Note: Entire interview can be seen at link.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-whistleblower-tax-probe-h****r-biden/

A whistleblower from inside the Internal Revenue Service has spoken publicly for the first time about a highly sensitive political probe he has supervised, which CBS News has determined is the ongoing probe into the finances of President Biden's son H****r B***n.

He said he became so concerned about prosecutors' handling of "a high profile, controversial" investigation that he felt duty-bound to sound alarms.

"There were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice," said Gary Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the agency, who spoke exclusively to CBS News chief investigative correspondent Jim Axelrod on Tuesday. "When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process. It was way outside the norm of what I've experienced in the past."

The accusations come more than three years into an investigation into H****r B***n that's being conducted in Delaware by a U.S. Attorney appointed by then-President Trump and held over by President Biden to avoid any appearance of political bias. The investigation focuses on potential crimes related to outstanding tax debts connected to income earned from a controversial stint as a board member for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president, and a potential false statement related to a gun purchase. Last year CBS News reported that the past-due taxes were paid off with a loan from high-powered Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris, who provided H****r B***n with financial backing.

Six months ago, a leak from the FBI revealed that agents there believed they had provided prosecutors with enough evidence to support criminal tax charges. No such charges have been brought as of this publication.

Shapley told CBS News he became increasingly concerned about measures being taken that he said appeared to shield the target of the investigation — which CBS News independently confirmed is H****r B***n.

"Each and every time, it seemed to always benefit the subject," Shapley said. "It just got to that point where that switch was turned on. And I just couldn't silence my conscience anymore."

Shapley is a supervisory special agent with the IRS's criminal investigations department, currently overseeing a team of 12 agents who specialize in international tax and financial crimes. Previously, he was an officer with the National Security Agency's Office of the Inspector General. He was assigned to a "sensitive" investigation in January 2020, and within months, he said he grew concerned about how the Justice Department was handling the investigation. CBS News has learned that was the H****r B***n probe. Shapley says he began documenting his concerns around June 2020.

"For a couple years, we'd been noticing these deviations in the investigative process. And I just couldn't, you know, fathom that DOJ might be acting unethically on this," he said.

Sounding alarms
The existence of a whistleblower inside the H****r B***n probe became known last month after one of Shapley's attorneys, Mark Lytle, wrote to Congress seeking legal protections for his client, who was maintaining his anonymity at the time. Without those protections, Shapley said he can't share anything about a taxpayer investigation—including the identity of the subject— without breaking tax secrecy laws.

Shapley is scheduled to appear before members of the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday, but his testimony will not be open to the public.

CBS News obtained a letter Shapley's attorneys sent last week to the Office of the Special Counsel, a federal agency dedicated to assisting government whistleblowers. The letter alleges "irregularities" in the Department of Justice's handling of the case,and cites a "charged meeting" Shapley's team had with Justice Department prosecutors last October. According to the letter, following that meeting, Shapley's team was effectively excluded from the investigation. Shapley would not say if he made prosecutors aware of his concerns but did acknowledge the incident prompted him to blow the whistle.

"It was my red-line meeting," Shapley said. "It just got to that point where that switch was turned on, and I just couldn't silence my conscience anymore."

In his April letter to Congress, Lytle said Shapley previously made whistleblower disclosures to the IRS, the Treasury inspector general for Tax Administration, and the Justice Department's inspector general. He also wrote his client would contradict sworn testimony "by a senior political appointee". In his interview with CBS News, Shapley declined to identify the sworn testimony or name the political appointee.

Whistleblowers in Washington
In recent months, House Republicans have brought forward federal officials who they said were blowing the whistle on perceived political interference from within the Department of Justice on other matters. The effort to highlight these concerns is the result of the recently created subcommittee on the "weaponization" of government by the House Judiciary Committee. Democrats have questioned the legitimacy of those claims, and Ranking Member Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, has referred to the subcommittee as "a political stunt."

Shapley told CBS News he has taken no money from anyone in deciding to step forward. His legal effort is being assisted by a nonprofit whistleblower advocacy group with staff who have previously worked with Republicans in congress, and he is a registered Republican. But he said he has never been politically active. He says he hasn't made any political donations or been involved in political campaigns.

"I'm not involved with any of that stuff," he said. "It's not what I want to do. I'm just simply not a political person. This is a job, and my oath of office is to treat everybody fairly that we investigate."

Shapley may already be paying a price for his decision to speak out. Last week, his attorneys informed Congress that he and his staff had been removed from the investigation "at the request of the Department of Justice." He claims he's faced retaliation from IRS leadership. In addition, H****r B***n's legal team has already accused him of breaking the law.

The White House declined to comment on the matter, but shared a statement it has previously released saying President Biden "has made clear that this matter would be handled independently by the Justice Department, under the leadership of a U.S. Attorney appointed by former President Trump, free from any political interference by the White House. He has upheld that commitment."

In a Senate hearing in March, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed not to interfere with the work of David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney in Delaware leading the H****r B***n investigation.

"I promise to ensure that he's able to carry out his investigation and that he be able to run it," Garland said on March 1.

Shapley would not say whether he was being investigated by the Justice Department in connection with the steps he's taken.

"If I were being investigated, it would be in retaliation for making a whistleblower complaint," he said.

Spokespersons for both the Justice Department and the U.S Attorney's Office in Delaware declined to comment.

The IRS also declined comment, saying, "Under federal law, the IRS can't comment on specific taxpayer matters." The agency's statement added that it remains "deeply committed to protecting the role of whistleblowers, and there are robust processes and procedures in place to protect them."

Shapley said he finds this new role — as a whistleblower — to be well outside his comfort zone, and is not something he wants to do. But he said he felt an obligation to come forward and report what he views as a violation of his oath of office.

"When I saw the egregiousness of some of these things, it no longer became a choice for me," he said. "It's not something that I want to do. It's something I feel like I have to do."

He said his ultimate motivation is what drove him to pursue the work of criminal tax investigations in the first place.

"When taxpayers are treated differently — and subjects of investigations are treated differently," he said, "I don't see how it doesn't affect the fairness of the system."

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace

e Peace
By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.
JEFFREY D. SACHS
May 23, 2023
Common Dreams
17
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent o*******w of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s o*******w nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the o*******w of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they eng****r serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to o*******w Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent o*******w of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s o*******w, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

They are, and I posted the relevant US code covering the Whistleblower laws for FBI agents in another thread. It can be found in it's entirety Title 5, subsections 2302, 2303, and 7211.

In summary, from: https://oig.justice.gov/hotline/whistleblower-protection

How to Make a Protected Disclosure:

It is unlawful for your employer to retaliate against you for making a “protected disclosure.” A disclosure is protected if it meets two criteria:

1. The disclosure must be based on a reasonable belief that wrongdoing has occurred. As explained in the chart below, the definition of wrongdoing varies slightly depending on your place of employment.

2. The disclosure must also be made to a person or entity that is authorized to receive it. Employees who reasonably believe they have evidence of wrongdoing are always protected for submitting that information to the OIG Hotline. However, as explained in the chart below, the other authorized audiences are different, depending on your place of employment.

FBI Employees:

Wrongdoing Defined:

Violation of any law, rule or regulation;
Gross mismanagement;
Gross waste of funds;
Abuse of authority; and
Substantial and specific danger to public health or safety

Authorized Audiences
For all disclosures, classified or unclassified, an FBI employee is only protected if the disclosure is made to:

(F) as described in section 7211;

[b]§7211. Employees' right to petition Congress
The right of employees, individually or collectively, to petition Congress or a Member of Congress, or to furnish information to either House of Congress, or to a committee or Member thereof, may not be interfered with or denied.

Like I previously said, my opinion is based on what my wife tells me, and she has successfully represented whistleblowers in Federal court over her law career. Your opinion, on the other hand, is mostly based on your ignorance of the written law.

You don't know what you're talking about!!!! They were considered protected the second they petitioned Congress. READ THE LAW!!!

WOW!!! You obviously slept through history class.

The only real difference between National Socialist, AKA N**I and Socialist ideologies is that National Socialism classified people by race, while pure Socialism classifies them by social classes. They are both collectivist in nature.

Like Socialism, N**Is were very anti-capitalistic. It's often argued though that N**Is never nationalized their production means, but that's not entirely true. They did allow private ownership, but that was mostly in name only, really only allowing them day-to-day management, as they were still politically collectivized through N**i planning agencies.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/second-irs-whistleblower-h****r-biden-concerns-retaliated

A second IRS whistleblower has alleged retaliation for raising concerns that Justice Department leadership was "acting inappropriately" on the investigation into H****r B***n, the Washington Examiner has learned.

The allegations from an IRS case agent come a month after an IRS supervisory special agent revealed to Congress politics had infected the case involving President Joe Biden's son.

Both whistleblowers were removed from the federal investigation into possible H****r B***n tax violations this month. Communications obtained by the first whistleblower's lawyers show that the second whistleblower was threatened with allegations of criminal conduct after raising concerns about the handling of H****r B***n's case.

The lawyers for the initial IRS whistleblower, Tristan Leavitt and Mark Lytle, the president of Empower Oversight and a partner at Nixon Peabody LLP, respectively, fired off a new letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel on Saturday in which they outlined the alleged retaliation.

“Our client learned that one of the agents he supervises — the case agent on the case our client is blowing the whistle on — sent you an email” on Thursday in which the IRS case agent raised concerns about the H****r B***n investigation, the lawyers wrote in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner from congressional sources. But IRS leadership quickly responded “with accusations of criminal conduct and warnings to other agents in an apparent attempt to intimidate into silence anyone who might raise similar concerns.”

The IRS must desist from "intimidating," the lawyers wrote, "lest they chill the disclosures of other IRS whistleblowers who may wish to come forward.”

The revelations are the latest claims of wrongdoing into how the federal government is handling the allegations of possible tax fraud that H****r B***n first revealed in 2020 immediately after his father won the White House. Joe Biden has routinely stood by his son and earlier this month claimed, "My son has done nothing wrong."

Lawyers for the initial IRS whistleblower sent letters to Congress in April and May providing details of alleged wrongdoing related to the federal investigation into President Joe Biden’s son. The whistleblower’s attorneys have claimed the agency engaged in "clearly retaliatory" action against their client.

Leavitt also sent a separate letter to the Office of Special Counsel on Wednesday, in which he said his client, a supervisory special agent with the IRS’s criminal investigation division, has allegedly been retaliated against numerous times for making “protected disclosures” in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

The letters to Werfel and the Office of Special Counsel were included in a letter to Congress on Monday evening, wherein the lawyers revealed their client is scheduled to speak with the GOP-led House Ways and Means Committee this Friday.

The whistleblower’s lawyers have consistently avoided confirming or denying that their client's allegations relate to H****r B***n, but congressional sources have said the disclosures relate to the investigation into Joe Biden’s son.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware is handling the criminal investigation into H****r B***n. It is reportedly up to U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump-appointed holdover, to decide whether to indict the president’s son. In February 2021, Joe Biden asked all Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys appointed by Trump for their resignations, with Weiss a rare exception.


Attorney General Merrick Garland has repeatedly vowed to ensure that Weiss is insulated from any political interference.

The letter from Leavitt and Lytle to Werfel included an email sent by the IRS case agent to the IRS chief and other agency leaders last week as an attachment.

The case agent's Wednesday email said, “For the last couple years, my SSA and I have tried to gain the attention of our senior leadership about certain issues prevalent regarding the investigation” and said they were often “left out on an island."

“The ultimate decision to remove the investigatory team … without actually talking to that investigatory team, in my opinion was a decision made not to side with the investigators but to side with the USAO and Department of Justice who we have been saying for some time has been acting inappropriately,” the second whistleblower, the IRS case agent, added.

Lawyers for the initial IRS whistleblower argued that “in response to making his good faith expression of reasonable concerns — concerns shared by our client — the case agent had a right to expect that his email would be taken seriously, considered, and addressed professionally without retribution, as the law requires.” Instead, the attorneys said, the IRS responded by trying to intimidate agents into silence.

Lola Watson, the assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office’s IRS Criminal Division, responded to the IRS case agent’s email on Thursday afternoon, telling him that “you have been told several times that you need to follow your chain of command” and that “your email yesterday may have included potential grand jury material” — which could be a crime.

“While such a claim is utterly baseless and without support in the law or facts of this matter, the language of the response suggests the case agent may have been referred for investigation, an even more intimidating form of reprisal likely to chill anyone from expressing dissent,” the initial IRS whistleblower’s lawyers told Werfel in their Saturday letter.

Just minutes after Watson’s email, another email was sent by Kareem Carter, the special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office for the IRS, in which he said, “There should be no instances where case related activity discussions leave this field office without seeking approval from your direct” supervisor, arguing that “following chain of command prevents confusion, conflict, and misunderstandings.”

The initial IRS whistleblower’s lawyers told the IRS commissioner that “you are responsible by statute for preventing prohibited personnel practices, such as whistleblower retaliation,” and reminded Werfel that it is “a crime to obstruct an investigation of Congress.”

The IRS whistleblower’s legal team had said last week that the IRS had removed the entire investigative team in the H****r B***n tax evasion investigation at the request of the Justice Department. Congressional Republicans last week demanded an “urgent briefing and explanation” from Werfel about the whistleblower’s claims.

The initial whistleblower has scheduled private testimony on Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over the IRS, and has invited Senate Finance Committee staff also to attend.

Lytle told Congress in April that his client’s “protected disclosures” lay out “examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected.”

The IRS agent’s allegations also “involve failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case” against H****r B***n and “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee.”

A source familiar with the whistleblower letter confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Garland is the unnamed senior Biden official whose testimony before Congress is being challenged.

The new Wednesday letter from one of the IRS whistleblower’s lawyers to the Office of Special Counsel also provided new details about the retaliation his client has allegedly faced repeatedly as he has blown the whistle internally at the agency and then later to the House and Senate as well as the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

After the whistleblower made a "host of protected disclosures to his chain of command between spring of 2021 and the end of 2022," he was excluded from prosecutorial discussions on the H****r B***n case, Leavitt wrote. After he disclosed the concerns to Congress and TIGTA, the whistleblower was passed over for a promotion to "J5 Lead position" despite being the "best qualified," the lawyer wrote.

After further disclosures to Congress and the Department of Justice inspector general in 2023 became public, the whistleblower "has been further retaliated against by being formally removed from the case in question," Leavitt wrote.

The IRS whistleblower’s lawyer included several emails that his client had sent detailing what he saw as “unethical conduct” by the DOJ.

“My choice was to turn a blind eye to their malfeasance, and not sleep, or to put myself in the crosshairs by doing the right thing,” the IRS whistleblower told his IRS superiors in one December 2022 email. “My conscience chose the latter. I hope IRS-CI applauds the incredibly difficult position I have been put into instead of entertaining the USAO’s attacks.”

The whistleblower’s legal team also told the Washington Examiner on Monday that they want Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) included in the congressional investigation into their client’s allegations, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is currently shutting Grassley out of it.

Well stated!

Sorry my I***t friend, I didn't say Liberals don't pay taxes, I said they should pay more in order to prove they are sincere in their belief that the Gov. needs to tax more.

It really doesn't really cost the Fed Gov all that much to collect on student loan debt. They just garnish the debtor's tax refund AKA Student loan tax refund offset to force repayment. For those who structure their tax payment so that they have no refund to garnish, they just garnish the debtor's wages through a simple court filing. All of that was put on hold during C***d, and is supposed to come back online sometime this summer.

I think they should increase any and all taxes that Liberals pay since they are always the ones whining that taxes are too low. It's also a fact that, in addition to the taxes they already pay--if in fact they pay any at all, they could just voluntarily send as much money as they want to the IRS any time they wanted. Oddly enough, none of them ever do. Seems they always want somebody else to pay the extra taxes.

Finding of no evidence of Russia collusion calls into question Rod Rosenstein’s epic decision that changed course of Trump presidency.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/was-mueller-investigation-ever-necessary-durham-report

In late summer of 2017, Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., questioned whether the Robert Mueller special counsel probe into Russia collusion was warranted, so he dropped a letter to the Justice Department seeking answers.

Read Posey's letter here:

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2023-05/BP_Letter_to_Rod_Rosenstein_Special_Counsel_September_2017.pdf

Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man who changed the course of the Trump presidency by appointing Mueller, had aide Steven Boyd draft a terse, short letter insisting the decision was lawful and necessary.

"The Special Counsel is carrying out his investigation in accordance with the Department's Special Counsel regulations (see28 CFR §§ 600.4 through 600.10)," Boyd wrote Posey in December 2017, months after the lawmaker first posed questions.

“Under these circumstances and consistent with the Department's longstanding policy regarding the confidentiality and sensitivity relating to pending matters, the Department is not in a position to respond further to your inquiry at this time,” the letter also stated.

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2023-05/RosensteinResponse_Dec2017.pdf

Five years later, Rosenstein’s decision to appoint Mueller faces even harsher scrutiny after a new special counsel, John Durham, declared in his final report last week the FBI and DOJ did not have, and never had, evidence that Trump conspired with Russia to hijack the 2016 e******n.

Durham’s report lays bare some painful realities, including that by the time Rosenstein made the Mueller appointment in May 2017 the FBI had used undercover informants to elicit exculpatory statements from key witnesses, determined key elements of Trump opposition research file known as the Steele dossier were either wrong or unprovable and that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was behind the whole narrative.

Posey told Just the News last week that DOJ’s response to him in 2017 was disingenuous and misleading and that the agency should have looked at the Clinton-inspired collusion allegations with far greater skepticism before escalating to upgrade the probe to a special counsel like Mueller.

"There's not one ounce of evidence of anything," Posey said in a recent interview with the "John Solomon Reports" podcast. "It was pure, intentional, misleading, trying to misdirect Congress while they try to somehow screw the president."

Rosenstein did not respond to a request for comment this weekend to his law office. But in congressional testimony a few years back he defended the Mueller appointment, saying it was the best way to finish the probe after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and left then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in charge.

"I was concerned that the public would not have confidence in the investigation and that the acting FBI director was not the right person to lead it," he explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I decided that appointing a special counsel was the best way to complete the investigation appropriately and promote public confidence in its conclusions."

Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney who served with Rosenstein, said the Russia-gate episode was part of a much larger dynamic in which government institutionalists such as Mueller, Comey and Rosenstein expanded the reach and power of the FBI and DOJ only to see it boomerang on the American people.

Just last week, a new FISA court filing revealed the FBI had abused the same warrantless surveillance powers over 278,000 times in a single year.

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2023-05/2021_FISC_Certification_Opinion.pdf

"Roughly 20 years ago, around 2003-04, two individuals went to Capitol Hill and testified in front of Congress extolling and begging and pleading for Congress to expand the power of the FBI and DOJ under the Patriot Act and under the FISA Act," Tolman told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show.

"Those two individuals were Jim Comey and Robert Mueller. Now, not coincidentally, years later they would be working hand in glove in terms of the operation that we've heard of now being exposed," he also said.

Tolman said Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller resulted from the fact that "the political pressure was so substantial given the level of respect at the time for Mueller and Comey. It's very difficult for people to stand up and to actually say, 'Hey, wait a minute, are we sure' because they had given such deference to Mueller and Comey over the years."

Posey, who has been in Congress for most of the last two decades, said his concern is that there has been no consequences for those who built government powers so big or abused them.

"I've seen a lot of injustice since I've been here," he said. "Just like Rosenstein here said that he had a right to do this, that apparently there was evidence. And just like [Democrat Representative] Schiff said over and over and over again: there's clear evidence.

“Well there's been no accountability, no consequences for anyone. You have serious, serious problems at the Department of Justice and the FBI. … Nobody has suffered any consequences. It's just like the financial meltdown. You know, the stockholders get screwed, and nobody's held accountable."

LOL, The law is plainly written, I can't help you if your unable to comprehend it.

Too funny, it's no wonder you're so clueless, seeing the sources you're using. Heck, that site doesn't make the mark on the Useful I***t Approved Information Source List:

Overall, we rate Bipartisan Report Questionable based on Extreme Left Bias, promotion of propaganda, numerous failed fact checks, and a complete lack of t***sparency.
Detailed Report
Reasoning: Propaganda, Numerous Failed Fact Checks, F**e News
Bias Rating: EXTREME LEFT
Factual Reporting: LOW
Country: USA
Press Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Website
Traffic/Popularity: Medium Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: LOW CREDIBILITY

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bipartisan-report/

Quite obviously, this legal stuff is way beyond the comprehension of some of the Dem Useful I***ts here, so I will attempt to dumb it down a good amount in hopes that even they might understand it--but I'm skeptical that I'll be able to dumb it down far enough for some of those i***ts.



How to Make a Protected Disclosure:

It is unlawful for your employer to retaliate against you for making a “protected disclosure.” A disclosure is protected if it meets two criteria:

1. The disclosure must be based on a reasonable belief that wrongdoing has occurred. As explained in the chart below, the definition of wrongdoing varies slightly depending on your place of employment.

2. The disclosure must also be made to a person or entity that is authorized to receive it. Employees who reasonably believe they have evidence of wrongdoing are always protected for submitting that information to the OIG Hotline. However, as explained in the chart below, the other authorized audiences are different, depending on your place of employment.

FBI Employees:

Wrongdoing Defined:

Violation of any law, rule or regulation;
Gross mismanagement;
Gross waste of funds;
Abuse of authority; and
Substantial and specific danger to public health or safety

Authorized Audiences
For all disclosures, classified or unclassified, an FBI employee is only protected if the disclosure is made to:

(F) as described in section 7211;

[b]§7211. [b]Employees' right to petition Congress
The right of employees, individually or collectively, to petition Congress or a Member of Congress, or to furnish information to either House of Congress, or to a committee or Member thereof, may not be interfered with or denied.