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Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
@tristanleavitt
Sep 15 • 7 tweets • 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
🚨🚨 Hunter Biden's attorneys are amping up their outrageous attempts to get the IRS whistleblowers prosecuted. The law is clearly on our side, and saying otherwise again and again doesn't make it true. But that hasn't stopped them from lashing out. 🧵

politico.com/news/2023/09/1…
Whether their goal is to actually effect a retaliatory prosecution of the whistleblowers, argue a tainted jury pool in the gun case, or just muddy the waters on the entire process is unclear. (Maybe it's all of the above!) Regardless, this shows how clearly desperate they are.
I've worked with whistleblowers my entire legal career--Republicans, Democrats, independents and more. I believe wholeheartedly our government has to protect whistleblowers if we want people to put their careers on the line to disclose problems in gov't.
There also have to be mechanisms for whistleblowers to make disclosures, and that's what Hunter Biden's attorneys don't seem to understand. Congress wrote the tax code, established the requirements for tax secrecy--and gave itself a way to release tax information when it chose. Image
Judge Noreika acknowledged as much when she denied the request from Hunter Biden's legal team to seal @RepJasonSmith's amicus brief, which included the IRS whistleblower transcripts. Defense counsel’s arguments today aren’t any different than those rejected by Judge Noreika.
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@RepJasonSmith But that hasn’t stopped attorneys for the President’s son from repeatedly lobbying the Biden Justice Department to initiate retaliatory prosecutions of SSA Shapley and then SA Ziegler for lawfully making protected whistleblower disclosures.
@RepJasonSmith
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More from @tristanleavitt

Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Sep 5
@ProfMJCleveland @ChuckGrassley AUSA Wolf likely already influenced Weiss's views before the NYT article. A week before it came out she'd said there was "no specific criminality" to asking questions about Joe Biden, despite knowing the bribery allegations, and prohibited questions along those lines. Image
@ProfMJCleveland @ChuckGrassley My real question is whether Wolf or Baltimore FBI agents weren't actually among the sources for the NYT article. Tell me this part of the article doesn't sound like jealousy over turf. nytimes.com/2020/12/11/us/…
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@ProfMJCleveland @ChuckGrassley Given everything public about AUSA Wolf, seems pretty unlikely she was happy to receive the bribery allegations when she was briefed just 2 weeks before the 2020 election. IRS agents had SPECIFICALLY ASKED to be in that briefing, but were denied, and never told what it was about. Image
Read 4 tweets
Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Aug 24
“Two IRS whistleblowers recently confirmed that the expiration of potential tax felony crimes was raised with Weiss and the Department of Justice (DOJ)…The two witnesses testified that the Justice Department…allowed the statute of limitations [for 2014-2015] to expire.”
“These two whistleblowers — and, more recently, a former FBI agent — said that the DOJ tipped off the Biden team on attempts to interview Hunter and to conduct searches. They describe an investigation that was anything but [a] ‘routine’ matter.”
“Weiss cut a deal with Hunter’s legal team that was widely derided. After years of investigation, he and the DOJ agreed to a couple of tax misdemeanors, a papered-over gun charge, and no risk of jail time for the president's son.”
Read 8 tweets
Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Aug 23
“The following story chronicles the efforts of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden to deal with Viktor Shokin on parallel tracks that would eventually thrust both the United States and Ukraine into five years of scandal that have cast a pall over two consecutive American presidents.”
“The decision by Biden and his…policymakers to try to force Shokin’s firing evolved over several days before he left for the Dec. 2015 trip to Kyiv. For weeks beforehand, U.S. officials at State, Treasury and Justice recommended Ukraine get its $1 billion in loan guarantees.”
“Hunter Biden brought in a new player to help cope with the publicity crisis, connecting Burisma with Democrat-connected firm Blue Star Strategies…Burisma’s goal for [Blue Star Strategies] was to shut down Shokin’s investigations of the firm and improve the company’s image.”
Read 7 tweets
Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Aug 22
For starters, noting the length of the investigation just supports what the IRS whistleblowers disclosed: the (3-year) investigation should have moved much faster, but the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office slow-walked it. The whistleblowers have explained why there was “no action.”
If by “DOJ” @eliehonig means various Biden-appointed officials at Main Justice or U.S. Attorneys Matt Graves and Martin Estrada then he’s correct—they have moved towards a very lenient disposition. But the “pattern” for Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss is the exact opposite.
@eliehonig Even after obstructing various avenues of investigation, Weiss’s office at least approved in early 2022 the felony tax charges for Hunter Biden that no one could ignore. But they had to get the approval of Biden’s DOJ Tax Division and Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to bring them. Image
Read 7 tweets
Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Aug 20
🧵Having read the Politico and NYT stories that came out tonight thanks to Hunter Biden's legal team handing all their emails over to the press, I have several thoughts. /1
First and foremost, it's shocking on its face that prosecutors were willing to let Hunter Biden off scot free. But piecing together the two stories with what we already know, they raise even more alarm bells about how this case was handled. /2
First, almost as soon as the Delaware U.S. Attorney's Office endorsed the conclusions below in Feb. 2022 (three felony tax violations and misdemeanors for 2015-2019), Hunter Biden's attorneys were working the refs behind the scene to prevent charges being brought. /3

Read 26 tweets
Tristan Leavitt Profile picture
Aug 14
🧵 It’s not just what the public learned at the recent plea hearing that caused Weiss to lose credibility. While there have long been calls for a special counsel, there have been several developments since 33 Senate Republicans wrote on 9/19/22 endorsing Weiss for the job.
1) On May 15, 2023—less than two weeks after Mark Lytle and I met with House and Senate Democrats and Republicans to outline SSA Shapley’s disclosures—Weiss oversaw the removal of SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler from the investigation of the President’s son.
SA Ziegler had opened the case himself 5 years earlier; SSA Shapley was the IRS supervisor of the case for over 3 years. Yet they had earlier been functionally cut out of the investigation in October 2022 after SSA Shapley expressed concerns about prosecutors' conduct.
Read 14 tweets

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