As Hunter Biden's legal problems and associated congressional scrutiny continue to heat up, word has emerged that a federal prosecutor accused of running interference for President Joe Biden and his family has quietly left her position at the Department of Justice, as the New York Post reports.
Lesley Wolf, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Delaware, sat for a deposition on Thursday with the House Judiciary Committee, and it was then that news of her change in employment status was revealed.
Wolf's involvement in the long-running Hunter Biden probe came to the forefront earlier this year when a pair of IRS whistleblowers testified that she was instrumental in blocking certain lines of questioning and investigation that could have put the first son or his father at increased legal exposure.
As Fox News reported back in July, one such whistleblower, IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, Jr., asserted that “at every stage” of the years-long probe of Hunter Biden, decisions -- including those made by Wolf -- “had the effect of benefitting” Joe Biden's son.
Shapley testified that Wolf endeavored to “limit” lines of inquiry with the potential to implicate Joe Biden and sought to prevent any references to “dad” or “the big guy” in relation to Hunter Biden's conduct.
The whistleblower also contended that back in October of 2020, an affidavit was presented to Wolf for a search warrant of Hunter Biden's home, and while she reportedly “agreed that probable cause had been achieved,” she declined to proceed any further.
Shapley said Wolf was not convinced that “the juice was worth the squeeze” in terms of the fallout that could result for Joe Biden.
Wolf was said to have explained that “optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to execute a search warrant,” and though she believed that “a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden,” she declared “there is no way we will get that approved.”
As the Post noted, investigators also learned in late 2020 that Wolf contacted Hunter Biden's defense lawyers and tipped them off to a planned search of their client's storage unit in Virginia, known to contain business records.
Whistleblower Joseph Ziegler said that this was another instance of Wolf “circumventing our chance to get evidence from potentially being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed.”
Other alleged instances of Wolf's interference included her insistence on removing search warrant language referencing “Political Figure 1,” said to be Joe Biden, and the denial of Shapley and Ziegler's efforts to secure cellphone geolocation data to establish whether he was with Hunter Biden when the latter sent a text message to a Chinese businessman threatening retaliation in the absence of cooperation with previously agreed terms of a deal between the two.
The precise date and circumstances of Wolf's departure from the DOJ remain unknown, and representatives from Special Counsel David Weiss's office offered no immediate response to a request for comment from the Post.
The efforts of Wolf and others at the Justice Department to grease the wheels for Hunter Biden were arguably calculated to result in the expiration of the statute of limitations on multiple potential tax charges that would likely have required greater scrutiny of Joe Biden, an outcome legal expert Jonathan Turley, seems to think is otherwise “inexplicable.”
“The whistleblowers have said they had a deal on the table that would have allowed that statute of limitations to be extended,” Turley noted, adding, “I can't imagine the rationale for allowing felonies to expire in the middle of an investigation. Maybe [Wolf] can, because I can't think of one.”
