Whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, both affiliated with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), initiated a significant defamation lawsuit against Hunter Biden’s legal representative on Friday. In their testimonies presented to Congress in May and June 2023, Shapley and Ziegler accused officials within President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) of providing Hunter Biden with undue advantages during an investigation concerning his tax obligations and international business activities.
The two IRS whistleblowers, who have also disclosed additional information regarding Hunter Biden’s business operations and laptop, are now pursuing legal action against Abbe Lowell, the attorney representing the president’s son, in federal court. They are seeking a total of $20 million in damages, claiming that allegedly defamatory remarks have inflicted “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.”
The allegations against Lowell assert that he defamed both whistleblowers by making false and malicious claims regarding their supposed violations of grand jury secrecy regulations and taxpayer protection statutes. Furthermore, it is claimed that some of these defamatory remarks were significantly amplified by media coverage. Ziegler and Shapley are each pursuing $10 million in damages from Lowell.
Among the most critical allegations made by the whistleblowers are claims that the Biden Department of Justice initially denied Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss the authority to expand charges, that the Biden presidential transition team was informed in advance about plans to interview Hunter Biden, and that DOJ attorneys declined to collaborate with Weiss on the case.
In June 2023, Shapley disclosed a text message that Hunter Biden allegedly sent to a Chinese business associate in July 2017, in which he mentioned being “sitting here with [his] father” while awaiting the fulfillment of an unspecified “commitment.” Additionally, Shapley contended that the FBI had verified the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop in November 2019, prior to its emergence as the subject of a New York Post article that was effectively suppressed by social media platforms, which claimed the laptop’s contents might be part of a sophisticated Russian operation aimed at disrupting the 2020 election.
The whistleblowers’ complaint highlights Hunter Biden’s recent guilty plea to multiple federal tax offenses in California as evidence that their concerns regarding a politically motivated investigation were justified.
“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.
