IRS whistleblower claim that evidence on Hunter Biden swept under the rug bolstered by court filing

The evidence prosecutors plan to cite in Hunter Biden’s California federal tax trial in the coming months states that the first son was paid by a foreign client in exchange for influencing U.S. policy. This provides evidence for a key claim the IRS whistleblowers brought to Congress last year: the Department of Justice had evidence of crimes by Hunter Biden, but failed to charge them before the statute of limitations expired.

According to motions filed earlier this week, federal prosecutors are planning to cite evidence at trial that Hunter Biden and his business associates were paid by a Romanian businessman to influence U.S. policy and public opinion.

Tristan Leavitt, the president of Empower Oversight whose group represents IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, said this new filing was “infuriating” in a post to X Thursday.

“…Special Counsel Weiss is demonstrating to a T exactly what SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler blew the whistle on: Weiss's office had clear evidence of crimes by Hunter Biden that they almost swept under the rug when they allowed the statute of limitations to expire,” he wrote.

“Weiss is just using the Romanian payments as evidence of intent to evade taxes,” he added. “But the evidence (not "allegations," as the filings point out) shows what Hunter Biden ‘did do for [Gabriel Popoviciu]’--and the fact of the matter is that it violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

The specter of potential FARA violations have hung over Hunter Biden’s business deals and Shapley testified that his team of investigators were blocked from looking into them further.

The committees leading the House Republican impeachment inquiry into his father say this pattern has emerged in several deals, not just the Romanian arrangement detailed in the court filing. They are calling Hunter Biden’s business relationship with several foreign clients an “influence peddling” scheme, though the impeachment has lost steam since President Biden announced that he would not be running for reelection.

The Romanian deal was included in one of the Oversight Committee’s bank records memorandums from May 2023, which showed a company connected to Hunter Biden received approximately a third of a $3 million payment from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu’s Bladon Enterprises Limited. The rest of the money was split between his other partners, according to the bank records memo and the recent court filing.

Hunter Biden’s lawyers moved last month to have evidence of “alleged improper political influence” excluded from evidence in the trial arguing that it would unfairly prejudice the jury.

“The government does not intend to reference allegations at trial,” Weiss’ prosecutors responded a motion filed Wednesday. “Rather, the government will introduce the evidence described above, including that the defendant and Business Associate 1 received compensation from a foreign principal who was attempting to influence U.S. policy and public opinion and cause the United States to investigate the Romanian investigation of G.P in Romania.”

According to the filing, the Romanian businessman—Gabriel Popoviciu—was under criminal investigation in his country at the time. In order to combat the investigation, the prosecutors say Popoviciu sought to hire Hunter Biden and his associates in order to “cause an end to the investigation…in Romania.”

According to the court filing, Hunter Biden and his partner—listed as Business Associate 1 in the court filing—“were concerned that lobbying work might cause political ramifications for the defendant’s father,” that is, then-Vice President Biden.

To remedy this concern, prosecutors say, Business Associate 1 signed an agreement with Popoviciu to form a purported management services company for real estate in Romania to serve as a front for the payments which were actually designated for Business Associate 1 and Hunter Biden to attempt to influence U.S. government agencies to “investigate the Romanian investigation” of Popoviciu. Popoviciu was sentenced in Romania to seven years in prison in 2017 after being convicted of real estate fraud, according to OCCRP.

You can read the court filing below:

The IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who worked together on the Hunter Biden investigation conducted by their agency and the FBI, approached Congress last year with complaints that the Justice Department was improperly giving Biden “preferential treatment” to avoid filing charges against him. In his first letter to Congress, Shapley also asserted that DOJ officials were limiting prosecutor David Weiss’ ability to pursue charges against the first son.

In a public hearing before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023, Shapley testified that Justice Department officials concealed evidence from the IRS investigative team, delayed key investigative steps for political reasons, and blocked them from pursuing any lines of investigation that involved Joe Biden.

In one episode that illustrates the whistleblowers’ frustrations, Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Wolf—a deputy to Weiss—intervened to stop a search warrant at Joe Biden’s Delaware home over “optics” concerns despite admitting there would be evidence at that location, Shapley testified.

“AUSA Wolf also told investigators they should not ask about President Biden during witness interviews even when the business communications of his son clearly referenced him,” Shapley said in his opening statement.

The Justice Department's alleged interference also extended to potential Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) charges. Though the prosecutors said in their motion that they will not “reference allegations that the defendant violated FARA,” but instead will introduce evidence that the business relationship with Popoviciu was structured to “avoid having to register as a foreign agent, and that the defendant and his business partners did reach out to government officials, specifically the United States Department of State.”

Weiss’ prosecutors are now confirming what Shapley has told Congress since last year, that they possessed evidence of potential FARA violations, but that the IRS investigators were “precluded” from pursuing it further.

In one instance, Shapley described how Justice Department officials stopped the investigators from trying to use location data to find out if Joe Biden was sitting next to his son when he made the infamous threat over text message to one of his Chinese business partners. Within weeks a $5 million capital contribution flowed into the account of Hudson West III, Biden’s joint venture with the Chinese conglomerate CEFC China Energy.

“And the reason you wanted to look into this is because there could have been a lot of money coming in from CEFC that was untaxed, correct?” the Republican counsel asked Shapley during his May 26, 2023 testimony.

“Yeah. We're talking about a lot of things there. There's FARA in play. And the FBI is considering a lot of national security type issues here. And we were precluded from doing anything,” he replied.

Just the News previously documented how Hunter Biden helped Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company where he served as a board member, arrange several meetings in 2014 with a top advisor to his father, then-State Department energy adviser Amos Hochstein.

Hunter Biden himself was directly involved in the outreach, at one point helping to forward a direct number for Hochstein to facilitate a follow-up.

The interactions with Hochstein part of the evidence at the center of potential FARA violations still hanging over Hunter Biden’s head. The meeting with Hochstein is not the only interaction Hunter Biden arranged. According to the same Senate investigation headed by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, Hunter Biden also corresponded with the wife of Antony Blinken in an attempt to secure a meeting between Blinken—then a Deputy Secretary of State—and Blue Star Strategies, the U.S. lobbying firm employed by Burisma.

Hunter Biden had connected Blue Star Strategies with Burisma in order to deal with media fallout from his board position and to close down investigations into Burisma’s founder in Ukraine, according to previous reporting by Just the News.

Abbe Lowell, the lawyer for Hunter Biden, did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News. In an interview with CBS News last August, Lowell told "Face the Nation" host Margaret Brennan that concerns over Hunter Biden’s compliance with FARA were false allegations.

“Our client has been investigated in a five year, long, thorough painstaking investigation for every transaction that he was involved in,” Lowell said.

“But, you asked me whether or not [FARA] has been part of the investigation and after five years and what we know happened in the grand jury, of course that had to be part of what the prosecutor has already looked at, as well as every other false allegation made by the right wing media and others, whether it's corruption or FARA, or money laundering,” he continued.