IRS whistleblowers slam Hunter Biden pardon and retaliation, urge reforms

The IRS whistleblowers who disclosed political interference while investigating Hunter Biden’s tax crimes slammed former President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, saying it put the hypocrisy of the Democratic Party on full display. 

Gary Shapley, the lead investigative IRS agent on the case, told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Thursday that Joe Biden’s last minute pardon of his son “shows the true colors of Joe Biden and really, really underscores just the hypocrisy that the Democratic Party has been purveying to the American people” over the years. 

“It was…it was clear that he was going to pardon his son, he just lied straight to everybody's face. And really, what hurt the Democratic Party and helped the Republican Party more than anything was everyone seeing that Joe Biden was going to pardon his family members for what, you know, for the crimes that they committed that we weren't allowed to investigate,” he said. 

The whistleblowers, Shapley and agent Joseph Ziegler, first brought concerns to Congress in 2023, that politics was hampering the investigation into the first son and alleged that Justice Department officials at the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office and Washington had improperly interfered in the probe. 

Vindicated

For their ordinarily protected disclosures to Congress, the whistleblowers said they faced retaliation from IRS leadership and were removed from the case. The agency also attempted to limit their disclosures to Congress, which were protected under federal law. 

The federal whistleblower protection agency vindicated the agents in new correspondence made public this week. The Office of Special Counsel concluded that Shapley and Ziegler were wrongfully retaliated against after they blew the whistle to Congress, and that the IRS may have violated federal law by trying to gag the agents from disclosing wrongdoing, according to correspondence to Congress made public Wednesday. 

But the whistleblowers say that despite this legal victory their decision to come forward took a personal toll.

“[I]t has significantly affected my life, affected relationships… I've lost a lot of people in my life because they did not agree with what I was doing,” Ziegler told Just the News. 

He also said that despite the OSC’s finding, the IRS still has not “corrected a lot of those things that they have said to me.” 

Both Shapley and Ziegler also stressed the importance of reforms to IRS leadership to ensure that this does not happen to any future whistleblowers who approach Congress with information. 

“[What] it's done is it's instilled this fear in whistleblowers coming forward, and it's intentional, and I just hope that we can come to a point to where we don't do this anymore, to people who are trying to speak the truth,” Ziegler said. 

"And ultimately, you know…one of the things that I think needs to happen, is that, you know—IRS criminal investigation, senior leadership is not there based on merit and performance, they’re there based on this bureaucratic process that promotes people based on these fabricated titles, and they just simply…they’re there and they're protecting the bureaucracy, and we need to change that,” Shapley said.