Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers now say that the Justice Department, the FBI, and IRS higher-ups ordered them not to  investigate President Biden or his son, Hunter Biden, in the wake of the disclosure of the first son’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election because the Bidens were deemed to be “sensitive” persons worthy of special protections during the course of the investigation. Republicans have long pursued information about the laptop and its contents, and the device helped score two criminal convictions for Biden in recent months. 

Sitting down with independent journalist Catherine Herridge, IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler say that their bosses improperly interfered in the probe despite the fact that they “knew” the laptop was real “many months” before it was reported by the New York Post in October 2020. 

“There were a lot of overt, investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming investigation,” Mr. Ziegler says. 

“It was many months before October 2020. We were confirming certain aspects of it that it was real and legitimate, as far back as late 2019,” Mr. Shapley said of the laptop. “It was clear there was a campaign to discredit that information before an election. Ultimately, I guess you can conclude it was for the purpose of affecting that election.”

The House Judiciary Committee, which has investigated the Biden family, their business dealings, the laptop, and the alleged interference into law enforcement probes of the whole affair, described Ms. Herridge’s report as “HUGE BREAKING NEWS” on Tuesday. The chairman of the committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, says, “It was always a coverup.”

One of the most salacious emails taken from Biden’s infamous laptop was a breakdown of how revenues from a certain deal would be split, with ten percent being listed as a payout for someone only disclosed as “the big guy,” which many have alleged is the president — including the whistleblowers who investigated. “We corroborated that ‘the big guy’ was Joe Biden,” Mr. Shapley asserted. 

Ms. Herridge discloses that IRS bosses sent an email to officials who investigated Biden shortly after the first son pleaded guilty to tax charges in California in September. The first son has denied wrongdoing in the case, but says he pleaded guilty in order to keep embarrassing details about his life out of the headlines for the sake of his family. 

“Those are words that are not supported by the actions of the agency,” Mr. Shapley said of the email that his bosses sent that praised investigators for helping win the guilty plea from Biden. 

Mr. Shapley added that he is aware that an “IRS watchdog” is “looking into the way that they have handled this, and they see the writing on the wall.”

Mr. Ziegler spoke about what are known as “sensitive investigations” within the department, that include special protections for certain officials who are being investigated by the IRS. 

The sensitive investigation about which Mr. Ziegler speaks is defined in part nine, chapter four, section one of the IRS manual for employees and investigators. Some of the officials and entities that are classified as “sensitive” include all currently serving federal elected officials, sitting federal judges, and incumbent high-ranking executive branch officials, as well as those elected officials and judges in high-ranking positions in the states. 

Why Biden was treated as a “sensitive” person in his own investigation does not seem to correlate with the IRS manual, given that Biden was not an elected official or judge at any level at the time of the investigation, nor was his father. The IRS manual makes no mention of retired high-ranking government officials, which was the president’s status as a private citizen who was running for president in 2020. 

Stories about the laptop were quickly pushed aside by former intelligence, military, and diplomatic officials in an open letter first reported by Politico in 2020. Those 51 retired officials said the disclosure of the laptop had warning signs of being a Russian influence operation, without having any evidence of such claims.

President Obama’s acting CIA director, Mike Morell, said in an interview with a House panel in 2023 that it was Secretary Blinken — a signatory of the letter who was, at the time, a senior advisor for foreign policy on the Biden 2020 campaign — “rushed” the publication of the letter in order to rebut the disclosure of the laptop. 

The two whistleblowers also offered criticism for Special Counsel Jack Smith who, with the permission of Judge Tanya Chutkan, has been able to release sensitive information about the federal election interference prosecution Mr. Smith is now running against President Trump. 

Ms. Herridge held up a copy of the evidentiary filing released by Judge Chutkan just weeks before the 2024 election, which the whistleblowers say would not have happened if Trump’s last name was Biden. 

“Based on what we saw in the Hunter Biden case, that document would never have been released four weeks before an election,” Mr. Shapley says.