Earlier this year, a pair of Internal Revenue Service agents involved in the years-long federal investigation of Hunter Biden came forward to Congress to expose alleged preferential treatment for the president's son and interference in that probe by senior Justice Department officials.
Now, Hunter Biden's attorneys have filed a lawsuit against the IRS with claims that its employees violated his privacy rights by improperly disclosing confidential personal financial information, Breitbart reported.
Coinciding with that lawsuit are indications that Special Counsel David Weiss could soon issue a federal criminal indictment against the president's son over his alleged tax crimes.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that Biden's attorneys filed a lawsuit against the IRS in relation to the information that IRS agents secretly shared as whistleblowers in sworn testimony to Congress that has since been made public by the relevant congressional committee.
The attorneys claimed that while Biden had "all the same responsibilities as any other American citizen," he simultaneously "has no fewer or lesser rights than any other American citizen, and no government agency or government agent has free rein to violate his rights simply because of who he is."
Taking specific aim at IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley, who has spoken in numerous interviews after Congress made his secret testimony public, and another whistleblower, the lawsuit stated, "This assault on Mr. Biden’s rights involved the public disclosure of his confidential tax information during more than 20 nationally televised and non-congressionally sanctioned interviews and numerous public statements."
The whistleblowers' disclosures "detailed allegations regarding the specific tax years under investigation, the amounts of deductions, the nature of those deductions, and allegations of liability regarding specific tax years and the amount thereof, that could only be known to them based on a review of the physical tax returns themselves."
In June, the House Ways and Means Committee under Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) voted to publicly release the sworn testimony of Shapley and another IRS whistleblower who had been involved in the years-long federal investigation of Hunter Biden under then-U.S. Attorney Weiss.
The testimony revealed allegations of preferential treatment for Biden, which included allowing the statute of limitations to expire on certain tax crimes, tipping off Biden's attorneys about planned investigatory actions, and blocking Weiss from pursuing serious charges in Delaware and other jurisdictions, as well as retaliation against the whistleblowers for raising concerns with superiors prior to seeking whistleblower protections from Congress, among other things.
The Post noted that in response to the Biden lawsuit, attorneys for Shapley dismissed it as "another frivolous smear" and insisted that the agent followed all of the rules to properly disclose what he knew to Congress as a whistleblower.
The attorneys further stated that neither they nor Shapley ever improperly disclosed "any confidential taxpayer information except through whistleblower disclosures authorized by statute. Once Congress released that testimony, like every American citizen, he has a right to discuss that public information."
The Post pointed out that the IRS itself declined to respond immediately to a request for comment on the Biden lawsuit against it.
Meanwhile, buried near the end of that report from The Post was the revelation that "Special counsel David Weiss might soon file a new indictment against Hunter Biden in another federal court -- potentially in California -- over alleged tax crimes that the agents say they found in reviewing his finances from 2014 to 2019."
That comes following the prior collapse of a proposed plea agreement on a pair of previously charged misdemeanor tax crimes in Delaware that have since been withdrawn, as well as the recent filing of a trio of federal felony firearms charges that would have been dismissed in a diversionary agreement if the scuttled plea deal had been approved.
