On Wednesday, IRS “Whistleblower X” was identified as Joseph Ziegler when he testified live before the House Oversight Committee. Ziegler is a 13-year Special Agent with the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. He also happens to be a Democrat, but he said he came forward because he wanted to detail his concerns about the FBI’s handling of the probe into Hunter Biden. Both he and IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley testified about how the case had been slow-walked and had all kinds of roadblocks thrown up in its path.

We hit some of the highlights of the hearing, detailed Ziegler’s opening statement, and some of the concerning things he alleged about DOJ interference in the matter in a CBS interview. We previously reported in June on how Ziegler said that he was prevented from interviewing Hunter Biden’s children and he reiterated that in his CBS interview.

He also made another important point during his opening statement to the hearing about the nature of the influence of Joe Biden and some of the complications in the case, including that Joe Biden showed up at the field office during the probe into his son.

“There were definitely potential issues I saw with working this case in Delaware,” IRS special agent Joseph Ziegler said in prepared remarks before the House Oversight Committee. “We were working with a small [US Attorney’s Office] who might not have ever worked a case of this caliber. Delaware was the state in which the subject’s father lived in, and the family was extremely well known throughout the state, including [by] people on the team.”

“This was later evident by the president, Joe Biden, having to come into the FBI office on an unrelated matter, and it being joked [about] with the team,” Ziegler added, presumably referring to the bureau’s Baltimore field office. “Another example was that a magistrate judge in Delaware made inappropriate comments at the signing of the first electronic search warrant that had caused her to recuse themself from the investigation, which set us back an additional 4 months as we had to draft new warrants and redo investigative steps.”

Ziegler did not identify the judge or specify the comments she made, but recalled thinking that “these are issues we have to deal with and there is nothing we can change.”

Ziegler didn’t identify the judge or what her comments were that caused such difficulty.

That shows the difficulty right there because of the influence that Biden has in the area. But imagine you’re working on the Hunter Biden case, and then Joe Biden shows up in the office — that would be more than a little disconcerting. What was he doing at the field office anyway? Was there a legitimate reason for being there, or was this something else? That raises an interesting question, too, beyond the effect on the Hunter Biden case — why else might he have been there? I didn’t see any public mention of this in a quick search of why he might have been at the office, although he has visited Baltimore for various reasons while in office. Was this related to some other investigation we don’t know about? Ziegler didn’t mention when this took place.

But this just adds one more problematic element to so many other things about the way this matter was handled.