The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday filed a lawsuit against two attorneys from the Justice Department’s tax division over their refusal to comply with subpoenas issued by the Republican-led panel co-leading President Biden’s impeachment inquiry.
The complaint asks the US District Court in Washington, DC to issue a preliminary injunction compelling DOJ lawyers Mark Daly and Jack Morgan to sit for depositions before the panel investigating the 81-year-old president’s alleged involvement in his family’s business dealings.
Daly and Morgan have been involved in the DOJ’s five-year-long probe into Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal activity, which has thus far resulted in 12 charges against the 53-year-old first son related to tax and gun crimes.
“The Committee’s need for Daly’s and Morgan’s testimony is urgent,” the motion for the emergency order states. “Every day that they defy the Committee’s Subpoenas delays and hinders its investigation at a time when the Committee is seeking to conclude its fact gathering.”
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler told lawmakers last year that Morgan and Daly were present during a June 2022 meeting involving now-special counsel David Weiss, IRS criminal investigators and FBI officials, where the DOJ Tax Division recommended against prosecuting Hunter Biden.
Shapley also testified that Morgan “wanted to remove Hunter Biden’s name from electronic search warrants” in the case, which “seemed unethical“ to the IRS investigator.
“Jack Morgan said, doing it without Hunter Biden’s name would probably still get us, in quote, ‘most’ of the data we sought,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee. “ I have never been part of an investigation where only getting most of the data was considered sufficient.”
The DOJ has “thwarted” the House panel’s efforts to get testimony from the Tax Division officials, according to the lawsuit.
“At first, DOJ refused to make Daly and Morgan available for voluntary interviews with the Committee, forcing the Committee to subpoena them for depositions, twice. But they defied the subpoenas because they elected to comply with DOJ’s baseless and unlawful direction not to appear,” the court filing states.
“They have deferred to DOJ’s claim that the Subpoenas are invalid because, under House Rules, agency counsel (a lawyer who represents the Executive Branch’s interests, not Daly’s or Morgan’s) cannot attend,” the lawsuit continues. “Among other things, DOJ argues that the inability of agency counsel to attend supposedly interferes with the President’s ability to control the disclosure of potentially privileged information.”
The filing notes that the impeachment inquiry is also seeking to determine whether the president pressured the DOJ to tread lightly in its investigation of his son, which House investigators believe Morgan and Daly can shed light on.
Other DOJ officials that have participated in the impeachment inquiry have testified that the Hunter Biden case was not politically influenced.
