Proven, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, IRS pursuers of Hunter Biden. Talking with RCI, the 2 males gave their first in-depth interviews in regards to the tax-evasion case that upended their lives and careers, earlier than their final vindication.
By Nancy Rommelmann, RealClearInvestigations
April 10, 2025
Joe Ziegler shouldn’t be a crushed man – not for his antagonists’ lack of attempting. Throughout his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a particular agent within the Inside Income Service’s legal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley have been shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was advised to simply accept a demotion or resign. Satisfied the IRS and Division of Justice have been stonewalling their efforts to carry fees in opposition to a sitting president’s son, the brokers went public as whistleblowers in 2023.
Hunter’s alleged crimes occured at time when he has admitted he was a drug abuser — proof of which turned up on his laptop computer.
Day by day Mail
The outcome, through the hyper-polarized years spanning the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump administrations, was predictable: The 2 males have been accused of partisanship, lambasted by Democratic members of Congress and the press, and had their reputations impugned by high-powered attorneys paid for by these sympathetic to the Bidens.
The fortunes of those political victims have now turned. In mid-March, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent introduced Ziegler and Shapley would begin work as senior advisers, serving to to information tax reform.
Which is all of the brokers had ever wished and tried to do. “On the finish of the day, that is really about doing the best factor and standing up for what is true,” Ziegler would testify earlier than the Home Methods & Means Committee in December 2023. “I’ll say this many times, that is a lot greater than the Hunter Biden investigation. This was not a private assault on Hunter Biden, however a name for change.”
Whereas the reprisals they are saying they endured for his or her acts of conscience seem to have ended, Ziegler and Shapely are not looking for their expertise to be memory-holed – particularly as a result of different whistleblowers who spoke out through the Biden administration have obtained much less consideration for his or her tribulations. Talking with RealClearInvestigations just lately, the 2 males gave their first in-depth interviews on the years-long case that upended their lives and careers.
***
“I anticipated everybody was going to behave appropriately,” Gary Shapley recalled. “It was simply one other case.”
AP
Ziegler, a self-identified Democrat, had no cause to witch-hunt the previous vp’s son in 2018; he was simply doing his job when he stumbled on Hunter Biden’s identify in the middle of researching a distinct case involving an abroad on-line pornography web site.
“He was paying people, so, prostitutes, that have been related to that firm,” Ziegler stated. A bit digging revealed Hunter Biden’s ex-wife reporting he had not paid his taxes and, of their divorce filings, mentioning “a really giant diamond he obtained,” a gem allegedly valued at $80,000 and given to him by an govt at a Chinese language power firm.
“I look into our IRS programs and see that he had unfiled tax returns for a number of years,” stated Ziegler. “While you fail to file tax returns and you’ve got earnings that qualifies you to file tax returns, that’s a misdemeanor offense.”
A misdemeanor that may rise to the extent of a felony, relying on the greenback quantity and the size of time the would-be filer has been delinquent. Hunter Biden regarded to qualify on each counts.
The case ought to have been a cakewalk, and but nearly instantly, Ziegler suspected he was being stonewalled: Interviews he requested have been denied, and coworkers subtly and never so subtly warned him to faucet the brakes.
“My supervisor on the time, who wasn’t Gary (Shapley), made it very, very exhausting for me,” Ziegler advised RCI. “He stated, ‘While you work with high-profile individuals like this, you want far more data, far more proof.’ He primarily set the bar increased, which I didn’t agree with in any respect.”
Even when he had set the bar increased, Hunter Biden’s actions would have cleared it, with a number of and well-documented situations of tax evasion, together with not reporting greater than $1 million in funds from the Ukrainian power firm Burisma. Nonetheless, Ziegler famous a decided lack of urgency inside the IRS to maneuver the case alongside. “It was a variety of exhausting work on my finish, pushing everybody on the case to be like, ‘We have to do that. We have to go interview these individuals.’ And each single time I hit a roadblock or hit somebody telling me, ‘No, we shouldn’t try this.’”
After greater than a 12 months of pushback, Ziegler discovered an ally in Shapley, who took management of the investigation in January 2020.
A supervisory particular agent with 14 years on the company, Shapley assumed the case can be dealt with routinely. “I anticipated everybody was going to behave appropriately,” he stated. “It was simply one other case, and that’s how I approached it.”
And never a lot of 1, in comparison with others he’d labored on, together with getting Credit score Suisse to plead responsible in 2014 to serving to U.S. taxpayers conceal offshore accounts, leading to a $2.6 billion high-quality.
“While you stick to simply the best way that it’s all the time been executed, then it does not matter who you’re investigating,” he stated. “I actually thought that, although (individuals) did a variety of this stuff that shielded Joe Biden from a full investigation, that they have been nonetheless going to do the best factor regarding Hunter Biden.”
Lesley Wolf, reluctant Delaware prosecutor: She fretted over the “optics” of a Biden search warrant, based on testimony. (Earlier in RCI: a Biden investigations timeline.)
Residence Information/YouTube
This might need been the case had Trump/Biden politics not turn out to be a blood sport. Shapley discovered no urge for food inside his division to difficulty subpoenas or execute search warrants. The dearth of entry accelerated when Joe Biden grew to become the presidential nominee. A request in late 2020 to look a visitor home he owned and through which Hunter Biden was staying was denied, as have been requests to interview Biden members of the family.
Why the hold-ups? Shapley stated he’d “by no means been advised by our management, ‘nod nod, wink wink,’” that they have been meant to deal with the case with a delicacy that truly prevented them from doing their jobs. Fearing their investigation was turning into Kabuki theater, Shapley started making a second document of what the brokers noticed as untoward resistance.
“Once we began having issues, I began documenting points and deviations from regular procedures,” stated Shapley.“With the search warrants that weren’t being executed, although there was possible trigger, that’s when it grew to become obvious that he (Hunter Biden) was receiving particular therapy.”
The brokers, too, have been receiving particular therapy of a form. Ziegler was yanked off different investigations he was engaged on. Requests that Shapley made went unacknowledged or disappeared into the ether. And each brokers noticed colleagues hold their distance, reluctant apparently to supply even the looks of assist.
“They fully remoted us,” stated Ziegler. “Nobody reaching out, nobody asking questions. There was a scarcity of empathy, a scarcity of caring inside my company, and it’s unhappy.”
For 2 years, he and Shapley engaged in a Sisyphean battle to maneuver the Hunter Biden case alongside, a scenario that went from outstanding to ludicrous to untenable.
“It was me and Gary on weekly FaceTime calls, actually (saying), ‘I can’t imagine they did this. I can’t imagine they’re not letting me do my job. They’re not letting us do the best factor,’” stated Ziegler. “After which it culminated to some extent the place we ended up blowing the whistle.”
***
The previous web site of the Delaware restore store the place Hunter deserted his notorious laptop computer in 2019. The FBI quickly verified it, however its existence grew to become public — and was shortly discredited — solely late within the 2020 marketing campaign, after Trump adviser Rudy Guiliani gave the New York Put up a duplicate of the exhausting drive.
Jonathan Schilling/Wikimedia
Their concern and frustration grew ever extra intense as a result of the info of wrongdoing the brokers uncovered have been so clear. Between 2014 and 2019, they discovered that Hunter Biden had didn’t pay taxes on greater than $8.3 million in earnings derived from varied sources, together with these in China, Ukraine, and Romania.
David Weiss, U.S. Lawyer: His denial of authority within the Hunter Biden case did not wash with Shapley — and prompted the IRS man to show whistleblower.
AP
Whether or not a few of that cash landed within the financial institution accounts of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. could proceed to be debated till solely cockroaches roam the earth, however one can assume the individuals who gave the youthful Biden a 3.4-carat diamond have been a minimum of hoping for entry to his father.
The proof confirmed that Hunter Biden evaded paying taxes by submitting false returns, claiming private bills reminiscent of funds to prostitutes, a $25,000 intercourse membership membership, and, extra healthful if alas nondeductible, faculty tuition for his youngsters. Consequently, he owed a minimum of $1.4 million in federal taxes, elevating his alleged violations to a doable felony for tax evasion and fraud. The alleged crimes – which additionally included one other doable felony cost for mendacity on a gun allow in 2018 – occurred through the time when Hunter Biden has described himself as a heavy consumer of crack cocaine.
Regardless of Ziegler and Shapley’s efforts, their investigation might need been buried if Hunter Biden had not didn’t retrieve the laptop computer he left at a Wilmington, Delaware, restore store in 2019. Though the FBI has admitted it took possession of the pc that very same 12 months and shortly verified it belonged to Hunter Biden, its contents – which documented Joe’s connections to his son’s enterprise affairs together with salacious pictures – surfaced solely in October 2020, after Trump adviser Rudy Guiliani gave the New York Put up a duplicate of the exhausting drive he stated he had obtained from the restore store proprietor. In an echo of the pushback Ziegler and Shapley have been experiencing, Biden supporters labored to discredit the laptop computer story.
Opposite to the media circus, Ziegler knew the laptop computer was not, as Joe Biden would declare, a “Russian plant.”
“Sure, completely,” he advised RCI in March from his house in Atlanta. His workforce was conscious of the contents of the laptop computer however had made no hay from it; it was simply one other a part of the investigation, which made the response to its discovery, together with 51 former senior intelligence officers publishing a letter claiming the laptop computer story “has all of the basic earmarks of a Russian data operation,” appear particularly weird.
“Evaluating that to the data we had on our finish is, in hindsight, extraordinarily disappointing,” he stated. “However I suppose on the time I simply didn’t take into consideration the politics of it.”
Merrick Garland, Lawyer Common: Prosecutors from his DOJ “went behind my again to get me faraway from the case,” Shapley stated.
AP
By late 2020, Shapley had come to see nothing however the politics of it, together with amongst fellow federal staff whose unwillingness to carry Hunter Biden accountable for his actions Shapley discovered disappointing, if unsurprising, the “sure man’s” method ahead.
“These individuals have been institutionalized by the federal authorities. They’re solely in these very excessive positions as a result of they performed this sport to maneuver up the ladder,” he stated from his workplace in Baltimore. A ladder being held firmly in place by Crew Biden.
There was additionally one thing too intelligent by half within the higher-ups placing Shapley, who for years had obtained the company’s highest suggestions, in control of a case the IRS gave the impression to be doing its greatest to spike.
“They knew I used to be the professional, they usually knew that I knew greater than them about working these kinds of circumstances, so that they put me on the recent seat,” he stated. “Then they caught their head within the sand, and pretended that the whole lot was going to be high-quality … and (that) the issues you have been transferring into in 2020, 2021, and 2022 have been simply going to go away.”
In the meantime, the probabilities of any fees being filed in opposition to Hunter Biden have been rising tenuous. Shapley was alert to this eventuality when he determined to take notes throughout an Oct. 7, 2022, assembly, the place U.S. Lawyer David Weiss, who was overseeing the case, said he was “not the deciding particular person” on whether or not fees can be filed.
“He stated that he needed to go to the President Biden-appointed U.S. Attorneys to get approval they usually stated no,” recalled Shapley. Weiss, a Trump appointee, had been engaged on the Hunter Biden case since 2020. When Merrick Garland grew to become legal professional common in 2021, he allowed Weiss to proceed the probe, partially to keep away from the looks of political interference. Then why, Shapley questioned, was Weiss greater than a 12 months later saying he didn’t have the authority? That Weiss later denied he’d ever stated he didn’t have official approval didn’t wash with Shapley, whose assembly notes – which he’d shared contemporaneously with different attendees – particularly had Weiss saying he’d been advised he was “not the deciding particular person on whether or not fees have been filed.”
“My crimson line assembly was Oct. 7,” he stated, and afterward, he “instantly began in search of a counsel to assist me legally observe the authorized path to blow the whistle.”
Ziegler’s crimson line intersected with Shapley’s on Might 15, 2023, when the brokers realized Hunter Biden can be supplied a deferred prosecution settlement, which meant he wouldn’t solely not face felony fees; he wouldn’t be charged with something in any respect. Might 15 was additionally the day the brokers realized they’d been faraway from the Hunter Biden investigation in December 2022, however that nobody had bothered to inform them. “Leaders inside my group, to listen to that they had eliminated us six months prior to truly eradicating us?” stated Ziegler. “This was an enormous slap within the face.”
As for why that they had been taken off the investigation, the boys have been advised the IRS and DOJ had not recognized in December whether or not the case would transfer ahead, and thus, the departments had not wished to waste sources. “Which is a bunch of malarkey,” stated Shapley, as was Hunter Biden being allowed to slide away from the costs he and Ziegler had labored exhausting to make stick.
To the brokers, this was a betrayal on a number of ranges. First, by colleagues contained in the division and out (“They arrive to my home and with their spouse and kids, I know these individuals,” stated Shapley, of DOJ tax prosecutors who “went behind my again to get me faraway from the case”), second, to the roles that they had constitutionally pledged to hold out, and third, of the nation’s taxpayers, in that it created a two-tiered system of justice, one for normal People, the opposite for a president’s son and anybody else the individuals on the high determined to guard.
“What sort of leaders take away a whole workforce from a high-profile case with out telling them?” Shapley would later ask in a listening to earlier than the Home Methods & Means Committee.
***
Testifying earlier than Congress: It meant the IRS brokers have been in for brand spanking new and several types of punishment.
AP
Changing into the general public faces of the Hunter Biden case, which included testifying earlier than Congress and operating the media gauntlet, meant the brokers have been in for brand spanking new and several types of punishment. Explaining that the tax crimes Hunter Biden had dedicated, which Ziegler testified to in excruciating element, ought to be adjudicated as they’d be for another citizen was forged as batting in opposition to Crew Blue. This is able to not do. Within the run-up to a different Trump/Biden face-off, the powers that be wanted to conquer (or a minimum of humiliate) their perceived enemies, to show the poison arrow away from their candidate and his child.
Rep. Dan Goldman, New York Democrat: He forged the IRS brokers as “silly,” Shapley stated.
AP
“It was extraordinarily essential to Gary and me that we keep as bipartisan as we may probably keep,” stated Ziegler of their many appearances on community information reveals. “And I feel as a lot as we tried to try this effort, I feel the left facet of the media didn’t, for my part, do a ok job… it was type of like, ‘Anybody else however Trump, we’ve to guard!’”
“I keep in mind (Congressman) Dan Goldman giving a press convention after an oversight committee, saying, ‘That is only a disagreement between investigators and prosecutors, and the prosecutors know what’s proper,’” recalled Shapley. “‘The prosecutors are good, the (IRS brokers) are silly,’ is basically what he stated. And I haven’t gotten a sorry but from him.”
Assaults additionally got here from the best, as when Ziegler’s private data was leaked on-line by a former Trump aide who believed that Ziegler, being a Democrat and homosexual, was a secret liberal intent on stalling the Hunter Biden case. “I acquired a telephone name proper round Christmas time that stated, ‘Hey, simply so you already know, your driver’s license is on the market within the media. He has an entire bunch of images, pictures of you and your accomplice.’” Ziegler paused. “He’s now my ex-partner. So, that was one other piece or factor as part of this investigation.”
The publicity and stress proved an excessive amount of for the wedding. “I do suppose,” he stated, “it performed a job in primarily shedding that relationship.”
***
Dangerous day in courtroom: Hunter leaves a Wilmington, Delaware, listening to in 2023 …
AP
In a case this controversial, in a local weather the place tearing down the opposite facet had turn out to be reflexive, issues have been sure to get messier. Hunter Biden’s plea deal – which had him pleading responsible to 2 misdemeanor tax fees for failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, in addition to a pretrial diversion program for a felony gun cost – collapsed in July 2023 when the choose raised issues in regards to the scope of immunity the deal. “When the choose actually struck down that plea, I cried,” stated Ziegler. “I used to be like, lastly, somebody will get it.”
… after Choose Maryellen Noreika refused to rubber-stamp his lenient plea deal. “I cried,” recalled Ziegler. “I used to be like, lastly, somebody will get it.” However his reduction proved short-lived.
U.S. District Courtroom for the District of Delaware
The reduction wouldn’t final. Hunter Biden sued the IRS that September, claiming the company failed to guard his tax information. (As of this writing, the case stays ongoing.) In September 2024, Ziegler and Shapley sued Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, for defamation, in search of $20 million in damages. This was in response to Lowell’s having written a letter to the chairman of the Home Methods & Means Committee in June 2023, alleging the brokers had improperly launched tax data, and characterizing them as “self-styled IRS ‘whistleblowers’ who could also be claiming that title in an try and evade their very own misconduct (which) was an apparent ploy to feed the misinformation marketing campaign to hurt our shopper, Hunter Biden, as a automobile to assault his father.” (Lowell’s request that the case in opposition to him be dismissed was denied.)
And the massive one, which shocked nearly nobody: On Dec. 1, 2024, outgoing president Joe Biden granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Hunter Biden for federal tax and gun convictions, in addition to another federal offenses he could have dedicated since Jan. 1, 2014. This, regardless of repeatedly having said he would rule out a pardon for his son. (On the final day of his presidency, Biden additional issued blanket pardons for six different members of the family.)
The Hunter Biden pardon was seen, variously, as a show of fatherly devotion; a cynical strategy to bury Biden household tracks; a preemptive measure to maintain Hunter Biden from the well-known vengefulness of the incoming president; and a large waste of taxpayer {dollars} and a focus.
“The pardon was the largest constructive for the Republican Occasion and the largest hit in opposition to the Democratic Occasion that would have probably occurred,” is how Shapley noticed it. “The Democratic Occasion can not say, ‘We’re for the little man, that we’ll maintain wealthy individuals accountable, et cetera, et cetera.’ And the Republicans, they’ll all the time return and say, ‘Nicely, the Democrat president lied to the American individuals after which pardoned his felon son.’”
“These pardons that have been handed down on the final day of his presidency would’ve by no means occurred if we didn’t do what we did,” stated Ziegler. “You may try to discredit me as a lot as you need. However since day one, since we got here ahead, none of what I testified to modified. There was nothing the place I needed to come out and say, ‘Oh, yep, what I stated there wasn’t correct.’ We got here out, we testified (earlier than Congress), after which we gave them the receipts. No matter what anybody else says on the market, we observe the legislation.”
The U.S. Workplace of Particular Counsel agreed when, in December 2024, it decided that Ziegler and Shapley had been retaliated in opposition to by the IRS, together with their being improperly faraway from the Hunter Biden investigation.
Was the Trump administration taking part in tit-for-tat after they reinstated the brokers, who, in 2026, will transition to senior management roles inside the IRS? Virtually assuredly, or a minimum of partially. And but that has no bearing on the truth that the 2 males stood agency when throughout them others have been prepared to not; have been prepared to compromise – a few of whom now are greeting Shapley and Ziegler as heroes.
“The rank and file agent right here that has paid any intention, they know the burden that I assumed by doing the best factor, they usually assist me,” stated Shapley. “One in every of them particularly stated, ‘You guys did the best factor. You’re going to be educating ethics lessons in two years right here.’”
Shapley estimated that “a whole lot and a whole lot of individuals” have come out in assist. “However none,” he stated, “have come out publicly.”
***
Again house in Atlanta, Ziegler stays incredulous that anybody would suppose he did what he did for political causes.
“Why blow up your life, break up, smash your status? Why do all of this?” he requested. “To be trustworthy with you, I would like change. I would like coverage change. I would like political change… If you happen to’re Joe Biden, if you happen to’re Hunter Biden, if you’re a celeb, if you’re whoever, you’re going to get handled the identical actual method as another person. I do really feel there may be a variety of preferential therapy with the Division of Justice, and particularly the IRS. And I feel that we have to cease that.”
As he begins his new job, he’s nonetheless metabolizing what was executed through the course of what ought to have been a routine investigation: the isolation, the subterfuge, and the sluggish roll, the individuals he’d assumed can be and by legislation ought to have been allies, as a substitute treating him as expendable.
“There was simply a lot heartbreak that it grew to become like a melancholy, grew to become exhausting to stand up and do my job. You simply didn’t really feel appreciated in any respect,” he stated. “It’s type of loopy as a result of now that Donald Trump is president, issues have type of modified just a little bit. I feel some (colleagues) are working from a way of concern inside our company; that Gary and I’ll get promoted to positions the place we’ve some energy, and the power to create change within the IRS.”
If it’s inside the legislation, Ziegler says, that’s one thing his coworkers can rely on.
“I knew what we have been doing was proper,” he stated. “And searching again on the whole lot, I’d completely do it once more.”
