Two IRS agents who blew the whistle on the Biden Department of Justice's slow-walking of the Hunter Biden investigation filed a $20 million defamation lawsuit against an attorney for the president's son, accusing him of operating with "clear malice."
IRS investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler have accused attorney Abbe Lowell of retaliating against them after they exposed the DOJ's lax approach to the Hunter Biden tax evasion probe. The lawsuit, which was filed in D.C. court, states that the case is being brought to "vindicate their reputations for the incredible and malicious harm they have suffered."
The two investigators further claim that as whistleblowers ,they acted "with honor and integrity in exposing conflicts of interest, preferential treatment, and political motivations that they reasonably believed were interfering with the criminal tax investigation of Hunter Biden."
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While following legal statutes, Lowell "falsely and maliciously" accused them of committing crimes, "namely, the illegal disclosure of grand jury materials and taxpayer return information despite the fact that they never publicly discussed return[ing] information that was not already public," the two men claim.
"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 lawsuit reads.
In one example, the pair cited a September 14, 2023 letter that Lowell sent to several congressional committees in which he falsely accused them of violating grand jury secrecy rules and the taxpayer confidentiality statute. "This was an act designed to harm Shapley and Ziegler by republishing the entire package of previous defamatory falsehoods in a larger forum," the complaint states.
Furthermore, the whistleblowers accuse Lowell of releasing a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, which "falsely stated that Shapley and Ziegler had disseminated 'grand jury and taxpayer information, including through multiple nationally-televised on-camera interviews of [Shapley],' which it called a 'clear-cut' crime unprotected by any whistleblower statute or other federal law.'"
Each IRS investigator is suing Lowell for $10 million each.
Shapley, who worked on the Hunter Biden probe since its inception and Ziegler, a 13-year agency veteran, alleged that the Hunter Biden probe was plagued by political interference in a series of whistleblower disclosures last year. The president's son initially secured a generous plea deal from then U.S. attorney David Weiss, which was ultimately scrapped by a U.S. district judge.
Hunter was recently convicted on federal firearms charges and recently pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges in a separate case.
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