitment made has not been fulfilled. And Z, if I get a call 
or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zang or 
the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting 
next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever 
hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. 
And I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.'' 
That is a fact. I did not make that up. That is not my opinion. 
That is not rhetoric. This is a message from Hunter Biden's 
WhatsApp app, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. It is from a search warrant from Apple iCloud 
backup, yes.
    Mrs. McClain. From where? From whose phone? My phone, your 
phone?
    Mr. Shapley. It was from Hunter Biden.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. Thank you, sir. I did not mean to be 
disrespectful.
    Mr. Shapley. It was not from his phone, but it was from a 
Hunter Biden device.
    Mrs. McClain. Yes. OK. Thank you, but it was linked to 
Hunter Biden, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. Thank you. Now, Mr. Shapley, were the 
Bidens contemplating a deal with CEFC in July 2017 timeframe?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I would just have to stick to what was in 
my transcript. I do not know if I really described that.
    Mr. Ziegler. And then I think there, that is a portion of 
the WhatsApp message. However, I do believe there is a full 
chain that. If it is relevant, we can turn that over the House 
Ways and Means Committee, and they can decide to vote to 
release that to you.
    Mrs. McClain. That would be appreciated. I just wanted to 
give in my limited time just to set the stage. One person has 
come forward. Tony Bobulinski, I believe has alleged that the 
Bidens were contemplating a deal with CEFC even earlier than 
2017, and he has come forward and said that. Is Tony 
Bobulinski, the Tony referenced in the WhatsApp? I am trying to 
connect the dots.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I think we need to stick to the 
transcript, and I think in my testimony, I referenced Sino 
Hawk, the SinoHawk deal. And we know that that deal never went 
through, and that relates to CEFC in China.
    Mrs. McClain. OK. So, the Tony, that he is referencing it, 
do you believe that to be Tony Bobulinski?
    Mr. Zeigler. So, in my transcript I did not mention 
anything regarding Tony Bobulinski, but what I can do, again, 
is provide any information that I have related to him----
    Mrs. McClain. Please.
    Mr. Zeigler [continuing]. Over the House Ways and Means 
Committee.
    Mrs. McClain. Thank you so much. And then the reference to 
James. Is there a reference to James in there? Is that James 
Gilliar another Biden associate? We might have to get that one 
too.
    Mr. Zeigler. Again----
    Mrs. McClain. That is OK. And again, I think it is just 
critical that we stick to the facts and not my opinion. So, I 
appreciate the fact that you are only speaking with fact not on 
a partisan basis.
    Mr. Ziegler. Absolutely.
    Mrs. McClain. But if you could get those that would help 
because in another message, Zhao responds to the earlier 
message, ``Copy, I will call you on WhatsApp,'' and Hunter 
writes back, ``Oh, my friend. OK. My friend, I am sitting here 
waiting for the call with my father.'' Again, my concern is the 
ability to tell the truth, right? The cover up is always worse 
than the crime. How many times did we hear Joe Biden say, not 
involved, not involved, not involved, I have no idea. Yet, his 
son says he is sitting right there while he is making these 
alleged influence peddling. So, Mr. Shapley, what do these 
messages indicate to you? Can you comment on that?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I mean, they indicate that we needed to 
take additional investigative steps to find out what the facts 
and circumstances were of this WhatsApp message, and, just 
simply, it was not supported.
    Mrs. McClain. Can you explain to us what do you mean, it 
was not supported?
    Mr. Shapley. So Special Agent Ziegler, I mean----
    Mr. Zeigler. Yes, so as a normal part of a tax 
investigation, you want to understand why individuals are 
earning money. If someone is paid a significant amount of money 
in order for that to be income, not a gift, not a loan, you 
need to understand the substance to why that person is paying 
them. And that is why you need to--you need to understand the 
four corners of that transaction.
    Mrs. McClain. Sure. And that standard operating procedure 
that is usually held for normal members of society. I mean, 
that is standard operating procedure, but what you are telling 
me is you were not able to pursue that, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mrs. McClain. I am out of time. Thank you so much, Mr. 
Chairman, and thank you again.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair recognizes Mr. Burchett from 
Tennessee.
    Mr. Burchett. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Members, thank you 
all for being here.
    When I was younger man, our country was not going too well. 
And one night, it really culminated in something and I remember 
my daddy praying, said, at the blessing, he just said, Lord, 
please do not let us lose our country. That is the prayer I 
will be making tonight after hearing this testimony, because 
this just really it sickens me. And Mr. Ziegler, I know you are 
a man of faith. Mr. Shapley, I guess after tonight, maybe you 
are or you are not. I am not sure where it will drive you, but 
I will be remembering you all in my prayers. And, Mr. Ziegler, 
I appreciate you all's incredible courage. It takes a lot of 
guts to get up here and put your families and your spouses 
through all this garbage, and it is not right, and thank you 
all, sincerely.
    Mr. Ziegler. I appreciate that.
    Mr. Burchett. Yes, sir. Mr. Ziegler, it has also come to my 
attention that today after this hearing was already underway 
apparently, oppo research is circulating from ``Hunter Biden's 
legal team,'' suggestions that you had leaked SARS and other 
investigative information to someone who had released that 
information online. Is there a statement that you would like to 
make about whether you have leaked any investigative 
information to someone to reveal on the internet? And I am sure 
Hunter Biden's legal team is obviously watching right now and 
these dirtbags are trying to smear you through the press, and 
it is disgusting, and I would appreciate hearing a direct 
answer from you, brother.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, there are two parts to this. There was 
that release of that bank report, my name was listed in there. 
So, my name was out in the public as one of the IRS agents 
working this case. And that was maybe 2 or 3 years ago. So that 
came out, and then on top of that, me and my husband were in a 
report that is out on social media, on Twitter, by a person 
with the same last name that I have, who I have never met, I 
have never turned over information to, we just happened to have 
the same last name. OK?
    Mr. Burchett. Right.
    Mr. Ziegler. I was, for my sexuality, my sexual 
orientation--my husband was put out there like information 
related to me. So, it was in an effort to discredit me that I 
am this person working for the liberal side, and I must be a 
plant, and it was awful the things that they were saying about 
me. But I can tell you that I have never turned over any 
information regarding this case to anyone related to that Marco 
Polo report or someone with the same last name that I have.
    Mr. Burchett. Thank you, and I appreciate that, and I am 
sorry----
    Mr. Ziegler. Thank you so much, sir.
    Mr. Burchett [continuing]. You and your husband had to go 
through all that misery. Mr. Ziegler, also, how much do you 
think Hunter Biden's business associates received from the 
Burisma Board?
    Mr. Ziegler. I am going to need to refer to my transcripts. 
So, if you give me 2 seconds.
    Mr. Burchett. How about this? How about if I just help you 
out, $666,667. Does that sound about right?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, is that a monthly transfer?
    Mr. Burchett. I am not sure. Well, if it is a monthly 
transfer, I am in the wrong line of work.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, so Burisma paid to everyone involved $6.5 
million.
    Mr. Burchett. OK, OK. And when did Hunter leave the Burisma 
board?
    Mr. Ziegler. Can you hold on 1 second?
    Mr. Burchett. Sure.
    Mr. Ziegler. It is not in the confines of my transcript, so 
that would be something I would have to turn over----
    Mr. Burchett. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. To the House Ways and Means.
    Mr. Burchett. I would like to get that. Was the money you 
think received from Burisma sent directly to Hunter Biden in 
2014 and 2015?
    Mr. Ziegler. It was not. It was sent to an entity called 
Rosemont Seneca Bohai.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Why would they do that? And why would 
they send it to his business partner Devon Archer in all that?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I can talk about my normal experience. 
Hold on 1 second. So, I can provide this in an additional 
testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee to explain 
that.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. I would like to get that. Mr. Ziegler, 
also Rosemont Seneca Bohai, they did not do anything. They did 
not produce anything. Skinny Atlas, they did not obviously do 
anything. Wasco did not do anything. Hudson West III did not do 
anything. But are all these Hunter Biden affiliated companies? 
To the best of your recollection.
    Mr. Ziegler. I believe I referenced in my testimony that I 
knew of those.
    Mr. Burchett. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler. But I did not reference how I knew of them.
    Mr. Burchett. OK. Well, I guess and I should have directed 
that at Mr. Shapley, I believe. But my point is you are 
familiar with these companies. But have you ever been able to 
identify what the Bidens did here in the business of selling or 
what they did with these companies? Either one of you all? Mr. 
Shapley?
    Mr. Ziegler. The response to that, the reason why some of 
these payments were received, we can turn over as a part of an 
additional testimony of House Ways and Means----
    Mr. Burchett. Well, I guess my point is, I did not sell 
tough steaks or crappy ties. They sold influence, in my 
opinion, and I am out of time, Mr. Chairman, I apologize. I 
would like to close and say a buddy of mine, Rob DeLoach, 
texted me during all this and said, ``I hope you all get to the 
bottom of this, and I hope you all do something about it.'' So, 
that would be my wish for this Committee. Thank you guys so 
much. God bless you.
    Chairman Comer. That is the goal. Thank you. The Chair now 
recognize Mr. Fry for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Ziegler and Mr. 
Shapley, were you able to pursue this investigation in areas 
that may implicate the President's involvement in his family's 
businesses?
    Mr. Shapley. We were hindered from following that line of 
investigative steps.
    Mr. Fry. Would you echo that, Mr. Ziegler?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes. Specifically, in my testimony, I 
referenced the campaign.
    Mr. Fry. In 2020, President Biden--candidate Biden at the 
time--said during a debate, ``My son has not made any money in 
terms of this thing about, what are you talking about China? I 
have not had--the only guy who made money from China is this 
guy, Donald Trump. He is the only one. Nobody else has made any 
money from China.'' Mr. Ziegler, was the President telling the 
truth when he said that his son Hunter Biden had not made any 
money from China?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I do not know what the President at the 
time was thinking, but what I can tell you based on what I 
testified in my transcript, that he did earn money from China.
    Mr. Fry. Right. And in March 2023, just a couple months 
ago, the committee showed through bank records that Hunter 
Biden, the President's son, James Biden, Hallie Biden, all 
received money originating from China funneled through Robinson 
Walker, LLC, a company owned by Rob Walker, who is a well-known 
Biden associate. When presented with this evidence by a 
reporter the President said that is not true. Mr. Ziegler, is 
it true that the President's family received money originating 
from China, which was funneled through the Robinson Walker 
account?
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Fry. As it pertains to the Hunter Biden investigation, 
Mr. Shapley, you sat in on a meeting on October 7, 2022, with 
Mr. Weiss. You have testified to that. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mr. Fry. And later this year, on June 7, Mr. Weiss publicly 
stated in a letter to the Judiciary Committee, the following, 
``As the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted 
ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility 
for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges.'' That 
statement is dramatically inconsistent with your recollection 
of a meeting that happened in October 2022. Is that correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, in corroborated documentation of that 
meeting clearly shows that that is not accurate.
    Mr. Fry. How is that not accurate from your recollection of 
that meeting?
    Mr. Shapley. Because during that meeting, United States 
Attorney Weiss said that he was not deciding person, he said it 
right out, and he further went in the Department of Justice Tax 
Division had to approve any charges first to which, as of March 
16, 2023, we know that they had not approved anything yet. He 
further goes, he says the D.C. U.S. attorney had declined to 
allow charges to be brought there and that he requested special 
counsel authority around that time. It was denied and was told 
to follow the process. That process would lead him to another 
President Biden appointed U.S. Attorney in the central district 
of California. And he told us at that meeting on October 7, 
2022, that if California declined it, that he would have to 
request those special authority again.
    Mr. Fry. Right. So, during that meeting and in subsequent 
letters that Mr. Weiss produced to both Senator Graham and to 
the Judiciary Committee, he seems to corroborate that meeting 
or some of the facts from that meeting that maybe he did not 
have that authority, right?
    Mr. Shapley. So, yes, the second letter on June 30, clearly 
shows that he is saying that he has full authority, he has 
ultimate authority.
    Mr. Fry. Right.
    Mr. Shapley. He immediately goes in and says, but my 
authority is geographically limited. I do not understand how 
you can conclude any way from that statement in the June 30 
letter, that he has full authority.
    Mr. Fry. Correct.
    Mr. Shapley. It is just simply not accurate.
    Mr. Fry. Correct. And that was something that you saw early 
on or you all saw as a potential problem. Mr. Ziegler, if the 
U.S. Attorney Weiss could not gain special counsel authority, 
what options remained in bringing charges against Hunter Biden 
in California or in the District of Columbia?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I guess it would have been the special 
attorney authority that I have seen recently referenced. But I 
mean, essentially, when D.C. said no, and we know that D.C. 
said no. We were having conversations with our FBI counterparts 
of how do we bring in a special counsel into the situation? I 
think that, like, once we knew that there was going to be 
potential problems with going to President Biden appointees, 
with moving this case forward, we were actively trying to 
figure out how as agents do we get that to happen. And still, 
to this day, there is not a special counsel assigned to this 
investigation.
    Mr. Fry. Right. So, the approach was, and I got to go 
quickly here, but the approach was to go to D.C., with Matthew 
Graves, where he was not able to bring charges under a Biden 
appointee. He went to the Central District of California, Mr. 
Estrada, was not able to bring charges. So, to both of you, in 
conclusion, in relation to the U.S. Attorney's inability to 
obtain that special counsel authority and bring these cases in 
either California or D.C., do you agree with Attorney General 
Garland's testimony that, ``The United States Attorney Weiss 
has been advised that he has full authority to bring cases in 
other districts if he needs to do that?''
    Mr. Shapley. I do not believe that is accurate.
    Mr. Zeigler. And I think the key word there is, ``he has,'' 
and I do not think that that is accurate. And I think that that 
is refuted in the later letter by U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
    Mr. Fry. Thank you both. In conclusion, thank you both for 
being here for your bravery and testifying today. I know it has 
not been easy on you or your family, but the American people 
and this Committee appreciate the work that you do, that you 
continue to do, and the truth that you are shedding light on. 
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Edwards from North Carolina for 5 minutes.
    Mr. Edwards. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Ziegler, did you 
ever ask for access to Hunter Biden's laptop in your 
investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. I do recall asking for access, yes.
    Mr. Edwards. And were you granted that access?
    Mr. Zeigler. I do not believe that that is in the confines 
of my transcript. So, when we are talking about----
    Mr. Edwards. Did you look at the laptop?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I can jump in there because I documented a 
meeting where we had this discussion, and it was included in my 
House Ways and Means Committee transcript. And Special Agent 
Ziegler asked a multiple times that, you know, that he had 
certain pieces of certain downloads from the devices, but he 
did not have access to all of them, and that is when Lesley 
Wolf said that well that is because prosecutors decided not to 
give it to you all.
    Mr. Edwards. So, you effectively were denied access. Mr. 
Shapley, in your interview with the Ways and Means Committee, 
you stated the following regarding efforts to obtain a search 
warrant for, at the time, former Vice President Biden's guest 
house, we talked about the storage unit earlier. Let us talk 
about the guest house now, where Hunter Biden had been staying. 
And Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf's assessment of the 
situation regarding the likelihood of such a warrant being 
approved. There was more than enough probable cause for the 
physical search warrant there, but the question was whether 
``the juice was worth the squeeze,'' and I find this in quotes. 
She continued, ``That optics were a driving factor in the 
decision on whether to execute a search warrant.'' She said, 
``A lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the 
guest house of former Vice President Biden,'' but said that 
there is no way that we will get it approved. I will open this 
question to both of you. In the course of your distinguished 
careers at the IRS, has a DOJ official ever attempted to argue 
against the execution of a search warrant, while acknowledging 
that such a warrant being carried out would likely yield 
positive evidentiary results for the investigation? Mr. 
Shapley?
    Mr. Shapley. So, my response would be that argument would 
not be required, you know, it would be discussion with the 
investigators working with the prosecutors, and if you were on 
the same page, then you just simply, you know, would move on. 
And with the circumstances of probable cause being achieved and 
knowing evidence was there, I do not know how she could have 
not allowed us to execute that search warrant.
    Mr. Zeigler. And I mean, it goes further. And even to the 
storage unit, when you talk about access to something and you 
are relying now on them to turn the records over to you versus 
you having access to those records, they are not being 
potentially destroyed. I mean, there is a multitude of reasons 
why you would want to execute a search warrant.
    Mr. Edwards. Mr. Chair, I would just like to share some 
thoughts. This hearing is much like arguing with my wife. We 
start out on a topic and then we go in all kinds of different 
directions, and it seems like that is what I am hearing, at 
least from the other side, today. And I have heard over and 
over that President Biden has not been implicated or proven for 
any wrongdoing here, and I acknowledge that for now, and I know 
that it is the intent of this Oversight Committee to continue 
to look at the evidence that we have here.
    The issue at hand, however, is that it is Joe Biden's son 
that is the target of this and seems to have had preferential 
treatment on a number of levels. The investigators were denied 
access to the laptop, the Biden family was tipped off with the 
warrant on the storage unit, and the investigators were denied 
access to the guest house even knowing, or suspecting, that 
there was evidential or evidence in that, and that is what 
concerns the American people. That is the two-tier justice 
system that we see here. It is not that Joe Biden has been 
proven to do anything wrong yet. It is that Joe Biden's son has 
received preferential treatment through the Department of 
Justice.
    I think that is a shame, and I appreciate these gentlemen 
being here to share their brief story with the American people. 
I yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back. The Chair 
recognizes Mr. Langworthy from North Carolina--from New York. 
Buffalo, New York. I have been to his place, Buffalo, New York.
    Mr. Langworthy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to 
these two very brave whistleblowers for what has been a very 
grueling hearing today. And I am just very grateful, and for 
openly testifying in front of everyone, and this must be 
challenging despite your providing accurate and credible 
testimony, but that goes directly to my point. I think it is 
important to sum up a few things.
    So, I just want to ask you a series of questions to you, 
Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler. It is true that you provided 
testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Langworthy. And how long did each of your interviews 
last?
    Mr. Shapley. Around 7 hours.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, a little bit more than 6, 7 hours.
    Mr. Shapley. Six or 7 hours.
    Mr. Langworthy. OK. And when did those interviews occur?
    Mr. Shapley. Mine was late May.
    Mr. Ziegler. June 1.
    Mr. Langworthy. Of this year?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mr. Langworthy. Were Democratic staff present during your 
interviews and did they question you?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, they did.
    Mr. Ziegler. Democratic staff was present, and actually the 
Chairman Smith was present at my----
    Mr. Langworthy. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. Testimony.
    Mr. Langworthy. Did you give your testimony knowing that 
you could be criminally prosecuted if you lied to Congress?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I did.
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, I did.
    Mr. Langworthy. Now, how long has your testimony been 
public for the American people to read?
    Mr. Ziegler. For the last 3-plus weeks, probably.
    Mr. Shapley. Around, yes, 3 weeks.
    Mr. Langworthy. OK. And you have been questioned by both 
Republican and Democratic Members today, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mr. Ziegler. That is correct.
    Mr. Langworthy. OK. Now, given all that you have just told 
us you gave over 15 combine hours of testimony to the Ways and 
Means, hours of public testimony today, and these facts have 
been public now for weeks, and yet, not one single person has 
been able to contradict a single fact about your testimony. 
That is incredible because it is that impressive. And it speaks 
to your credibility, your attention to detail as investigators, 
and now as whistleblowers.
    The attacks you hear today are not actually because of your 
testimony. They are Democratic talking points meant to protect 
the Bidens just like the DOJ and the IRS. Your testimony speaks 
for itself. It is powerful, and I am so glad you are willing to 
voluntarily come in today. And that is why, Mr. Chairman, I am 
so pleased that you held this hearing today and show yet 
another example of why this Committee must continue this 
investigation into these matters. And I am proud to yield back.
    Chairman Comer. The gentleman yields back----
    Mr. Ziegler. Can I say something real quick regarding what 
he just----
    Chairman Comer. Yes.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, one of the topics that was brought up over 
here regarding the 99-page pros memo and then that there was 
discretion given in there. From what I understand discretion, 
there is also language that I have seen included in DOJ tax 
memos, that references the need to charge the felony, you have 
to charge the felony essentially. So, I would ask Congress, 
when Mr. Weiss comes to testify here, at that point in time, 
what did that memo say? In August, when he got it from his 
team, what did that memo say? Did it approve felony and 
misdemeanor charges, and then what happened to that after. That 
I think is crucial for you guys to understand.
    Mr. Langworthy. Thank you. I just got a little time. Mr. 
Shapley, do you have anything else that you would like to add?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, just to add on to that. The Department of 
Justice Tax Division has a policy called a major count policy 
and that basically mirrors what Special Agent Ziegler is 
saying. They actually teach it when they come out to speak to 
agents and provide training to agents. And that major count 
policy is that they have to charge a felony. They cannot just 
plead away the felony just to get out of a potential trial. 
They cannot just rely on charging a misdemeanor or giving 
someone a misdemeanor when there is felony charges on the 
table. And as we have said all along, we have shown all along, 
that these prosecutors agreed with multiple felonies and none 
of them were charged.
    Mr. Ziegler. And I have one more thing to add to that. And 
I go back to last spring. David Weiss is going to do the right 
thing. He is absolutely going to do the right thing. Let us 
hold off. We are moving forward. We get to August, and we get 
recommended approval for the felony and misdemeanor charges. So 
how do we end up where we are at today, and I just do not know.
    Chairman Comer. Gentleman, would you yield your last 30 
seconds?
    Mr. Langworthy. I would be glad to.
    Chairman Comer. And we were told the same thing about Mr. 
Weiss as well, so we share your disappointment. Mr. Ziegler, 
you said there were foreign documents related to this matter, 
related to the investigation?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes.
    Chairman Comer. Would you provide those documents to the 
Committee?
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes. I can provide those documents to Ways and 
Means Committee.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you.
    Mr. Ziegler. Like a normal process for obtaining----
    Chairman Comer. Right.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. Foreign documents, correspondent 
bank requests. So, you can actually request those corresponding 
wires, and that is a step that you can take----
    Chairman Comer. Very good.
    Mr. Ziegler [continuing]. In getting foreign money 
transfers.
    Chairman Comer. Would you also provide the full Rob Walker 
transcript?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I will consult with my attorney, and we 
will turn that over to the House Ways and Means Committee.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you. Thank you.
    Chairman Comer. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Burlison from 
Missouri.
    Mr. Burlison. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good news, I am the 
last one.
    Chairman Comer. Next to last.
    Mr. Burlison. Next to last. Oh, oh. So, I want to 
reiterate, thank you for your bravery, thank you for what you 
are doing. I think the American people should be pissed. They 
should be very angry about this. No one gets away with not 
paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes and having 
just blown over or been turned into a misdemeanor charge 
especially when you have other criminal activity involved.
    And it is funny, this hearing, no one denied the facts that 
he is guilty of this stuff, right? We all know he is guilty. I 
think the question at hand is, to what extent was his father 
aware? In a way, it is kind of like Schrodinger's cat. Either 
he was aware of what is going on and he knew what his son was 
doing, and he was involved, or he was not, and maybe he was 
completely clueless, absent-minded, whatever, unaware of what 
his family was doing, but one or the other is the truth. You 
cannot come to any other conclusion other than that. And the 
problem is, you were not able to determine or lift that box, 
the Schrodinger's cat box, and determine is the cat dead or 
not, was Joe Biden truly involved or not?
    So, Mr. Shapley or Mr. Ziegler, throughout the 
investigation, what investigative steps that would have 
involved Joe Biden, would you have liked to have pursued but 
were unable to?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I guess in my testimony, I talked about 
the atmosphere when we were interviewing witnesses, and talking 
about specific areas or specific, being the campaign, that we 
were prevented, there was rolling eyes at us. I mean, it was a 
very harsh environment to be in.
    Mr. Burlison. And you were directly turned down, as well.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, there were situations to where I was not 
able to ask certain questions, yes.
    Mr. Burlison. So, you were not able to lift the box and 
find out what is underneath?
    Mr. Ziegler. In our investigation, you want to follow the 
facts. That is a part of our job is you follow the evidence, 
and you work the case.
    Mr. Burlison. So, I know that it was tipped off about the 
storage unit before you were able to actually search it. Can 
you say what you were looking for, what evidence, because you 
have built up to this point and then now, you know there is 
strong indication that there is something there.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I believe in Gary's testimony, there was 
that he moved his prior office, so he being Hunter, moved his 
prior office into that storage unit.
    Mr. Burlison. And so, this was computers, files----
    Mr. Ziegler. I do not know specifically what would have 
been in there.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. Besides any tax crimes or violations, 
what other violations were being investigated by any other 
agencies?
    Mr. Ziegler. So those are not in the confines of our 
testimony, what other charges are being investigated, any 
offshoots, but----
    Mr. Burlison. Were there other agencies that were working 
with you that were working on other----
    Mr. Ziegler. Yes, FBI was working this case with us.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. But you cannot speak to whether there was 
a Foreign Agents Registration Act or----
    Mr. Ziegler. I cannot speak to that.
    Mr. Burlison. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler. But what I can tell you is, not only do we 
investigate tax crimes, but we also investigate money 
laundering. So, any instances of money laundering, us as IRS 
agents, we are allowed to investigate those crimes.
    Mr. Burlison. OK.
    Mr. Shapley. So, Mr. Congressman, if I can add. So, in my 
transcript, I do say that there is a FARA issue at play during 
the investigation.
    Mr. Burlison. OK. So, there was a FARA issue, a Foreign 
Agents Registration Act issue, and has that been pursued?
    Mr. Ziegler. We are not a part of the investigation 
anymore, and, I mean, that is our whole point of a special 
counsel. If there is these offshoot investigations, we were 
going to just rely on the same thing to happen.
    Mr. Burlison. In your investigations, you knew that there 
was foreign bank accounts, foreign money wires. Are you aware 
if the Biden family has or they own foreign bank accounts, and 
do you have the ability to get access to those?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, any records that I would have related to 
that, I can turn over to the House Ways and Means Committee, 
and then they could vote to release that.
    Mr. Burlison. Thank you, thank you. I yield back the 
remainder of my time.
    Chairman Comer. Were you all ever given access to the Form 
1023 that alleged Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were a part of a 
bribery scheme with Ukraine? The reason I ask that is because 
that allegation is consistent. The way that the oligarch claims 
he gave the Bidens the bribe is consistent with what we have 
seen in Romania and other countries where they set up all these 
shell companies, and then they launder the money through their 
shell companies back down to different Biden family members. 
So, I wondered if you knew about that form before it became 
public?
    Mr. Shapley. So, I can speak to that. So, in my original 
transcript, I would not have been able to say that I knew 
anything about 1023, but I provided a supplement after I saw 
open-source information from the former Attorney General Bill 
Barr. He said that he saw this document and they sent it to 
Delaware for further investigation. And the team, to the best 
of my knowledge, never saw that document.
    Chairman Comer. So, the team that was in charge of 
investigating the Biden family for tax crimes never received 
the FBI document that alleged Joe Biden was involved in a 
bribery scheme?
    Mr. Shapley. For the IRS investigators on the case, the 
answer is no.
    Chairman Comer. Is that odd? I mean, everybody knew you 
were investigating the Bidens for at least tax evasion.
    Mr. Shapley. Generally speaking, if there are any types of 
money coming in, and there is a criminal tax investigation 
ongoing, I do not see how that information can be withheld from 
the investigators.
    Mr. Ziegler. And I can tell you and I can provide this in 
my testimony, but, like, there are things that are contained on 
that document that could further corroborate other information 
that we might be having an issue corroborating because it could 
be regarding a foreign official. So, if we have information 
regarding that in a document or a witness, we can further 
corroborate later evidence. And like I said, if that is 
something that we have, we can turn that over to the House Ways 
and Means Committee.
    Chairman Comer. Thank you, thank you. The Chair recognizes 
Mrs. Luna from Florida.
    Mrs. Luna. Mr. Shapley, did the FBI first learned of the 
Delaware computer shop processing a laptop that allegedly 
belonged to Hunter Biden and contained evidence of potential 
crimes in October 2019?
    Mr. Shapley. Did the FBI first learn of it?
    Mrs. Luna. Yes.
    Mr. Shapley. I do not know if I speak about who first 
learned of it.
    Mrs. Luna. OK. The answer would be yes. But thank you. And 
isn't it true that the FBI verified the laptop's authenticity 
in November 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter 
Biden's iCloud accounts?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, I believe that is in my transcript. That 
is accurate.
    Mrs. Luna. Correct. Transcript 12. The FBI analyzed the 
computer, correct? There was a report that the FBI CART team 
analysis had taken place?
    Mr. Shapley. Can you point to just a page on my transcript 
so that----
    Mrs. Luna. Page 12.
    Mr. Shapley. OK. Page 12.
    Mrs. Luna. Or Transcript 12.
    Mr. Shapley. So, could you repeat the question, please?
    Mrs. Luna. Isn't it true that the FBI verified the laptop's 
authenticity in November 2019, by matching the device number 
against Hunter Biden's iCloud account?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes, that is correct.
    Mrs. Luna. OK. And they performed an FBI CART team 
analysis?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mrs. Luna. Mr. Ziegler, did you see this report?
    Mr. Ziegler. I do not think that I talked about that in my 
transcripts.
    Mrs. Luna. Correct. I am assuming that that was probably 
very frustrating being that you were conducting an 
investigation.
    Mr. Shapley. So, I can speak to this again, because I did 
contemporaneously document a long meeting about the laptop.
    Mrs. Luna. Uh-huh.
    Mr. Shapley. And Special Agent Ziegler confirmed and it was 
released to House Ways and Means Committee testimony that he 
pointed out individual pieces of data that he was provided. And 
then he asked why he had not seen other pieces of data. And 
that is when Assistant United States Attorney Wolf told them 
that prosecutors were withholding information from the 
investigators.
    Mr. Ziegler. And I think what is important with 
withholding, they never said what they were withholding. So, I 
think that is, like, important.
    Mrs. Luna. So, to my understanding, the U.S. Attorney said 
that you have not seen it because for a variety of reasons they 
kept it from the agents. So, they kept this information from 
you, I think this is important to know, correct?
    Mr. Shapley. That is correct.
    Mrs. Luna. OK. Isn't it relevant evidence for you and your 
team to review, Mr. Ziegler, that these types of evidence would 
help you to conduct your investigation.
    Mr. Ziegler. So, in an everyday normal investigation, you 
would want to know, you are the investigators, we are the ones 
that are supposed to process the information and provide the 
relevant information to the prosecutors. So, we should know 
absolutely everything that we are looking at because we might 
testify to it 1 day.
    Mrs. Luna. So, it is safe to say that it is not a normal 
practice to withhold evidence from agents reviewing the case?
    Mr. Ziegler. It is not a normal practice to withhold and 
not tell us what you are withholding from us.
    Mrs. Luna. Do you know who made that decision to withhold 
information from the agents?
    Mr. Ziegler. That I do not know.
    Mrs. Luna. OK.
    Mr. Ziegler. And it is not in my transcript.
    Mrs. Luna. OK. Mr. Shapley, you and your team are learning 
about the existence of this information, and you are being 
denied information at the same time. And this is October 2020, 
correct, timeframe?
    Mr. Shapley. Yes.
    Mrs. Luna. At that same time, did you remember Hunter 
Biden's laptop being discussed or rather suppressed by the 
media?
    Mr. Shapley. I generally remember the discussion of a 
laptop. I think everybody heard about the laptop. I do not know 
if I knew about the media suppressing it.
    Mrs. Luna. So, I think it is important to note that the FBI 
learns about the laptop in 2019. That is 2019, not 2020. And, 
in fact, the FBI authenticated the laptop in November 2019, 
then takes possession of the laptop, does analysis, but these 
analysis and information are not provided to you guys, the IRS 
agents conducting the case. Mind you, the folks running the 
nuts and bolts of the criminal tax fraud case. They are 
learning about all this information, and yet, at the same time, 
being denied access to it. Meanwhile, the media is actively 
working to suppress that. And at the same time, 51 national 
security officials signed on to a letter saying that the FBI 
has authenticated saying that it is Russian disinformation.
    This is, mind you, Joe Biden's son, which I think it is 
important to note that many of my colleagues tried to make this 
about race and saying that there is a two-tiered justice system 
for Black and Brown people. And yet we are investigating, 
according to their terms, a man of White privilege, who is 
being aided and abetted by this Administration and being 
criminally covered for by the Department of Justice, and yet 
somehow that is not supposed to be a topic of discussion.
    I have 41 seconds left. Would you guys like to say anything 
for the record so the American people can know what is really 
happening in this country?
    Mr. Ziegler. So, I do have something. So, there are two 
things. I believe that AUSA Lesley Wolf and U.S. Attorney David 
Weiss would say phenomenal things about my work, and I know 
they have said that. They have said that we did a great job in 
this investigation. I want to make that clear to everyone that 
we are not disgruntled. We are not out here to get people. We 
are here for accountability and that we learn from this. That 
is the most important part of why we are here.
    Mrs. Luna. Well, you are doing great, and I know that you 
are not conservative. I know you are not Republican, but I will 
say this. Thank you for at least bringing faith back to some 
part of the IRS so that people understand that just because 
your last name is Biden does not mean that you are held above 
the law. So, thank you. Chairman, I yield my time.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back, and that 
concludes our questions.
    Again, I want to thank you all for being here. I am going 
to yield to the much-improved Ranking Member, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez 
from New York, for a closing statement.
    Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. I will take the gold star. Thank you, 
Chairman, and I would like to thank our witnesses here today. 
Once again, we acknowledge fully that this is not easy and that 
your public service here is respected and acknowledged and 
valued, so thank you. Thank you for your testimony.
    You know, I think it is important for us to summarize much 
of what we heard and saw today, and overall, what this matter 
is about. A U.S. Attorney, handpicked by Attorney General Barr, 
has for 4 years investigated together with a dozen agents and 
at least four prosecutors from his office and the Tax Division 
of the Department of Justice, the son of President Biden. 
Hunter Biden has been charged with a felony and two 
misdemeanors, and he is pleading guilty to several crimes and 
submitting to sentencing by a Trump-appointed judge. However, 
we are also seeing today is an effort to find some issue with 
this prosecution, this existing prosecution, this is a person 
who has admitted to crime and finding evidence of political 
interference, a very serious charge.
    So, much of what we saw today honed in on a conversation, 
the testimony honed in on a conversation that one of today's 
witnesses was involved in, in which Mr. Shapley heard Mr. Weiss 
to say that he was denied special counsel status. That account 
had been contradicted by the U.S. Attorney Weiss, who has 
reiterated several times that he had full authority to bring 
any charges in any district and had received assurances from 
the Department of Justice that if he needed special attorney 
status, not counsel, but rather attorney status to bring those 
charges, it would be granted. So, we are left here with two 
possible options for this story, that either Mr. Weiss, who was 
appointed by President Donald J. Trump and trusted by Attorney 
General Barr, also serving under Trump, was lying to protect 
the Biden Administration, or he respectfully disagreed with the 
charges that today's two witnesses wanted to bring as 
professionals in their professional opinion.
    Disagreement over charges is not uncommon. The IRS Criminal 
Tax Counsel attorneys have disagreed in charging decisions, as 
we heard here today, 90 percent of the time, and in this 
particular case, reviewing attorneys at IRS and the Tax 
Division raised issues with the proposed charges. And the 
witnesses described how Mr. Weiss expressed some concerns about 
the charges. In fact, in some of the testimony, we saw Mr. 
Shapley recognized with regard to at least one of the charges 
which he himself recommended he could, ``see some issues with 
that, that would preclude it from being charged.''
    Now, I understand why the two witnesses, who testified here 
today, are disappointed after 5 years of investigation. I 
believe you all are honorable serving professionals, truly, and 
that Mr. Weiss disagreed with this analysis of facts. There was 
absolutely frustration that to not ``have a seat at the 
table'', that Mr. Weiss made his decision about how to charge 
in this case, and he did charge, and that was a decision that 
he, as the U.S. Attorney, in charge of the case, was empowered 
to make. The question though, I believe that is very important 
to address is, why we are holding these hearings today despite 
what we have seen as deliberate lobbying for this hearing by a 
political candidate, Donald J. Trump?
    What we also saw today was the revival of certain 
conspiracy theories around Ukraine, first promoted by Rudy 
Giuliani during Trump's first impeachment in 2019 and his 
reelection campaign. We did not bring that up. That was first 
brought up by the Republican side that required addressing here 
today. Chairman Comer started this hearing by asking these 
witnesses about Burisma and other Members of the Committee 
again raised the specter of these debunked conspiracy theories. 
It has been debunked time and time again, including by Trump's 
own Department of Justice.
    But that being said, this is the problem with bringing 
these conspiracy theories into this Committee. They beget more. 
It does not stop, and today we have gotten a new conspiracy 
theory, one that requires us to believe that David Weiss, a 
Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney, trusted by Trump-appointed 
Attorney General Barr, has somehow been complicit in abetting 
and concealing a Deep State conspiracy to protect Hunter Biden 
on behalf of the Biden Administration when they were selected 
by Donald Trump. This is a theory which has apparently been 
proven unsuccessful, given that Hunter Biden is now criminally 
charged and facing sentencing by a Trump-appointed judge.
    Today also marked a new low when pornographic images were 
paraded in this hearing room. Chairman Comer, last October, you 
told Time Magazine that you were not interested in the sordid 
details of Hunter Biden's life. You were quoted as saying, 
``That is counter to a credible investigation,'' and I agree. 
Sadly, that is a reflection of how low some individuals here 
have been willing to go in their efforts to attack the 
President and his family, and, frankly, I do not care who you 
are in this country. No one deserves that. It is abuse. It is 
abusive.
    If Republicans truly want to get to the facts here and they 
want to understand why Mr. Weiss decided to charge Hunter Biden 
the way he did, let us hear from Mr. Weiss. But until then, we 
must move on from these theories and focus on the issues that 
matter to the American people, like ending the scourge of gun 
violence that is plaguing our country, confronting and 
combating the climate crisis, and standing up for our 
constitutional rights, and yes, going after the enormous amount 
of inequity and injustice in our tax system. And with that, I 
yield back to the Chair.
    Chairman Comer. The gentlelady yields back. Before I close, 
I want to ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record 
three letters from myself, Judiciary Chair Jordan, and Ways and 
Means Chair Smith to the Secret Service Director of the IRS and 
the Attorney General requesting more information pertaining to 
our investigation.
    Without objection, so ordered.
    Chairman Comer. As well as enter into the record the two 
bank memorandums that we have already submitted to our friends 
in the media that we are trying to teach financial literacy, 
too. I would love to enter those two memorandums into the 
record.
    Chairman Comer. Again, I want to thank you all so much for 
what you have done today. I cannot imagine what you have been 
through. I apologize for what you have been through. This is 
what this Committee is all about.
    The mission for the House Oversight Committee is to 
identify and root out waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in 
the Federal Government. To do that, we depend on whistleblowers 
coming forward and telling their story, and that is what you 
all have done. And to think that there are people on the 
Committee who have tried to question your credibility, it is 
pretty low mark for the history of the House Oversight 
Committee. So again, thank you.
    And what we learned today, let us go back 6 months, when 
this investigation started, when we became the Majority. The 
laptop, according to many of my colleagues on the other side of 
the aisle and many of our friends in the media, was Russian 
disinformation. And what we now know is the laptop contains 
many of the financial records, the financial documents, the 
communications between both the President as well as other 
members of his family with many of these associates, with many 
of these foreign nationals.
    So, there is a clear path of evidence. I say that 
investigating the Biden family influence peddling is like 
investigating a bleeding bear through a snowstorm. There is so 
much evidence laying around. We have confirmed today what we 
have been saying in this Committee for several months that the 
Bidens took in over $10 million--$17.3 million to be exact--
from adversaries. We have no earthly idea of what they did to 
receive that money. I think that is concerning to every 
American. We have evidence that Hunter Biden spoke to his 
father about his businesses and that Hunter used his father's 
name to shake down the Chinese Communist Party-backed person. 
We saw that in the WhatsApp message that you all released, we 
have seen that in other emails and correspondence from the 
laptop. We learned, unfortunately, these brave and credible 
whistleblowers had been retaliated against at the IRS and 
intimidated by the Biden shady legal team and their lapdogs in 
the press, and for that, I apologize, and I hope that that does 
not deter other brave and credible whistleblowers from coming 
forward.
    All roads lead to Joe Biden, the big guy, the guy who was 
set to go in business with the Chinese Communist Party-linked 
entity that wired money to the Biden family, as well as to Gal 
Luft, who was mentioned earlier by one of my colleagues on the 
other side of the aisle. Joe Biden was even set to share office 
space, according to an email, with this Chinese Communist 
Party-backed entity, and that is a concern. That should be a 
concern to every American because whether you are Republican or 
Democrat, whether you are rural or urban, one thing that we can 
agree on is that Americans detest public corruption. That is 
why we have an IRS. That is why we have an IRS Criminal 
Division. That is why we have an Oversight Committee. That is 
why we have an Ethics Committee. That is why we are supposed to 
have a judicial system in America that provides equal justice 
for all. But we have to work together, and we have to be 
honest, and we have to respect our checks and balances.
    And what we learned today, as troubling as anything, is 
that your investigation that you spent years of your life on, 
that we have spent 6 months investigating, where you see a 
pattern of suspicious activity, where money flows from shady 
foreign companies and from shady foreign nationals through 
shell companies that are then laundered. And that is according 
to six different banks in the suspicious activity reports, 
laundered down in incremental payments to the Biden family, for 
things that we have no idea what they did to receive the money.
    And as part of that years long investigation, the FBI is 
sitting on the whole time a document that alleges Joe Biden and 
Hunter Biden took a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch, 
where there are bank records that show that the Bidens were 
receiving money from this entity. There was already evidence 
there to show that. Now, I do not know whether that allegation 
is true or not. I know the FBI never investigated it. And what 
we know from today, they never communicated with the IRS 
Criminal Division that spent years investigating this. So, 
there are two things that is happening here with the Oversight 
Committee with respect to the President of the United States: 
there is the investigation of the Biden corruption and there is 
the investigation of the cover-up.
    Again, I want to thank you all for the work that you have 
done over the years. We appreciate that. The American people 
appreciate that. The taxpayers appreciate that. And we look 
forward to receiving the additional information through the 
Ways and Means Committee through the proper process as we 
continue our investigation.
    With that and without objection, all Members will have 5 
legislative days within which to submit materials and to submit 
additional written questions for the witnesses, which will be 
forwarded to the witnesses for their response.
    Chairman Comer. If there is no further business, without 
objection, the Committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 7:04 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

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