The Biden transition team and the Secret Service were tipped off in December 2020 by the FBI about their plans to interview Hunter Biden - which resulted in Hunter ducking out of said interview, according to an FBI supervisory special agent and 20 year veteran of the bureau who retired last year.
The agent made the comments under oath on July 17 during closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, the transcript of which Fox News Digital has obtained.
His testimony came amid whistleblower allegations that prosecutorial decisions made throughout the Hunter Biden investigation, led by U.S. attorney David Weiss, were influenced by politics. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley testified that the Biden transition team and the Secret Service were "tipped off" about the planned interview of Hunter Biden. The agent corroborates Shapley's testimony.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last week sought to clear the cloud of alleged politicization from the investigation into the president’s son, who pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and a felony gun charge after an orchestrated plea deal with the Justice Department fell apart in federal court on grounds of unconstitutionality.
On Friday, Garland appointed David Weiss as special counsel in the Hunter Biden investigation - a move which has left some Republicans outraged over why the same prosecutor who's been leading the Hunter investigation for over four years (and has been accused of political bias) - could now lead the probe with a new mandate.
"Tipping off the transition team and not being able to interview Hunter Biden as planned are just a couple of examples that reveal the Justice Department’s misconduct in the Biden criminal investigation that occurred under U.S. Attorney Weiss’ watch," said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a statement to Fox News.
"The Oversight Committee has no confidence in U.S. Attorney Weiss as Special Counsel given his inability to prevent the Biden transition team from being contacted, and federal agents were not permitted to interview Hunter Biden as planned," he continued. "Under the Weiss-led investigation, investigators were prevented from taking steps that could have led to Joe Biden, the statute of limitations was allowed to run with respect to certain felonies, and the U.S. Attorney’s office sought to give Hunter Biden an unprecedented sweetheart plea deal."
The FBI supervisory special agent’s testimony highlighted some of the decisions made throughout the probe — including steps to interview Hunter Biden, the target of the investigation — and how they differed from any other investigations the agent had been involved in for 20 years serving at the FBI.
According to the report, the "initial plan" was to "make approaches of multiple witnesses, to include subject Hunter Biden, on December 8th" 2020, several weeks after the election.
"The initial plan was to have the local field office of the Secret Service be notified the morning of to diminish opportunities for anybody else to be notified. I was working with my management on that, as well as headquarters—our FBI headquarters," the agent testified, adding that the night before - Dec. 7, 2020, he was "informed that FBI headquarters had contacted Secret Service headquarters and had made a notification at that time, or somewhere around that time on the evening of the 7th."
According to the agent, the notification was of investigators' intent - "That we sought to interview Hunter Biden."
As for notifying the Biden transition team; "I felt it was people that did not need to know about our intent," he said, adding: "I believe that the Secret Service had to be notified for our safety, for lack of confusion, for deconfliction, which we would do in so many other cases, but I didn’t understand why the initial notification."
The next day, when the Hunter interview was to take place, the agent testified that he was notified by his assistant special agent in charge that "we would not even be allowed to approach the house; that the plan, as told to us, was that my information would be given to the Secret Service, to whom I don’t know exactly, and, you know, my name, my contact, you know, my cell phone, for example, with the notification that we would like to talk to Hunter Biden; and that I was not to go near the house and to stand by."
When pressed by majority counsel if in his two decades working at the FBI he had "ever been told" he had to "wait outside of a target’s home until they contacted you?"
"Not that I recall," the agent said. "I mean, there have been times where we waited for maybe something else operationally to happen, but, no, not from the point of view of the target, the subject of the investigation."
The agent said he and his assistant "weren’t allowed to go to the house" and had to wait "a block or two away."
"We waited a period of time. You know, I will add, it was frustrating, and I know supervisor number two was very frustrated, and I understood that frustration," he said, adding that they did have another interview to conduct. -Fox News
Read the transcript below:
