House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan said Thursday it’s clear why the Department of Justice allowed Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes in 2014 and 2015 to lapse under the statute of limitations: to protect his father, President Joe Biden.
The Ohio Republican made his argument on Fox News ahead of the expected closed-door testimony of former U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf, who helped make the decision, he said.
Fox News reported a source said Wolf, who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware, recently resigned following the testimony of IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley this summer that she limited questioning related to Biden and any references to him as “dad” or “the big guy.”
Jordan told the news outlet one question he has for Wolf is, “Why the investigation decided to let the tax years 2014, 2015, when the bulk of the Burisma income was coming into Hunter Biden, why they let the statute of limitation lapse for those years?”
Hunter Biden took a position on the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings for $1 million per year starting in 2014, when Joe Biden was vice president and the point person for Ukraine policy under the Obama administration.
“My theory, when you get into Burisma, you get to the White House. I mean it’s one thing to charge Hunter Biden on a gun charge in Delaware, that doesn’t involve Joe Biden,” Jordan said.
Fox News host Bill Hemmer followed up by asking if the congressman considers 2014 and 2015 to be the most serious charges.
“Yeah, because I think the theory of this case is, I think it’s an old story. You’ve got a politician who does certain things. Those actions benefit his family financially, and then there’s an effort to conceal it,” Jordan answered.
Is Jordan right?
“I think the effort to cover up and conceal it was the way [U.S. attorney and now special counsel] David Weiss and Lesley Wolf handled this investigation,” he said.
Jordan laid out what he called “four fundamental facts” regarding the topic of the Bidens and Burisma.
One, Hunter Biden joined the energy company’s board in 2014.
Two, he had no qualifications to do so.
Three, Burisma executives then asked him in December 2015 to “call D.C.” to get the pressure off the company being brought by Ukrainian government prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating corruption within the company.
Finally, three days later, Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine and called for reform at the prosecutor’s office.
During a trip to Kyiv in March 2016, the then-vice president demanded then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fire prosecutor Shokin or lose $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees.
In January 2018, at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting, the elder Biden recounted the incident with an apparent sense of pride.
He recalled telling Poroshenko, “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in,’ I think it was, ‘about six hours.’ I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”
“Well, son of a b****, he got fired,” Biden said.
The four facts regarding Joe and Hunter Biden are “as clear as they can be,” Jordan said.
IRS whistleblowers Shapley and Joseph Ziegler thought the president’s son should have been charged for tax crimes for the years 2014 and 2015, but the DOJ declined to do so, the congressman noted.
This month, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden with not paying at least $1.4 million in federal taxes he owed between 2016 through 2019.
The New York Post reported in 2021 that two months after Joe Biden left the vice presidency in January 2017, Burisma cut his son’s board pay by more than half.
Hunter Biden resigned from his position on the Burisma board in April 2019, the same month his father announced he was running for president.
