Score half a point for Donald Trump.
It turns out he was on to something with his claim the 2020 election was rigged, though not in the way he thinks.
The dirty deed didn’t happen in offices in Arizona or Georgia, where Republicans supposedly were banished while Democrats counted duffel bags full of late-arriving votes.
Nor did Trump lose because computers were wired to rob him of victory.
Instead, the cheating that likely denied Trump a second term was very close to home.
In fact, it was an inside job.
There are numerous bombshells in the congressional testimony of two IRS whistleblowers, but the most significant is that members of Trump’s Department of Justice helped to tip the 2020 election to his opponent by slow-walking the investigation into Hunter Biden.
The interference with the probe began as soon as it looked like Joe Biden was going to win the Democrats’ nomination.
That’s the allegation made by supervising agent Gary Shapley, who detailed steps he and other IRS investigators wanted to take to gather evidence against Hunter for massive tax fraud and other crimes.
They planned to execute search warrants in New York, California, Arkansas and Washington, DC.
They also wanted to search Joe Biden’s Delaware guest house because Hunter spent a lot of time there.
The probers laid out their plan in a probable cause memo, but it was inexplicably rejected by DOJ lawyers.
“After former Vice President Joseph Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in early April 2020, career DOJ officials dragged their feet on the IRS taking these investigative steps,” Shapley testified.
“By June 2020, those same career officials were already delaying overt investigative actions.”
Noting that the rejections came long before the probes ran afoul of the Justice Department’s rule to “stand down” on political cases within 60 or 90 days of an election, Shapley said bluntly: “It was apparent that DOJ was purposely slow-walking investigative actions in this matter.”
So the fix — for both the case and the election — was in from the start.
The testimony is pure dynamite, with Shapley and the other agent, who is unidentified, documenting numerous instances where either career officials or, later, Joe Biden appointees, stepped in to thwart the investigation.
They claim DOJ lawyers tipped off Hunter’s lawyers about a plan to conduct surprise interviews, and disclosed the plan to search a storage locker, giving Biden’s team time to remove any incriminating evidence.
Shapley, who led a team of 12 IRS agents, said that unlike usual practices, Justice lawyers selected which witnesses could be interviewed.
His team was blocked from seeing Hunter Biden’s laptop, even though the FBI had authenticated it in 2019.
The big setup
“Investigators assigned to this investigation were obstructed from seeing all the available evidence,” he testified, calling the move “unprecedented.”
He also said they were instructed “to not look into anything related to President Biden.”
An example of their suspicions of wider crimes includes the infamous July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao, where Hunter wrote: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”
He threatened that if he didn’t get a call or text from the right people, “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”
As The Post reported, Senate officials in 2020 found that Hunter Biden’s checking accounts received wires totaling $5.1 million from China in subsequent days.
Did the “big guy” get his cut?
Only a fool would believe it’s a coincidence Justice settled the Hunter case on see-no-evil terms two days before the testimony became public.
Clearly, Attorney General Merrick Garland and his corrupt aides wanted to head off public outrage by saying the case was over.
But Garland is in a double bind, because Shapley testified that Garland lied to the Senate when he said Delaware US Attorney David Weiss had the authority to bring whatever charges in any district he wanted.
Shapley said Weiss was in fact prevented by Biden appointees from bringing charges in DC and California.
Garland, in an echo of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s ridiculous claim that “I am science,” declared his innocence and added that allegations of corruption against Justice were dangerous because they “constitute an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy and essential to the safety of the American people.”
Sounds like he’s feeling the heat.
The IRS testimony also casts a shadow on Bill Barr’s two-year tenure as Trump’s AG.
Barr did courageous work in flagging the misconduct of former FBI Director James Comey and others for spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign and in eviscerating the media’s role, too.
Barr’s double role
Barr tasked John Durham with getting to the bottom of the 2016 scandal, and Durham concluded the FBI never had enough evidence to open the Trump probe.
Yet Barr did not pay sufficient attention to what was happening under his nose in the 2020 campaign.
He certainly knew of the Hunter Biden probe, but, to judge from results, never realized corrupt DOJ officials were again abusing their power to rig the outcome of a second presidential election.
Indeed, the effort to help Joe Biden wasn’t limited to restricting the probe of his son.
FBI agents instructed Twitter, Facebook and other tech giants to block The Post’s first laptop stories, which showed Joe Biden meeting with Hunter’s partners and paymasters.
The agents adopted the “Russian disinformation” ruse the Biden campaign and 51 former intelligence officials also used.
How much coordination there was in those two plots remains unknown.
Unfortunately for America, the effort succeeded.
Polls taken after the election showed enough Biden voters to change the outcome would not have voted for him if they had known about The Post’s reports.
The IRS testimony feels like a potential turning point, but House Republicans must resist the temptation to rush toward impeachment of Garland and the president. Release of the transcripts came during a crush of big news, such as the loss of five people in the Titan disaster and the move to oust Vladimir Putin by Russia’s mercenary leader.
As legendary GOP strategist Ed Rollins notes, the political class, including the media, assume every voter is a news junkie.
Rollins cautions it can take two weeks for even big news to get the full attention of most people.
That means Rep. James Comer of Kentucky and other investigative leaders must keep putting key witnesses under oath, especially Hunter Biden partners Devon Archer and Rob Walker.
Brick by brick, they must build a case that even honest Democrats and their media handmaidens can’t deny.
Only then should the GOP move to the end game.
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