'This guy is not a whistleblower': Expert blasts GOP's source in Hunter Biden investigation as 'complainer'
A whistleblower from the Internal Revenue Service who claims he was blocked in his investigation of President Joe Biden's son is nothing more than a "complainer" with a "political ax to grind," a legal expert said Wednesday.
Speaking to "The CBS Evening News" Tuesday, Gary Shapley – an IRS supervisory agent who helped oversee a five year investigation into allegations of tax fraud against Hunter Biden – claimed he was stopped from issuing subpoenas and blocked from doing further investigations.
He was speaking a week after Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware, David Weiss announced a plea deal in the Biden case.
But a specialist in that area of law, Harry Litman, told MSNBC on Wednesday that he doesn't buy Shapley's claims.
"It's very implausible, for starters," Litman said of the Shapley accusations. "I'm a whistleblower lawyer. This guy is not a whistle-blower. A whistleblower goes within the agency, follows the procedures, and says something wrong has happened. This guy is just a complainer with maybe a political ax to grind or maybe just a professional —"
Host Andrea Mitchell cut him off to explain that the only reason he was called a whistleblower was that the House Oversight Committee called him one.
"All I'm saying is a whistle-blower means someone who reports malfeasance in the agency, goes through all the processes and is rebuffed," said Litman.
"This guy has a political career and he may be a professional one, but he's just one guy. He didn't go through any process. There's no corroboration. It's implausible. That's my brief reaction."
In a report from the New York Post last week, Shapley complained that Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf told him "optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to execute a search warrant. She said a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden, but said there is no way we will get that approved."
The search warrants that Shapley wanted to be executed would have sent FBI and IRS agents to the home of Donald Trump's challenger less than a month before voting began in 2020.
Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the IRS, is being represented by attorney Mark Lytle, a white-collar crime lawyer who previously served at the Justice Department as an Associate Deputy Attorney General under Attorney General Bill Barr. Prior to that he worked in Donald Trump's administration as Associate Counsel in the Office of the White House Counsel, his LinkedIn page reads.
Shapley spoke to Rep. James Comer's (R-KY) House Oversight Committee last month and detailed his story about investigating Hunter Biden.
See the video of Litman's comments below or at the link here.
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