After suing IRS whistleblowers, claiming they unlawfully exposed his tax information, Hunter Biden has dropped his case.
The former president’s son — known for his infamous laptop, which exposed the Bidens’ shady overseas business deals — sued the IRS in September 2023. The suit specifically focused on Special Agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, alleging they exposed Biden’s tax information when blowing the whistle on preferential treatment by the DOJ, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland previously reported. On April 30 Biden moved to drop the case “with prejudice,” meaning it is permanently closed.
“It’s always been clear that the lawsuit was an attempt to intimidate us. However, we were always motivated by doing the right thing, defending our work, and honoring our duty to the American people,” Shapley and Ziegler wrote in a press release the same day. “Intimidation and retaliation were never going to work.”
Biden targeted the IRS, since the law does not allow suits against individual agents. Shapley and Ziegler sought to intervene in the case last year for “their careers, their reputations, and fending off adverse collateral consequences,” as Cleveland reported at the time.
“We truly wanted our day in court to provide the complete story, but it appears Mr. Biden was afraid to actually fight this case in a court of law after all,” the agents wrote in the April 30 release. “His voluntary dismissal of the case tells you everything you need to know about who was right and who was wrong.”
Meanwhile, Biden has been dropping other suits across the country, claiming financial ruin, according to George Washington University Professor Jonathan Turley.
Instead of paying his ex-wife or fourth child — or even his “fair share” of taxes — Biden spent hundreds of thousands of dollars from 2016 to 2019 on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing,” and even a sex club, as The Federalist previously reported. According to his memoir, he lived out of low-budget motels during this time, pursuing a cocaine addiction. More recently, he has been struggling to sell his art and the memoir.
Biden’s access to this wealth, which he soon squandered, followed numerous influence-peddling schemes with Chinese businessmen and Ukrainian oligarchs. These took place both during and after the vice presidency of Joe Biden, who became known in these deals as “the big guy.”
There was so much evidence that even the corrupt Biden DOJ had to investigate the president’s son, ultimately giving him a slap on the wrist. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote, DOJ Special Counsel David Weiss “never indicted the younger Biden for failing to register as a foreign agent” or for more serious crimes — notwithstanding his illegal and debased spending habits. And before Weiss would even bring that limited indictment, IRS whistleblowers Ziegler and Shapley had to expose federal prosecutors for giving Hunter special treatment.
During his last days in office, the senior Biden — or whoever was behind his autopen — signed blanket pardons for Hunter and other family members involved in these pay-to-play schemes. Still, whistleblowers Ziegler and Shapley stood their ground.
“Hunter Biden brought this lawsuit against two honorable federal agents in retaliation for blowing the whistle on the preferential treatment he was given by President Biden’s Department of Justice,” their legal team wrote after Hunter dropped the suit. “Shapley and Ziegler did nothing wrong, never had to seek a pardon, and their actions have now been entirely vindicated once again.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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