Two IRS agents who came forward with allegations the Justice Department gave Hunter Biden special treatment are asking a judge to dismiss Biden’s lawsuit against the agency.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler filed a motion to intervene on Friday and argued the IRS and Justice Department have a conflict of interest in defending whistleblower disclosures that were critical of them.
“The conflicts of interest could not be more clear. Shapley and Ziegler blew the whistle against the handling of an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, the Justice Department’s Tax Division, and the IRS into the conduct of the sitting President’s son,” Shapley and Ziegler’s attorneys wrote.
“Without intervention, the Tax Division is now tasked with defending the legality of disclosures critical of the Tax Division and the IRS. The bottom line remains that Shapley and Ziegler did not violate the law in their disclosures and need the opportunity to intervene to defend their interests.”
The motion advocates the IRS whistleblowers’s right to intervention because the litigation is still in its early stages and the IRS, through its representation by the DOJ Tax Division, has allegedly failed to represent the interests of the whistleblowers.
In separate court filings on Friday, Shapley and Ziegler argued the case should be dismissed because their whistleblower disclosures are legally protected.
Hunter Biden filed the civil lawsuit against the IRS in September as part of his aggressive legal strategy against his political opponents. He is suing the IRS for alleged illegal disclosures by the whistleblowers, and the IRS is tasked with defending the two IRS agents who went public with their allegations.
Last year, the whistleblowers testified before congress with allegations the Justice Department slow-walked and obstructed investigative steps throughout the long-running criminal tax probe into Hunter Biden. They initially testified behind closed-doors to the House Ways and Means Committee and then appeared for a public hearing in July.
In addition, they provided a trove of evidentiary documents to the Ways and Means Committee released last fall to support their initial testimony. Shapley and Ziegler testified again in December and the latter turned over more documents to the committee.
House Republicans released a report in December detailing how testimony from numerous IRS, FBI, and DOJ officials corroborated the IRS agents’s allegations. The Justice Department has denied the whistleblowers’ allegations.
After the whistleblowers came forward, Hunter Biden’s guilty plea deal and pretrial diversion agreement with the Justice Department fell apart in court. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss special counsel shortly thereafter.
Shapley’s attorneys have asked the DOJ’s Inspector General to investigate Weiss over a “misleading” court filing where Weiss’s team of prosecutors appeared to imply the whistleblowers were under investigation.
The IRS whistleblowers celebrated the bombshell federal tax indictment against Hunter Biden in December for allegedly failing to pay over $1 million in taxes over a four year period.
Special counsel Weiss and his team are prosecuting Hunter Biden for three federal gun charges and nine federal tax charges, with both cases set to go to trial next month. The gun trial is set to begin on June 3 after Biden’s attorneys unsuccessfully fought to get the case delayed and failed in their attempts to have the charges dismissed.
The criminal trials will likely become a major political liability for Hunter’s father, President Joe Biden.