IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler, who squashed Hunter Biden’s sweetheart deal on his tax crimes — and then were kicked off the case and ostracized — have been promoted to leadership positions at the Treasury Department.
It is sweet vindication for the veteran investigators who have endured two years of retaliation since they blew the whistle on political interference in their criminal investigation of the former first son.
Shapley and Ziegler will start work this week as senior advisers to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, guiding reform of the tax agency for 12 months, after which they will transition to senior IRS leadership 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.”
Said Bessent: “I am pleased to welcome Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to the Treasury Department, where they will help us drive much-needed cultural reform within 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 men’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 private letter last month to place the two whistleblowers in leadership positions in the IRS.
Shapley and Ziegler were removed from the Hunter Biden case in December 2022 after they informed their IRS bosses that the Department of Justice and then-Delaware US Attorney David Weiss were obstructing their investigation and slow-walking the case, blocking search warrants (including of a cottage on then-President Joe Biden’s Delaware estate where Hunter had been living), tipping off Hunter’s lawyers of impending searches, and letting the statute of limitations lapse on the most serious charges.
The men have named six IRS executives who they say retaliated against them and should be disciplined in an official complaint to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which is pending.
Last month, federal whistleblower protection agency, the Office of Special Counsel, found that the IRS had wrongly retaliated against Shapley and Ziegler.
“Gary and Joe have never been motivated by accolades, just an underlying desire to do what was right,” said the whistleblowers’ lawyers, Tristan Leavitt and Jason Foster of Empower Oversight.
‘Work life became hell’
Shapley and Ziegler were “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 also 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 apart, Hunter, 55, was charged with tax fraud in California, to which he pleaded guilty last year, and gun felonies in Delaware, for which he was convicted by a jury.
His father pardoned him in December for any offenses he may have committed since Jan. 1, 2014.
