Show Notes
Tristan Leavitt, President of Empower Oversight, joined Susan Crabtree and Eric Eggers to reveal the untold story behind the IRS whistleblowers who took down Hunter Biden despite retaliation by the administration of his father, President Joe Biden.
Leavitt’s organization “is a group of lawyers that represent whistleblowers who are key to providing accountability to our federal government,” says Crabtree on the most recent episode of the On Background podcast. “And boy, have they done so when it comes to the Hunter Biden case!”
Leavitt’s group has a new documentary called “Shielded By Power” that details what they and two brave whistleblowers from within the IRS had to go through to bring Hunter Biden’s crimes to light.
“We went through so many ups and downs in helping Gary Shapley to come forward. He came to Empower because his he was working already with an attorney named Mark Lidle, who he had known when Gary was the investigator on Swiss bank secrecy cases involving Credit Suisse,” Leavitt told the hosts. Shapley, a fraud investigator for the IRS, “went to Mark after a period of time um said, ‘Hey, I think I need to blow the whistle to Congress.’”
Lidle was not familiar with whistleblower laws, so Empower America helped Shapley and his supervisor, Joe Ziegler to come forward and speak with congressional investigators.
“It became clear we needed to be able to tell their story in a deeper way. So, last November, we released the book The Whistleblowers Versus the Big Guy . They co-authored it, and Empower published it,” Leavitt said. “They are still federal employees, so all of profits from that book benefit Empower Oversight, which is a nonprofit. We rely just on donations to be able to do the work we do.”
After that, Leavitt said, he realized there was a more compelling way to tell this story, through a visual medium. The documentary wraps in their account with the reporting done by Miranda Devine of the New York Post, who reported the details found in Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.
“The documentary is going to be a really good way to bring together these many threads starting with some of the work that Peter Schweizer has done (in a 2018 bestselling book called Secret Empires) highlighting the Biden crime family and then track that through the media suppression and how we got to where we are and how it impacts our country going forward,” Leavitt added.
“I think it’s also a useful way to reset and tell the story from the beginning,” said co-host Eric Eggers. “We had information about the son of the nominee for president. Who’s doing business deals that were conducted while his father was vice president.”
“And then big tech got together with the intelligence community and kept it from the public.”
“Absolutely,” said Leavitt, “and I think one of the things that hit home to me most has been feedback from others. In 2020, 50 percent of the people who voted for Joe Biden had no awareness of the Hunter Biden laptop whatsoever.”
“Part of what the documentary will flesh out is the laptop isn’t just about Hunter Biden, it’s about Joe Biden and the entire family and how they were benefiting as a whole,” he added.
He points out that it was not really necessary to show direct deposits of funds to Joe Biden’s bank accounts, although there were some of those. “Think of any family dynamic, right? If I don’t need to ask my dad for money for any of these things, right, it benefits the whole family,” Leavitt said. “So, Joe Biden doesn’t need to be receiving money in his bank account for it to be beneficial.”
It was President Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of Hunter Biden on his last day in office that finally convinced many skeptics that the corruption allegations were legitimate. Those who had previously dismissed the laptop story as political noise suddenly recognized something substantial existed. President Biden’s pardon of his son and other members of his own family vindicated years of work by whistleblowers who faced retaliation for exposing the truth. Biden’s decision to protect his son from prosecution proves the investigation uncovered real crimes that threatened the entire Biden family.
