There is building evidence that a prosecutor in charge of overseeing the Hunter Biden tax probe likely intervened in order to directly protect President Biden from “Department of Justice scrutiny.” Eileen O’Connor, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Tax Division, testified Thursday at the first House Oversight impeachment hearing explaining why U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf blocked campaign-finance inquiries.
National Review writes that O’Connor testified that Wolf’s behavior suggests she wanted to prevent the tax probe from escalating to the point that the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit would become involved, as that would place President Biden under direct scrutiny.
“If it’s a campaign contribution then it implicates political person number one,” O’Connor said. Biden was referred to as “Political Figure 1” in a redacted warrant obtained by the committee. O’Connor added that the $2 million was intended to cover Hunter’s liabilities surrounding late and unpaid taxes for two years.
“Agents follow the leads wherever they take them,” O’Connor said of normal investigation protocol. “In this case, a legitimate investigation was being done into the money that was being paid and the assistant U.S. attorney who was orchestrating the investigation to say ‘don’t look at that anymore.’ I think the reason is…she didn’t want to get public integrity involved and that tells us she was looking beyond Hunter Biden into a person whose activity would be subject to public integrity.”
National Review explains that Public integrity is a unit of the DOJ that deals with the investigation and prosecution of all federal crimes affecting government integrity, including bribery of public officials, election crimes, and other related offenses.
National Review breaks down how Wolf prevented a probe into Joe Biden by blocking the involvement of the Public integrity unit of the DOJ:
On August 2020, Wolf emailed federal investigators that any mention of “Political Figure 1” should be stricken from a warrant “as a priority.” She directed them to “focus on FARA evidence only,” referring to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which the whistleblowers accused Hunter of violating.
Further, IRS investigators wanted to interview Hunter’s adult children about money that he purportedly gave to them for various expenses such as tuition and clothes, which he had deducted from his taxes, according to a committee summary. However, on October 21, 2021, Wolf warned investigators that they would be in “hot water” if they did so, a restriction that whistleblower Special Agent Joseph Ziegler described as “completely abnormal” because it is “part of [the] normal process” to interview people who are receiving money from the case subject.
