With Hunter Biden’s plea deal on the ropes in federal court, a powerful House committee chairman is pushing for public Internal Revenue Service whistleblower testimony to be included in the record for the judge’s consideration. Mr. Biden’s legal team has been trying to block it — saying the inclusion of the whistleblower’s testimony, even though it’s public information, is a violation of his privacy rights.

The chairman, Congressman Jason Smith, leads the Ways and Means Committee, which conducted hours of closed-door hearings with two IRS whistleblowers and later released transcripts of their testimony to the public. The whistleblowers alleged that Mr. Biden received preferential treatment from the Department of Justice during the years-long federal investigation into his business affairs.

The testimony disclosed new details about Mr. Biden’s violation of federal tax law and his threats to business partners in Communist China, which included invoking President Biden’s name in order to secure payment for unspecified services. In a WhatsApp exchange, Mr. Biden tells a Chinese business associate that his father is sitting right next to him, and he’d better pay up, or the younger Mr. Biden will hold “a grudge.”

When Mr. Smith attempted on July 25 to have that testimony included in the court record for the presiding judge, Maryellen Noreika, to review, Mr. Biden’s legal team said the inclusion of such information would violate the first son’s protection against having his personal financial information exposed in the public record. 

Mr. Smith’s committee then made the testimony public on the Ways and Means Committee’s website, in time for Mr. Biden fils’s July 26 plea hearing. 

Mr. Biden’s lawyers are aiming to keep the testimony out of the court record, arguing that there is “no purported grand jury or tax return information” publicly available in the documents submitted by the committee, Mr. Smith’s counsel wrote to Judge Noreika in a legal brief released publicly on Monday. 

Yet “at no point during this exchange did Defendant’s counsel identify any specific information in the Amicus Filing that violated any rule or statute requiring the redaction or sealing of any material,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers continued. “To date, they still have not identified any such information.”

At one point, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, Christopher Clark, threatened to seek to have Mr. Smith’s lawyers punished in court if they did file such documents. “Your attempts to publicly file my client’s personal financial information with no protection … are improper, illegal and in violation of applicable rules,” Mr. Clark wrote to Mr. Smith in an email. “Please follow the rules in making your non-party and non-approved filings. We will seek all appropriate sanctions in response to your actions.”

Mr. Clark did not immediately respond to a request from the Sun for comment. 

Mr. Smith had originally filed the documents with the court shortly after Mr. Biden’s plea deal was announced. At the time of his filing, the full House of Representatives had voted to make the whistleblowers’ testimony public. Mr. Clark’s complaints about disclosing too much personal information were answered by Mr. Smith, who said that “phone numbers, signatures, physical addresses, email addresses, account numbers, and similar information” had already been redacted. 

Mr. Clark then went around Mr. Smith’s team and Judge Noreika in order to speak with the court’s clerk, who removed the document from public view after Mr. Clark’s protests. When Judge Noreika was presented with those facts, she agreed to keep the document under seal, but only if Mr. Clark could point out specific information that he felt should not be presented to the public. 

According to Mr. Smith and court records, Mr. Clark has yet to provide any examples of illegally disclosed personal information that has been entered into the public record. 

Mr. Clark also made claims before the court that “grand jury” information had been publicly disclosed. Mr. Clark told Judge Noreika that “information that is patently considered grand jury material” was included in Mr. Smith’s filing of whistleblower testimony, which Mr. Smith has denied.

“It is unsurprising that Defendant was not able to identify any secret grand jury information within the Whistleblower materials: the Whistleblowers were represented by competent counsel who were careful not to submit any such information to the Committee,” Mr. Smith’s lawyers wrote in response to that claim. 

Mr. Biden’s legal team also claimed that great personal harm would befall Mr. Biden if some financial information was released. Mr. Smith rebutted, saying that even if the first son could prove there would be great personal harm, it is within the legal rights of the whistleblowers and the committee to obtain such documents. 

Here, Mr. Smith cites the United States Code, which states that anyone with access to financial information that “may relate to possible misconduct, maladministration, or taxpayer abuse” has the right to turn such documents over to Congress or law enforcement. In their role as IRS agents, the whistleblowers legally obtained the tax filings.