Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler filed a massive defamation lawsuit against Hunter Biden’s attorney on Friday.
Shapley and Ziegler, both IRS agents, alleged to Congress that officials in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) gave Hunter Biden preferential treatment during an investigation into his taxes and overseas business dealings in testimony delivered in May and June 2023. The two IRS whistleblowers, who also provided other information about Hunter Biden’s business affairs and laptop, are now suing Abbe Lowell — the first son’s attorney — in federal court, seeking a combined $20 million in damages for allegedly defamatory statements that caused “incredible and malicious harm.”
“It is particularly ironic and damaging that a well-known attorney like Lowell — in his words, ‘one of the country’s foremost white collar defense and trial lawyers’ that is ‘widely viewed as counsel of choice for individuals facing government investigations and potential indictments’— has chosen to falsely accuse these special agents of criminal behavior,” reads the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Lowell’s stature and credibility in the legal community have amplified the harm caused by his defamatory statements. Lowell’s malicious and false allegations, including accusations that Shapley and Ziegler ‘committed felonies’ and ‘violated the law,’ were published to third parties, including the media, and have severely harmed their professional and personal reputations.”
IRS Whistleblowers Defamati… by Nick Pope
The complaint against Lowell alleges that he defamed both of the whistleblowers by falsely and maliciously stating that they had violated grand jury secrecy rules and taxpayer protection laws, and that some of these allegedly defamatory statements were essentially amplified by the media. Ziegler and Shapley are seeking $10 million apiece from Lowell.
Some of the whistleblower’s most significant allegations included assertions that the Biden DOJ initially denied Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss expanded charging authority, that the Biden presidential transition team was notified in advance of plans to interview Hunter Biden and that DOJ lawyers refused to work on the case with Weiss.
In June 2023, Shapley released a text message that Hunter Biden appeared to send to a Chinese business partner in July 2017, in which the first son wrote that he was “sitting here with [his] father” awaiting the fulfillment of an unspecified “commitment.” Shapley further alleged that the FBI had authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop in November 2019, well before it became the subject of a New York Post story that was effectively censored by social media companies on the basis that the laptop’s contents were possibly part of an elaborate Russian scheme to disrupt the 2020 election.
The whistleblowers’ complaint points to Hunter Biden’s recent decision to plead guilty to a host of federal tax charges in California as proof that the whistleblowers’ concerns about a politicized investigation were vindicated.
“Though the Biden investigation was almost derailed, their efforts resulted in a new level of attention that led to criminal charges, and Biden has now pleaded guilty to all the charges of tax crimes brought against him,” the complaint states.
