Weiss authority in Hunter Biden case has limits, DOJ tax official testifies

David Weiss cannot bring tax charges against Hunter Biden without first conferring with the Department of Justice Tax Division, a revelation that underscores the little-known but critical role the division has had during the government’s yearslong investigation of the president’s son.

Stuart Goldberg, a 35-year veteran of the DOJ and top official in the Tax Division, told Congress in recent testimony that Weiss, even with his current special counsel authority, is and has always been subject to this regulation regarding internal revenue laws, according to a transcript reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

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“If someone — if Mr. Weiss gets 515 authority, he would still be required to go through the Tax Division to get approval of tax charges. Is that correct?” the House Judiciary Committee asked Goldberg in reference to a statute about special authorities.

Goldberg replied, “Yes.”

“So even if Mr. Weiss had been afforded special attorney status or special counsel status, he would still be operating within the Justice Department’s guidelines in the Justice Manual, correct?” the committee asked.

“Yes,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg also said, however, that his office told Weiss that it planned to allow Weiss to charge Hunter Biden at Weiss’s “discretion,” meaning Weiss became aware at some point that he would have the requisite approval from DOJ headquarters to charge Hunter Biden for tax crimes if he wanted to.

Goldberg suggested that he conveyed this to Weiss, who works out of Delaware, before Weiss contacted the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., about bringing charges against the first son in that jurisdiction in late February or early March of 2022.

“So presumably, if Mr. Weiss brought a case to D.C., at that point in time, the Tax Division had okayed that. Is that a fair assumption?” the committee asked Goldberg.

Goldberg replied, “Well, I think I mentioned that I talked to Mr. Weiss before he contacted Mr. Graves about bringing the case there.”

He did not specify what that conversation entailed, and he was accompanied by two DOJ lawyers who frequently interjected that Goldberg could not speak about the substance of the Hunter Biden investigation because it was ongoing.

Weiss’s authority in the case, which he has been overseeing since 2019, first became a point of controversy after two Internal Revenue Service criminal investigators told Congress in the spring that certain officials, including those at the DOJ Tax Division, obstructed their investigative work. They also said Weiss could not charge the first son because Weiss faced objections from DOJ headquarters and U.S. attorneys in Washington and California, where charges would need to be venued.

Weiss has denied those claims and attempted to clear the air this summer by telling lawmakers pressing him about the matter that he has always had “ultimate authority” in the Hunter Biden case.

Asked about that remark, Goldberg said, “I don’t know exactly what was meant by ‘ultimate authority.’”

“[Weiss] was in a position where he was going to make a recommendation … regarding the prosecution and that — and we had advised him that he was — if we authorized charges that he was seeking, that it was going to be with discretion, so he had the ability to not bring the charges or not,” Goldberg continued. “That’s my understanding of where it is.”

The two IRS investigators-turned-whistleblowers said the DOJ Tax Division had initially been supportive of bringing felony tax evasion, felony false return, and misdemeanor charges against Hunter Biden for various years from 2014 to 2019 when the first son had raked in millions of dollars from his foreign business deals.

Upon completion of a lengthy report that included several years’ worth of work and thousands of pages of evidence, one of the whistleblowers, Gary Shapley, emailed his superior in February 2022, writing that “the elements of the violations recommended are met beyond a reasonable doubt. DOJ Tax and the USAO in Delaware agree with this opinion.”

They are “planning to indict,” Shapley wrote.

At a meeting at the DOJ’s headquarters in Washington on June 15, 2022, however, the whistleblowers were surprised to learn that the Tax Division had changed its position, they said.

In addition to the two agents, Weiss, Goldberg, and a handful of others deeply involved in the case were present at the meeting.

“We had no idea that they were going to bring up a huge presentation [at the meeting] to everyone there regarding the reasons why we shouldn’t charge this case,” Joseph Ziegler, the other whistleblower, said, noting that DOJ Tax Division officials were specifically the ones who gave the presentation opposing charges.

It remains unclear why Weiss has never brought tax charges against Hunter Biden for 2014 to 2019, and it is possible he could still bring some of them.

But since at least last year, Weiss has also faced intense pushback from Hunter Biden’s defense team, so much so that Weiss, in a seemingly rare move, summoned Goldberg to partake in a meeting in January 2023 in Delaware where defense attorney Chris Clark was to deliver a presentation to prosecutors.

“Often contentious discussions occurred” at the meeting, Goldberg said, though he noted that sort of friction is not unusual between a prosecution and defense.

The whistleblowers also alleged that they were often at the mercy of the DOJ Tax Divison when it came to basic needs like subpoena approvals, saying the processes were unusually bureaucratic and drawn-out and may have been plagued by political bias.

Goldberg said that any high-profile case, including the Hunter Biden one, is going to require “closer supervision” and higher-level approvals. He said he did not witness any partisanship in the case.

Weiss will be required to complete a report detailing all of his prosecution decisions once his investigation is over, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed to release that report to the public.

Garland, for his part, was pressed by Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) on the policy surrounding Weiss’s authority at a hearing in September. Garland indicated Weiss could, in fact, bypass the Tax Division regulation if the attorney general himself had already given certain authority.

Roy directly asked Garland if “tax cases require approval by main Justice, as a general matter?”

“Most of the time, but not when the Attorney General has granted authority to a U.S. attorney to do what he thinks is best,” Garland said.

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The DOJ declined to comment for this story.

A spokesperson for the House Judiciary Committee said Goldberg’s testimony “yet again shows that David Weiss didn’t have ultimate charging authority, despite Weiss saying that he did, and the whistleblowers were right. Again.”