On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) responded to claims by IRS whistleblowers that they were blocked in their investigation of Hunter Biden by stating “many” of the steps they wanted to take were “very overaggressive and did not take into consideration the fact that much of the conduct they were talking about was [in] an election year where the subject’s father was on the ballot.” And that “to the extent it was slow-walked or he has issues with the search warrant, that was the Bill Barr Justice Department.”
After Goldman claimed that the whistleblowers are just describing disagreements between them and prosecutors about what charges to bring, host Jake Tapper pointed out that this isn’t the only issue the whistleblowers have and pointed out that Joseph Ziegler is “saying that he was hampered in his investigation. For instance, Hunter Biden deducted on his taxes his kid’s college tuition, and that’s not a legitimate deduction. And so, instead of just taking that paper evidence as sufficient, he wanted to go talk to the adult children of Hunter Biden, and he said that that’s just how normally an investigation would happen.”
Goldman responded, “[Y]ou very rarely go interview the children of a subject of an investigation if they were not in any way indicated to be involved in this. And you especially don’t when it is a sensitive investigation like this. That is a hyper-overaggressive step that is unnecessary to prove that element of the case. And I think that’s part of the problem here is that many of what their suggestions were are very overaggressive and did not take into consideration the fact that much of the conduct they were talking about was [in] an election year where the subject’s father was on the ballot. So, the ‘slow-walking’ that they talk about was actually done by Bill Barr’s Justice Department because of election year sensitivities.”
He continued, “And so, to the extent it was slow-walked or he has issues with the search warrant, that was the Bill Barr Justice Department. And we know Bill Barr was not afraid of abusing his power for the benefit of Donald Trump, as he did with Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
