Justice Department contacted Hunter Biden over US Attorney Weiss' head, whistleblower's lawyer says

The Justice Department headquarters, not U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss, controlled the federal investigation into Hunter Biden, an attorney for IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said. 

Shapley's attorneys said Wednesday that they had been in contact with associate deputy attorney general Bradley Weinsheimer, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco's subordinate who had worked as a conduit for Biden's legal team during the last part of Weiss' tax fraud investigation, The New York Post reported.

Shapley led the IRS investigation into Hunter Biden until he and his team were removed from the probe earlier this year after telling Congress that the Justice Department interfered with the probe.

Weiss was subsequently appointed as special counsel in the federal investigation earlier this month after a judge shot down a plea deal that Biden had with prosecutors.

Weinsheimer had spoken with Shapley attorney Mark Lytle in April to try to understand his claims against other department officials, Lytle said.

The day after the phone call, Weinsheimer met with Biden's then-attorney Chris Clark and Weiss, who was overseeing the case at the time but had not yet been appointed as special counsel, per Politico.

"After our client offered whistleblower testimony to Congress, Lisa Monaco’s righthand man, Bradley Weinsheimer, scheduled a meeting with Mr. Biden’s defense counsel to appeal over the head of Mr. Weiss in a way that was totally at odds with the narrative that David Weiss was acting independently," Lytle told The Post.

"The Deputy Attorney General’s office then claimed to us it was genuinely interested in addressing the whistleblower’s allegations, without disclosing its meeting with Hunter Biden’s lawyers. We now know that shortly after that meeting Weiss’s assistant [Lesley Wolf] offered to end the case with no guilty plea at all on the very same day that DOJ removed our client and his entire IRS team from the case," Lytle also said. 

When Lytle followed up with Weinsheimer in May after Shapley and his team were dismissed from the case, the conversation went very differently, according to the whistleblower's attorney. 

"Mr. Weinsheimer’s tone had taken a dramatic turn from claiming interest in the whistleblower disclosures to being completely unwilling to engage and referring us to Mr. Weiss," Lytle said.

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