The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Wednesday that IRS whistleblowers will testify next week at a hearing into alleged interference in the Justice Department’s investigation of Hunter Biden.
The public hearing, scheduled for July 19, is expected to focus on testimony from Gary Shapley, a former IRS criminal investigator, and a second unnamed IRS criminal investigator, who possess ‘critical information’ related to the committee’s investigation into the Biden family, the panel said in its announcement.
Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty last month to two counts of federal misdemeanor in Delaware for non-payment of his taxes, a deal some Republicans have lamented as an insufficient sentence following a department investigation of Justice over the president’s son that lasted five years.
During closed-door testimony in May, Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee under oath that U.S. Attorney David Weiss had sought permission to indict Biden in Washington, D.C. and California with charges wider.
In a letter this week to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R.S.C., the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Weiss said he “has never been denied the power to bring charges in any jurisdiction.”
Father Lowell, one of Biden’s attorneys, also denied the veracity of a message Biden allegedly sent to a Chinese businessman in 2017 demanding payment. Shapley told the Ways and Means Committee he got the message, but Lowell said the alleged screenshots of communications between Biden and the businessman are ‘not real and contain a myriad of issues “.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has argued that the president and his family members have engaged in bribery and corruption, even though he has posted to repeatedly documents that did not substantiate the charges.
Inasmuch asstatement On Wednesday, Comer said the upcoming hearing was a chance to hear directly from Shapley and the other whistleblower, whom he called “credible.”
The hearing was announced the same week an unsealed indictment revealed federal charges against Gal Luft, who has alleged in so far unsubstantiated public statements promoted by House Republicans that the Biden family had received payments from Chinese nationals with ties to Chinese intelligence and that Hunter Biden had a mole inside the FBI.
Luft was accused of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government, trafficking weapons and lying to federal agents.
Comer last week called Luft “very credible” and stood by that description on Tuesday while saying he had never spoken to Luft.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com