A new legal filing from Hunter Biden’s lawyers suggests Biden and the Department of Justice are seeking revenge on the IRS whistleblowers who helped force the Bidens family’s misconduct into the public eye and turn them against each other in the courts.
The filing comes in a case Hunter Biden brought against the IRS, effectively targeting its whistleblower agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, who came forward last summer to expose how federal law enforcement tanked the investigation and prosecution of Hunter Biden and others associated with the Biden family’s international influence-peddling operation.
Knowing the DOJ’s faux pursuit of the president’s son was about to be exposed, the Justice Department rushed to cook up a sweetheart plea deal with Hunter. It was a transparent bid to protect him from serious legal peril with any sort of connection to his father — insulating the president while allowing the DOJ to save face by acting like it was doing something about Hunter’s obvious lawbreaking.
When the sham plea deal fell apart under Delaware Judge Maryellen Noreika’s questioning, she forced the Justice Department’s hand. To fix a disastrous situation, Attorney General Merrick Garland elevated U.S. Attorney David Weiss, the lead prosecutor on the spiked Hunter Biden “case,” to special counsel. After years of shielding the Bidens and running out statutes of limitation on serious crimes, his team brought Hunter on gun charges in Delaware and tax evasion charges in the pending California case — charges still at a remove from the Biden family business.
The IRS agents, Shapley and Ziegler, claim they faced reprisals for coming forward through the appropriate channels with disclosures to Congress and thus the American people. The IRS allegedly pulled both Shapley and Ziegler off the case after Biden’s legal team lobbied the DOJ to pursue them.
Hunter Biden’s lawyers have not only maligned the duo in court filings but, in bringing suit against the IRS last fall, charged that the whistleblowers and their attorneys made unlawful disclosures of Hunter’s confidential tax information.
Since Hunter is suing the U.S. government rather than its employees, the case perversely puts the IRS and the DOJ, as the government’s lawyers, in the position of defending the very agents who exposed those agencies’ alleged malfeasance. Despite this glaring conflict, the U.S. government disputes that Shapley and Ziegler wrongfully disclosed Hunter Biden’s tax records — consistent with the factual record — illustrating how frivolous Hunter’s suit is.
But the feds have refused to defend the whistleblowers adequately. They confine their admission that the IRS agents are innocent to a mere footnote in a filing supporting their partial motion to dismiss the case. The feds have called on the court to dismiss the wrongful disclosure count only “to the extent” that Hunter Biden’s team brings its claim “based on the alleged wrongful disclosures by the IRS employees’ personal attorneys.” (Emphasis mine.)
The feds have vowed to “answer … remaining allegations … and … raise all available defenses” — of the whistleblowers — only after the court rules on the partial dismissal. In other words, the U.S. government is leaving IRS agents who blew the whistle on the government’s alleged malfeasance twisting in the wind.
Because of the obvious conflict, and the government’s absurdly passive posture, agents Shapley and Ziegler understandably motioned to intervene in the case to defend themselves back in May. Yet Hunter Biden’s legal team and the feds opposed that intervention. The government argued that only it “has the right to decide its litigation strategy, which includes the right to decide what arguments to make and when to make them,” and claimed Shapley and Ziegler lacked standing.
On Aug. 7, Shapley and Ziegler jointly filed a motion blowing the lid off this chilling effort to punish them, in response to both Biden’s and the government’s opposition to their intervention. In the filing, the agents assert:
[T]he IRS opposes intervention in a case where Shapley and Ziegler seek at the outset to secure an appropriate and complete dismissal of this lawsuit against the IRS. But instead of taking the position any litigant on the defense side of a civil lawsuit would take, the IRS opposes dismissal and purportedly wants ‘to wait for a fully developed factual record to present its defenses.’ In other words, the IRS wants the parties to engage in written discovery and depositions, even if unnecessary to resolve this case in its favor … oddly inviting needless discovery that defendants would normally seek to avoid.
The agents also highlight the Kafkaesque situation they find themselves in, in which the “very parties against whom the[y] … blew the whistle (Hunter Biden, the IRS, and the Department of Justice’s Tax Division) are collectively asking this Court to prevent them from defending the clear legality of their actions by intervening as parties in this litigation.”
The whistleblowers have made clear in court that they could face any number of personal and professional harms should the government not vigorously and successfully defend them — a compelling argument that they have standing to intervene in the case.
Shapley and Ziegler conclude in their Aug. 7 filing that “unless the IRS’s ‘litigation strategy’ is not to prevail in this case, it begs the question of why the IRS opposes enabling the two people whose conduct is at issue to have a seat at the table.”
The answer would seem to be that a hyper-politicized and weaponized government under Biden-Harris’ command will punish anyone and everyone who dares to challenge it.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
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