During a recent appearance on MSNBC, lawyer and contributor Harry Litman asserted that an individual with a background in the IRS who has been touted by Republicans as an ostensible whistleblower stemming from time that individual spent working on the Hunter Biden investigation is a fraud.
“I’m a whistleblower lawyer. This guy is not a whistleblower,” Litman said, discussing Gary Shapley. “A whistleblower goes within the agency, follows the procedures, says something wrong has happened. This guy is just a complainer with maybe a political ax to grind… [Republicans are] in a great, sort of Orwellian run of calling anything — you know, they want to expunge the impeachment. All I’m saying is, a whistleblower means someone who reports malfeasance in the agency, goes all through the process, is rebuffed. This guy has a political grievance or maybe a professional one. But he’s just one guy.”
Shapley’s claims that he was generally restricted from pursuing more aggressive and ostensibly fitting leads in the Hunter Biden case have not been substantially corroborated and have, in fact, evidently been flatly rejected by some of the relevant authorities. The investigation into Hunter, which recently reached an apex with the revelation of a plea deal involving admissions to tax offenses, was largely the work of a U.S. attorney whose placement in that prosecutorial role originates with the Trump admin. With Hunter’s case specifically, some have discussed the apparent factor that the president’s son actually received a stricter response from prosecutors than others may have gotten to those acts. And there remains no real evidence connecting this in meaningful ways to the president himself.
Republicans keep going, though. They haven’t really dropped the claim that Hunter and Joe at least may have gotten millions of dollars apiece in bribe money, even though the purported aim of those millions would have been basically exactly what much of the West was already doing in opposing a then-Ukrainian prosecutor. With Shapley, Jim Jordan is among those who’ve helped publicize and attempted to lend what’s essentially credibility to the situation. Check it all out below (Raw Story publicized the clip:
