Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Hunter Biden struck a deal with federal prosecutors last week, agreeing to plead guilty to two tax charges and likely avoiding jail time, but the drama over his investigation is just beginning.
At the end of last week, House Republicans unsealed testimony from two IRS officials who came forward as whistleblowers expressing concerns about how the investigation was handled by the Justice Department.
The testimony reveals that the investigation collapsed into bitter acrimony and finger-pointing, with these IRS officials repeatedly pressing for more aggressive action, while the DOJ prosecutors they worked with during both the Trump and Biden administrations counseled caution. The IRS team was sidelined and eventually removed from the case. The whistleblowers claim this was political retaliation, but there are also signs it was connected to concern over leaks to the Washington Post in October 2022.
Conflicts between agents and prosecutors over just how aggressive an investigation should be are not rare, though they became particularly charged in this case. And these IRS officials wanted to be very aggressive indeed, even pushing to interview President Biden’s grandchildren to quiz them about money...
Mark Sullivan never thought the last time he would see the woman he fell for at a charity dinner, she would be sitting in the glass-walled dock of a magistrates' court. His former partner, Deborah...