IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations

Jerry Dunleavy, here:

Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.

“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy." 

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”

Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.

The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.

 

I don't know but I'm guessing her initials are Lesley Wolf

The question remains who within the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office withheld the FD-1023 from Shapley and his team when Barr had directed that the CHS’s reporting be sent there for further investigation. Further, Barr has recently confirmed the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office was briefed on the detailed allegations contained in the FD-1023, following then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s conclusion that the CHS’s reporting did not appear to be misinformation. ...

Every indication suggests it was the FD-1023 that the FBI HQ’s team falsely labeled disinformation, which raises the specter that individuals in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office were colluding with FBI HQ to protect the Biden family. It is now up to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s whistleblower to close the circle.

More.

IRS whistleblower says FBI confirmed authenticity of Hunter Biden laptop in November 2019, almost one year before New York Post laptop story

“In October 2019, the FBI became aware that a repair shop had a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden and that the laptop might contain evidence of a crime. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID,” Shapley said.

The laptop’s contents linked Joe Biden to his son’s dealings, including in China and Ukraine — contradicting his public claims he never discussed business with his son Hunter or brother James Biden.

Despite the FBI’s internal corroboration, 51 former US intelligence agency leaders signed a pre-election letter saying that the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” ...

But behind the scenes, “when the FBI took possession of the device in December 2019, they notified the IRS that it likely contained evidence of tax crimes,” Shapley said.

Shapley, who has worked at the tax agency for 14 years, supervised a 12-person team that determined Hunter Biden had failed to pay $2.2 million on $8.3 million in income earned between 2014 and 2019 from foreign countries where his father held sway as vice president, such as China, Romania and Ukraine.

The case was resolved Tuesday with the announcement of a probation-only plea deal with the first son, despite investigators attempting to recommend felonies, Shapley and another IRS whistleblower told the committee.

On October 19, 2020 — the same date the “spies who lie” letter was fed to Politico — Shapley said he emailed Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf to tell her: “We need to talk about the computer.”

More.

So the Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf is the one who stymied the FBI investigation of Joe Biden's links to Hunter Biden's deals

[Whistleblower] Shapley said that, prior to the interview with [Hunter Biden business associate Rob] Walker, “we had obvious questions like who was H, who the big guy was, and why this percentage was to be held separately with the association hidden.” But the whistleblower said that Delaware assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf “interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy” and stated that she did not want to ask questions about "dad."

The whistleblower said that “when multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had to ask, she responded, there's no specific criminality to that line of questioning.” Shapley said, “This upset the FBI too.”

“There were multiple times where Lesley Wolf said that she didn't want to ask questions about dad,” Shapley said. “We referred to Hunter Biden's father, you know, as dad.”

Shapley quoted the Delaware prosecutor as saying, “I don't want to talk about the big guy. I don't want to ask about dad. … Don't ask about the big guy.”

Shapley said, “The IRS and FBI agents conducting this interview [of Walker] tried to skirt AUSA Wolf's direction.” He added that the FBI agent tried to get Walker to talk about the email “while not directly contradicting” the direction by Wolf not to ask about “the big guy.”

The IRS whistleblower argued that “based on guidance provided by the prosecutors on a recurring basis to not look into anything related to President Biden, there is no way of knowing if evidence of other criminal activity existed concerning Hunter Biden or President Biden.”

The whistleblower said that “in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant” and that “the messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.” Shapley said that “nevertheless, prosecutors denied investigators' requests to develop a strategy to look into the messages and denied investigators' suggestion to obtain location information to see where the texts were sent from.”

More.

IRS whistleblower says Hunter Biden could have been charged with failure to file or pay taxes for each of the 5 years 2015-2019 and felony tax evasion and/or filing a false return for each of the years 2014, 2018, and 2019

 Earlier this week, Biden agreed to enter guilty pleas for two misdemeanor tax charges that related to his failure to pay tax on more than $3 million in income. As part of the deal with Delaware U.S Attorney David Weiss — who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump and was kept in the position by the current administration to continue the probe —  Biden will avoid full prosecution on a separate gun possession charge. A Delaware judge must approve the agreement at a hearing currently set for July 26.

More. 

One law for me, another for thee.

Criminal head of the FBI James Comey withheld evidence of Hillary plot against Trump from his own FBI agents investigating Trump

 They all knew, except the agents. Hillary Clinton continues to be the worst person in the whole world, and all her patsies the dumbest.

What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony today at House Oversight, which will go on for at least a couple of hours or more, but this part wasn’t the bombshell. In his special-counsel report, Durham had already revealed that CIA Director John Brennan briefed these four in August 2016 that Hillary Clinton planned to paint Donald Trump as linked to Russian intelligence, presumably to shift attention away from her own e-mail scandal.

That briefing resulted in a “referral memorandum,” and one of its recipients was then-FBI director James Comey. Oversight chair Jim Jordan asks Durham whether Comey ever bothered to share that with the agents assigned to the newly launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane or ever presented to the FISA court when applications were made for domestic surveillance of Trump campaign officials. Nope, Durham says, and explains how he found that out . . .

. . . the director of the FBI knowingly withheld evidence pertinent to an FBI investigation. That resulted not just in errors made by the agents conducting the investigation that might have resulted ending what turned out to be a witch hunt, but also contributed to misrepresentations to the FISA court about the nature of the evidence they used to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign figures. ...

Comey knew it, but made sure the agents assigned to the case did not. So did Obama, Lynch, and Biden. And yet all of these officeholders lied publicly about the nature of the rumors and innuendo consistently for months.

More.

Iowa meteorologist who was global warming apostle driven out of the profession by one e-mail stalker who was caught

WaPo tells his litany of woe, here.

Public school education in the United States continues its decades-long freefall, accelerated by pandemic closures and a system obsessed with sexual grooming

 The decline in math scores last year was the biggest in the past 50 years, according to newly released federal data. ...

The lowest-performing students scored at levels last recorded in the 1970s, when the assessment began. ...

Test results from earlier this year showed that U.S. history scores among middle schoolers are also falling — dropping to the lowest levels ever recorded since the assessment began in 1994. 

More.

Joe Biden is obviously not in charge: Calls Xi Jinping what he really is, a dictator, one day after his Secretary of State tries to soothe relations with Taiwan remarks

 Biden calls Xi 'dictator,' fueling Chinese anger... 

Blinken Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Does Not Support Taiwanese Independence, After Meeting To Quell Tension

LOL, Trumpworld catching on only now that Mark Meadows wasn't really one of them when it was obvious in 2017

 Months ago, Meadows and his lawyer severed communications with most of Trumpland ...

Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger this month offered only vagueness ...

That cryptic statement did not sit well with much of Trumpworld. In recent weeks, several lawyers and confidants had already discussed their unconfirmed suspicions with Trump that Meadows was being very useful to the feds in order to reduce Meadows’ own possible legal exposure, two other people familiar with the matter say. Both sources independently tell Rolling Stone that when the topic has come up within the past several months, Trump has at times said that he doesn’t know what Meadows is doing, adding that it would be a “shame” if the MAGAland rumors were true.     

More.

Meadows played key roles in mucking up both Obamacare repeal and immigration reform.

Trumpworld is a bunch of dimwits, and Meadows knows it better than anyone else.

LOL, Democrat named Wackerman, $400 donor to Lincoln Project, arrested for setting July 2022 "Oak Fire" in Yosemite National Park which Democrats blamed on global warming

 The so-called Oak Fire destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings. Roughly 6,000 people were forced to evacuate as the inferno torched 30 square miles of land and smoke from the fire drifted more than 200 miles into parts of Nevada and the San Francisco Bay Area.     

More.

Trump's Operation Warp Speed disappears into a black hole

 

Fewer than 1.7 million jabs have been administered in 2023 through May 9 in the United States, per Our World in Data.

On the Sunday grill: My May 1984 33-cent hamburger should cost 96-cents in May 2023, instead it costs $1.24

 It's nearly 30% overpriced.

The inflation-adjusted pound of ground beef over the period should cost $3.82.

I buy the good stuff, however. My burger costs $1.50, washed down with a cheap pint of Hamm's Beer for 83-cents.

I'll be back to beans and rice on Monday.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

 

Trump's greatest economy ever is simply part of the worst economy ever, now in its sixteenth year and third year of Biden

Something about some guy abandoning free market principles in order to save the free market system.

LOL Mexico soccer fans strike again, Las Vegas match called early because of Puto! chants

Things are really getting bad if you have to go to Mexico to escape the Nazis to practice the First Amendment.

 

Homophobic chants force US-Mexico soccer match to end early in Las Vegas

The United States men’s match against Mexico was cut short Thursday night by the referee after the stadium devolved into echoes of homophobic chants from Mexican soccer fans. ... Four players were ejected in a testy second half of the game, which the U.S. won 3-0 for a spot Sunday in the CONCACAF Nations League final against Canada.

Wait for it.

Trend for average temperature in Grand Rapids, Michigan shows an anomaly of less than +0.5 degrees F after 124 years

 Could be just a heat island effect from KGRR.

As long as you put 'em all in there and never let 'em out, I'm all for it

 

Most Oppose Construction of New $3.5 Billion FBI Headquarters

Congress went on a spending orgy since 2019 adding $8.77 trillion to the national debt and dimwits blame the Fed for being unable to control inflation

 Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Blame yourselves. You elected them.

 

The chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

-- Plato, Republic, I, 346f.

The Fed left the Funds Rate unchanged yesterday, and no members of the Federal Reserve Board currently anticipate a rate lower than at present through the end of the year

 They anticipate higher, but not by much, which means more rate hikes this year.

The yield curve aggregate yesterday closed just 4 basis points lower than the current cycle high of 4.674% achieved on March 8th, at 4.671%. That's the sum of the basis points for all US Treasury securities marketed yesterday divided by 13 (ranging from 1-month securities to 30-year).

To say the Fed's response to inflation has been timid would be an understatement.

In the 1980s the Fed's response to core inflation such as we experience today at 5.3% year over year was a Fed Funds Rate in excess of 10%. We're at 5.08%. The yield curve is not steppin' and fetchin' when the big dog won't bark.

This is not a serious country, and is perversely more than willing to inflict the worst tax on all, namely inflation, mostly because the whole damn economy is predicated on 2% inflation, which halves your nestegg in 35 years.

At 5% it does that in just fourteen.

It's criminal.

The price of gasoline has fallen, but only to the level of Obama-era expensive, not Trump-era cheap