House Judiciary Committee suing DOJ officials for testimony on Hunter Biden tax case
Fox News
The House Judiciary Committee is suing Justice Department officials Mark Daly and Jack Morgan to enforce subpoenas for their testimony related to the Hunter Biden tax investigation as part of the broader House impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
Daly and Morgan were both involved in the Hunter Biden tax investigation and in early decisions not to prosecute, Republicans have alleged.
According to the lawsuit, “The Committee intends to ask Daly and Morgan about these decisions, including why they initially agreed with bringing charges for the 2014 and 2015 tax years, why they then reversed their opinion just a few months later, what additional (if any) information they received that changed their minds, and whether they were in any way pressured to change their views by other people inside or outside of DOJ, and if so, by whom.”
The committee subpoenaed Daly and Morgan in September 2023 and February 2024, according to the lawsuit. However, the lawsuit says Daly and Morgan did not comply “because their employer, DOJ, directed them not to appear.”
The suit names both men in their official capacity as DOJ employees.
The Justice Department told Fox News that it is “committed to working with Congress in good faith.”
“We took the extraordinary step of making six supervisory employees available to testify on appropriate topics last year,” a DOJ spokesperson told Fox News. “It is unfortunate that despite this extraordinary cooperation from senior DOJ officials, the Committee has decided, after waiting for months, to continue seeking to depose line prosecutors about sensitive information from ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions.”
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The DOJ spokesperson added, “We will continue to protect our line personnel and the integrity of their work.”
The Justice Department said it will review the committee’s filings “and respond in court.”
House Republicans have been investigating whether politics played a role in prosecutorial decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation.
Special counsel David Weiss charged Hunter Biden in December, alleging a “four-year scheme” when the president’s son did not pay his federal income taxes from January 2017 to October 2020 while also filing false tax reports.
Weiss filed the charges in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
The charges break down to three felonies and six misdemeanors concerning $1.4 million in owed taxes that have since been paid.
Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to the charges.
In the indictment, Weiss alleged that Hunter Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019, from in or about January 2017 through in or about October 15, 2020, and to evade the assessment of taxes for tax year 2018 when he filed false returns in or about February 2020.”
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Weiss said in “furtherance of that scheme,” the younger Biden “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company, Owasco, PC by withdrawing millions” from the company “outside of the payroll and tax withholding process that it was designed to perform.”
The special counsel alleged that Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” and that in 2018, he “stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for tax year 2015.”
Weiss alleged that Hunter Biden “willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes,” and that he “willfully failed to file his 2017 and 2018 tax returns on time.”
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler said the tax charges against Hunter Biden were a “complete vindication” of their yearslong investigation into the president’s son.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler approached Congress earlier this year, alleging that prosecutorial decisions made throughout the federal investigation into the president’s son were impacted by politics.
Shapley, Ziegler and other IRS officials who testified before Congress, including Michael Batdorf, have said they were frustrated that the Justice Department did not charge Hunter Biden for failing to pay federal income tax for 2014 and 2015. They alleged that Weiss had allowed the statute of limitations to expire for tax charges against Hunter Biden from 2014 and 2015 in Washington, D.C.
Shapley, who led the IRS portion of the probe, said that Hunter Biden should have been charged with tax evasion for 2014, and for filing false tax returns for 2018 and 2019. With regard to the 2014 tax returns, Shapley said that Hunter Biden did not report income from Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings.
Fox News Digital first reported in December 2020 that Hunter Biden did not report “approximately $400,000” in income he collected from his position on the board of Burisma Holdings when he joined in 2014.