US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) special agent Joseph Ziegler and his supervisor, Gary Shapley, testified before Congress on Thursday, revealing Ziegler was the previously-anonymous IRS whistleblower who claimed last month that his superiors and the Department of Justice were protecting US President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
According to Ziegler, his superiors dismissed findings pointing to corruption within the Biden family in connection to business deals in China, Ukraine, and Romania that seemingly implicated US President Joe Biden. He claimed that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss “slow-walked” the investigation forward, delaying a search warrant until after the November 2020 election and then quietly burying it.
During the Thursday hearing by the House Ways and Means Committee, Republicans tried to tease apart perceived inconsistencies in Weiss’ story relating to his claims not to have the power to pursue the investigation further, and they tried to highlight facts they said would buttress their effort to impeach Attorney General Merrick Garland for intentionally misleading Congress about the Hunter Biden probe. Democrats, meanwhile, tried to dismiss the whistleblowers’ concerns, saying their testimony actually proved that the Bidens had been rigorously investigated.
Now, some Republicans are demanding Biden be impeached, although the effort has been maligned by the party’s mainstream.
Scott Stantis, a cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, creator of the comic strip Prickly City, and the winner of the Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Award, told Sputnik that the testimony was “weak tea” compared to what Republicans were hoping for, but not worth the dismissal it was given by Democrats, either.
Stantis said he thought the amount of money involved in the allegations should turn Americans’ heads, but that the complexity of the finances involved were instead making their heads spin.
“The fact is, these are complicated finances and you have to put this in a much clearer perspective.[…] But this was a drugged-out son of an influential American being handed huge, lottery-winning [sized] cheques. It’s not hard to, you know, I’m sorry to do math again, but one and one does equal two here. At least you have to look into it. ”
Stantis said he thought the IRS investigators were being truthful in their allegations and their concerns, which Democrats on the committee, such as Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), attempted to dismiss as mischaracterizing the investigation.
“Well, there’s always a chance [that the IRS investigators were making it up], but watching their testimony and hearing how they both stuck to the story – and frankly, look at the damage this can cause to their lives and will cause to their lives. So you don’t do this lightly and you don’t do it on a whim and you don’t make that kind of stuff up. I mean, sure, anything’s possible: the last ten years of politics have shown us that.
But are they straight-shooters? It sounds like they are. Did it sound to me a little bit like they were maybe – disgruntled is too harsh a word, but they’re investigators they investigate and they find stuff and they want to get the guy. And they felt that the plea deal that they struck with Hunter Biden was too weak and far short of the actual crimes they felt were committed. And they seemed sincere. They were obviously good witnesses. So, if I was Congressman Stantis of Alabama, I’d say, yeah, these guys are telling the truth.”
Steve Gill, an attorney and CEO of Gill Media who previously served as director of intergovernmental affairs for the US Trade Representative, told Sputnik that the coverup of the corruption was multifaceted and didn’t just include government institutions stonewalling any kind of probe, but also the media refusing to report on major facts in the case and elected officials creating impossible standards by which they would concede the validity of the concerns raised.
He noted that the FBI investigators failed to follow up on key leads, such as Hunter Biden mentioning “my dad” and “the big guy” in reference to a person sitting next to him in a meeting and who received a payout from a deal.
“You have government documents – not just not just Hunter’s emails, not just Hunter’s texts, but you have government federal officials who are referring to ‘a Hunter’ and his ‘dad’ and ‘the big guy’ and ‘10%’ – stuff that was not in the in the public media at the time that these references were being made. You know, the ‘10% to the big guy’ came out later,” he explained.
“So the federal officials had this information and as it moved up the food chain, there were approvals for prosecuting Hunter for this pattern of corruption and evading taxes and not reporting income and everything else. And yet it would hit a certain political appointee level, and then that’s where the walls would come up, that’s where the blockade would begin, on even inquiring any further into Joe Biden’s involvement and role. And then they cut this sweetheart deal to give him a complete pass.”
Gill noted that there had been “zero coverage by the mainstream network in media coverage on this.”
They’ll follow some rumor about President Trump or one of the Trump kids to the ends of the earth and report it and repeat it incessantly, and yet this goes into the black hole of non-coverage. It is part of the cover-up.
It’s not just the FBI, it’s not just the IRS, it’s not just the Department of Justice: it’s the mainstream media that is doing the cover-up game for the Bidens as well. And as he pointed out, these are detailed conversations. This is detailed information that is being buried by the folks at the Department of Justice and the Democrats on this panel keep interjecting their defense that, well, you know, essentially ‘you don’t have President Biden on tape saying I’m a crook.’ I have him on tape saying, ‘where’s my 10%?’ So there’s nothing here to look at.”
