IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, who squashed Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal on his tax crimes — after which have been kicked off the case and ostracized — have been promoted to management positions on the Treasury Division.
It’s candy vindication for the veteran investigators who’ve endured two years of retaliation since they blew the whistle on political interference of their legal investigation of the previous first son.
Shapley and Ziegler will begin work this week as senior advisers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, guiding reform of the tax company for 12 months, after which they are going to transition to senior IRS management roles to execute the plans.
‘Promote the truth’
“This is a win for every whistleblower out there,” says Ziegler, lead investigator on the troubled five-year Hunter Biden case in Delaware. “Gary and I will continue to do everything in our power to promote the truth, promote whistleblowers and to weed out the bad actors who have affected democracy.”
Shapley, his former supervisory agent, says: “We will be in a great position to assist the administration in effecting its goals. The winners will be the American people.”
Mentioned Bessent: “I’m happy to welcome Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to the Treasury Division, the place they are going to assist us drive much-needed cultural reform inside the IRS.
“These veteran civil servants join us to help further the agency’s focus on collections, modernization, and customer service, so we can deliver a more effective and efficient IRS experience for hardworking American taxpayers. I appreciate [Iowa] Senator [Chuck] Grassley’s efforts in Congress to support whistleblower protections in order to improve transparency, accountability and root out the culture of retaliation.”
Praising the boys’s “bravery, courage, expertise and integrity,” Grassley says their elevation “will send a clear signal that pointing out wrongdoing is an honorable thing to do.”
Grassley urged Bessent in a non-public letter final month to put the 2 whistleblowers in management positions within the IRS.
Shapley and Ziegler have been faraway from the Hunter Biden case in December 2022 after they knowledgeable their IRS bosses that the Division of Justice and then-Delaware US Legal professional David Weiss have been obstructing their investigation and slow-walking the case, blocking search warrants (together with of a cottage on then-President Joe Biden’s Delaware property the place Hunter had been dwelling), tipping off Hunter’s legal professionals of impending searches, and letting the statute of limitations lapse on probably the most critical expenses.
The boys have named six IRS executives who they are saying retaliated towards them and ought to be disciplined in an official criticism to the Advantage Techniques Safety Board, which is pending.
Final month, federal whistleblower safety company, the Workplace of Particular Counsel, discovered that the IRS had wrongly retaliated towards Shapley and Ziegler.
“Gary and Joe have never been motivated by accolades, just an underlying desire to do what was right,” stated the whistleblowers’ legal professionals, Tristan Leavitt and Jason Foster of Empower Oversight.
‘Work life became hell’
Shapley and Ziegler have been “isolated, frozen out of career advancement and scrutinized relentlessly,” says Foster. “Work life became hell.”
He paid tribute to Bessent for his “willingness to step up and bring these two courageous whistleblowers into leadership positions within the agency.”
“This opportunity provided to them by Secretary Bessent will allow them to use their deep skill set and understanding of how the IRS works from top to bottom to help solve some of the engrained issues within the agency.”
Foster additionally praised Grassley, who “has never wavered from his support of Gary and Joe, and we appreciate everything he and [House committee] chairmen [Jason] Smith [Missouri], [James] Comer [Kentucky] and [Jim] Jordan [Ohio] have done to ensure that they are able to use their skills to assist the administration.”
After his sweetheart deal fell aside, Hunter, 55, was charged with tax fraud in California, to which he pleaded responsible final yr, and gun felonies in Delaware, for which he was convicted by a jury.
His father pardoned him in December for any offenses he might have dedicated since Jan. 1, 2014.
