IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley revealed that the Department of Justice had enough materials to decide whether to charge Hunter Biden. The Biden Justice Department opted to delay until after the 2022 midterms. Shapley said the consensus among the brass was that they didn’t want to shoot themselves in the foot. Shapley and Ziegler objected to the decision repeatedly until both men were removed from the case (via NY Post):
The revelation came from IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley’s typed notes following a Sept. 22, 2022, meeting between investigators and prosecutors, during which the Delaware US Attorney’s Office and the Justice Department’s Tax Division “made the decision not to charge until after the election.”
“They said why should they shoot themselves in the foot by charging before,” Shapley wrote in his notes from that day.
The message was relayed to the investigative team by Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf, Shapley wrote in an affidavit dated Sept. 20, 2023.
[…]
It is unclear what prosecutors meant by “shoot themselves in the foot.”
[…]
After the learning of prosecutors’ decision to wait until the elections were completed, Shapley made a series of objections by email and in meetings, according to the documents.
That continued until he and fellow whistleblower IRS Special Agent Joseph Ziegler were abruptly taken off the case this past May “at the request of Delaware USAO and DOJ.”
“Unclear” is a bit coy. We know why the Justice Department dragged its feet: they didn’t want to do it. The political bias at the DOJ is a well-known fact—look at the plea deal they were willing to offer Hunter Biden before Shapley and Ziegler’s House testimony scuttled it. No one wanted to be the next James Comey, where such a monumental decision could be viewed as helping the Republicans when it would simply be these folks doing their job. Comey and the FBI bent over backward to not look political, only to further tarnish the agency. The same happened here: DOJ officials, not wanting to weigh in before the 2022 elections, only ended with their sweetheart plea deal to Hunter blowing up, followed by a controversial special counsel appointment for David Weiss that makes this mess look political in the public’s eyes. Weiss is the US attorney whose fingerprints were all over the aborted Hunter plea deal and who also allowed some of the most severe tax charges facing the president’s son to expire under the statute of limitations. His appointment bars House Republicans from soliciting his testimony about this case.
They didn’t want to shoot themselves in the foot, meaning they didn’t want to hurt Democrats. We’ve known that for awhile now.