Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday said that Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers who spoke out on the Hunter Biden case have been hired as senior advisors for the Treasury Department.
“I am pleased to welcome Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler to the Treasury Department, where they will help us drive much-needed cultural reform within the IRS,” Bessent said in a written statement.
“These veteran civil servants join us to help further the agency’s focus on collections, modernization, and customer service, so we can deliver a more effective and efficient IRS experience for hardworking American taxpayers. I appreciate Senator Grassley’s efforts in Congress to support whistleblower protections in order to improve transparency, accountability, and root out the culture of retaliation,” he continued.
The Trump administration recently announced its efforts to modernize the IRS’s operations.
Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler spent years alleging that the Biden administration had frustrated efforts to investigate alleged tax and gun violations committed by Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
Breitbart News wrote in 2023:
Speaking with Bret Baier on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Shapley said one of the biggest challenges of investigating Hunter Biden was the inability to ask about the “big guy,” an alias that whistleblower Tony Bobulinski originally revealed as Joe Biden from his dealings between the Bidens and a Chinese entity.
“The crux of one of the issues here is that we weren’t allowed to ask questions about to add. We weren’t allowed to ask about the ‘big guy,’” he said. “We weren’t allowed to include certain names and document requests and search warrants. So we were precluded from following that line of questioning.”
“We were conducting investigation of Hunter Biden, and we were trying to follow the normal process,” he added. “There are definitely hindrances that I’ve never seen before in my 14 years concerning this investigation that didn’t allow us to follow through on investigation of any other individual to include President Biden.”
Ziegler revealed that, in 2021, he drafted a memo recommending FBI prosecutors charge Hunter Biden with multiple felonies and misdemeanors.
“In August of 2022, we had a phone call with all of the assigned prosecutors and they had said that all four of them were recommending the approval of felony and misdemeanor tax charges,” Ziegler said in 2023.
In June 2023 Hunter Biden pled guilty to two federal tax violation charges and one gun possession violation.
During the waning days of his administration, President Biden pardoned Hunter for offenses that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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