Joe Ziegler is not a beaten man – not for his antagonists’ lack of trying. Across his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley were shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling their efforts to bring charges against a sitting president’s son, the agents went public as whistleblowers in 2023.
The result, during the hyper-polarized years spanning the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump administrations, was predictable: The two men were accused of partisanship, lambasted by Democratic members of Congress and the press, and had their reputations impugned by high-powered lawyers paid for by those sympathetic to the Bidens.
The fortunes of these political victims have now turned. In mid-March, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Ziegler and Shapley would start work as senior advisers, helping to guide tax reform.
Which is all the agents had ever wanted and tried to do. “At the end of the day, this is truly about doing the right thing and standing up for what is right,” Ziegler would testify before the House Ways & Means Committee in December 2023. “I will say this again and again, this is much bigger than the Hunter Biden investigation. This was not a personal attack on Hunter Biden, but a call for change.”
While the reprisals they say they endured for their acts of conscience appear to have ended, Ziegler and Shapely do not want their experience to be memory-holed – especially because other whistleblowers who spoke out during the Biden administration have received less attention for their tribulations. Speaking with RealClearInvestigations recently, the two men gave their first in-depth interviews on the years-long case that upended their lives and careers.
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“He was paying individuals, so, prostitutes, that were associated with that company,” Ziegler said. A little digging revealed Hunter Biden’s ex-wife reporting he had not paid his taxes and, in their divorce filings, mentioning “a very large diamond he received,” a gem allegedly valued at $80,000 and given to him by an executive at a Chinese energy company.
“I look into our IRS systems and see that he had unfiled tax returns for multiple years,” said Ziegler. “When you fail to file tax returns and you have income that qualifies you to file tax returns, that’s a misdemeanor offense.”
A misdemeanor that can rise to the level of a felony, depending on the dollar amount and the length of time the would-be filer has been delinquent. Hunter Biden looked to qualify on both counts.
The case should have been a cakewalk, and yet almost immediately, Ziegler suspected he was being stonewalled: Interviews he requested were denied, and coworkers subtly and not so subtly warned him to tap the brakes.
“My manager at the time, who wasn’t Gary [Shapley], made it very, very hard for me,” Ziegler told RCI. “He said, ‘When you work with high-profile people like this, you need way more information, way more evidence.’ He essentially set the bar higher, which I didn’t agree with at all.”
Even if he had set the bar higher, Hunter Biden’s actions would have cleared it, with multiple and well-documented instances of tax evasion, including not reporting more than $1 million in payments from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Still, Ziegler noted a determined lack of urgency within the IRS to move the case along. “It was a lot of hard work on my end, pushing everyone on the case to be like, ‘We need to do this. We need to go interview these people.’ And every single time I hit a roadblock or hit someone telling me, ‘No, we shouldn’t do that.’”
After more than a year of pushback, Ziegler found an ally in Shapley, who took control of the investigation in January 2020.
A supervisory special agent with 14 years at the agency, Shapley assumed the case would be handled routinely. “I expected everyone was going to act appropriately,” he said. “It was just another case, and that’s how I approached it.”
And not much of one, compared to others he’d worked on, including getting Credit Suisse to plead guilty in 2014 to helping U.S. taxpayers hide offshore accounts, resulting in a $2.6 billion fine.
“When you stick to just the way that it’s always been done, then it doesn't matter who you’re investigating,” he said. “I really thought that, even though [people] did a lot of these things that shielded Joe Biden from a full investigation, that they were still going to do the right thing concerning Hunter Biden.”
This might have been the case had Trump/Biden politics not become a blood sport. Shapley found no appetite within his department to issue subpoenas or execute search warrants. The lack of access accelerated when Joe Biden became the presidential nominee. A request in late 2020 to search a guest house he owned and in which Hunter Biden was staying was denied, as were requests to interview Biden family members.
Why the hold-ups? Shapley said he’d “never been told by our leadership, ‘nod nod, wink wink,’” that they were meant to handle the case with a delicacy that actually prevented them from doing their jobs. Fearing their investigation was turning into Kabuki theater, Shapley began creating a second record of what the agents saw as untoward resistance.
“When we started having problems, I started documenting issues and deviations from normal procedures,” said Shapley.“With the search warrants that weren’t being executed, even though there was probable cause, that’s when it became apparent that he [Hunter Biden] was receiving special treatment.”
The agents, too, were receiving special treatment of a sort. Ziegler was yanked off other investigations he was working on. Requests that Shapley made went unacknowledged or disappeared into the ether. And both agents saw colleagues keep their distance, reluctant apparently to offer even the appearance of support.
“They completely isolated us,” said Ziegler. “No one reaching out, no one asking questions. There was a lack of empathy, a lack of caring within my agency, and it’s sad.”
For two years, he and Shapley engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to move the Hunter Biden case along, a situation that went from remarkable to ludicrous to untenable.
“It was me and Gary on weekly FaceTime calls, literally [saying], ‘I can’t believe they did this. I can’t believe they’re not letting me do my job. They’re not letting us do the right thing,’” said Ziegler. “And then it culminated to a point where we ended up blowing the whistle.”
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Their concern and frustration grew ever more intense because the facts of wrongdoing the agents uncovered were so clear. Between 2014 and 2019, they found that Hunter Biden had failed to pay taxes on more than $8.3 million in income derived from various sources, including those in China, Ukraine, and Romania.
Whether some of that money landed in the bank accounts of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. may continue to be debated until only cockroaches roam the earth, but one can assume the people who gave the younger Biden a 3.4-carat diamond were at least hoping for access to his father.
The evidence showed that Hunter Biden evaded paying taxes by filing false returns, claiming personal expenses such as payments to prostitutes, a $25,000 sex club membership, and, more wholesome if alas nondeductible, college tuition for his children. As a result, he owed at least $1.4 million in federal taxes, elevating his alleged violations to a possible felony for tax evasion and fraud. The alleged crimes – which also included another possible felony charge for lying on a gun permit in 2018 – occurred during the time when Hunter Biden has described himself as a heavy user of crack cocaine.
Despite Ziegler and Shapley’s efforts, their investigation might have been buried if Hunter Biden had not failed to retrieve the laptop he left at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop in 2019. Although the FBI has admitted it took possession of the computer that same year and soon verified it belonged to Hunter Biden, its contents – which documented Joe’s connections to his son’s business affairs along with salacious photos – surfaced only in October 2020, after Trump adviser Rudy Guiliani gave the New York Post a copy of the hard drive he said he had received from the repair shop owner. In an echo of the pushback Ziegler and Shapley were experiencing, Biden supporters worked to discredit the laptop story.
Contrary to the media circus, Ziegler knew the laptop was not, as Joe Biden would claim, a “Russian plant.”
“Yes, absolutely,” he told RCI in March from his home in Atlanta. His team was aware of the contents of the laptop but had made no hay from it; it was just another part of the investigation, which made the reaction to its discovery, including 51 former senior intelligence officials publishing a letter claiming the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” seem especially bizarre.
“Comparing that to the information we had on our end is, in hindsight, extremely disappointing,” he said. “But I guess at the time I just didn’t think about the politics of it.”
By late 2020, Shapley had come to see nothing but the politics of it, including among fellow federal employees whose unwillingness to hold Hunter Biden accountable for his actions Shapley found disappointing, if unsurprising, the “yes man’s” way forward.
“These people were institutionalized by the federal government. They are only in those very high positions because they played this game to move up the ladder,” he said from his office in Baltimore. A ladder being held firmly in place by Team Biden.
There was also something too clever by half in the higher-ups putting Shapley, who for years had received the agency’s highest recommendations, in charge of a case the IRS seemed to be doing its best to spike.
“They knew I was the expert, and they knew that I knew more than them about working these types of cases, so they put me on the hot seat,” he said. “Then they stuck their head in the sand, and pretended that everything was going to be fine ... and [that] the problems you were moving into in 2020, 2021, and 2022 were just going to go away.”
Meanwhile, the chances of any charges being filed against Hunter Biden were growing tenuous. Shapley was alert to this eventuality when he decided to take notes during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, where U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was overseeing the case, stated he was “not the deciding person” on whether charges would be filed.
“He said that he had to go to the President Biden-appointed U.S. Attorneys to get approval and they said no,” recalled Shapley. Weiss, a Trump appointee, had been working on the Hunter Biden case since 2020. When Merrick Garland became attorney general in 2021, he allowed Weiss to continue the probe, in part to avoid the appearance of political interference. Then why, Shapley wondered, was Weiss more than a year later saying he didn’t have the authority? That Weiss later denied he’d ever said he didn’t have official approval did not wash with Shapley, whose meeting notes – which he’d shared contemporaneously with other attendees – specifically had Weiss saying he’d been told he was “not the deciding person on whether charges were filed.”
“My red line meeting was Oct. 7,” he said, and afterward, he “immediately started seeking a counsel to help me legally follow the legal path to blow the whistle.”
Ziegler’s red line intersected with Shapley’s on May 15, 2023, when the agents learned Hunter Biden would be offered a deferred prosecution agreement, which meant he would not only not face felony charges; he would not be charged with anything at all. May 15 was also the day the agents learned they’d been removed from the Hunter Biden investigation in December 2022, but that no one had bothered to tell them. “Leaders within my organization, to hear they had removed us six months prior to actually removing us?” said Ziegler. “This was a huge slap in the face.”
As for why they had been taken off the investigation, the men were told the IRS and DOJ had not known in December whether the case would move forward, and thus, the departments had not wanted to waste resources. “Which is a bunch of malarkey,” said Shapley, as was Hunter Biden being allowed to slip away from the charges he and Ziegler had worked hard to make stick.
To the agents, this was a betrayal on multiple levels. First, by colleagues inside the department and out (“They come to my house and with their wife and children, I know these people,” said Shapley, of DOJ tax prosecutors who “went behind my back to get me removed from the case”), second, to the jobs they had constitutionally pledged to carry out, and third, of the country’s taxpayers, in that it created a two-tiered system of justice, one for regular Americans, the other for a president’s son and anyone else the people at the top decided to protect.
“What kind of leaders remove an entire team from a high-profile case without telling them?” Shapley would later ask in a hearing before the House Ways & Means Committee.
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Becoming the public faces of the Hunter Biden case, which included testifying before Congress and running the media gauntlet, meant the agents were in for new and different types of punishment. Explaining that the tax crimes Hunter Biden had committed, which Ziegler testified to in excruciating detail, should be adjudicated as they would be for any other citizen was cast as batting against Team Blue. This would not do. In the run-up to another Trump/Biden face-off, the powers that be needed to vanquish (or at least humiliate) their perceived enemies, to turn the poison arrow away from their candidate and his kid.
“It was extremely important to Gary and me that we stay as bipartisan as we could possibly stay,” said Ziegler of their many appearances on network news shows. “And I think as much as we tried to do that effort, I think the left side of the media didn’t, in my opinion, do a good enough job... it was kind of like, ‘Anyone else but Trump, we have to protect!’”
“I remember [Congressman] Dan Goldman giving a press conference after an oversight committee, saying, ‘This is just a disagreement between investigators and prosecutors, and the prosecutors know what’s right,’” recalled Shapley. “‘The prosecutors are smart, the [IRS agents] are stupid,’ is essentially what he said. And I haven’t gotten a sorry yet from him.”
Attacks also came from the right, as when Ziegler’s personal information was leaked online by a former Trump aide who believed that Ziegler, being a Democrat and gay, was a secret liberal intent on stalling the Hunter Biden case. “I got a phone call right around Christmas time that said, ‘Hey, just so you know, your driver’s license is out there in the media. He has a whole bunch of pictures, photos of you and your partner.’” Ziegler paused. “He is now my ex-partner. So, that was another piece or element as a part of this investigation.”
The exposure and stress proved too much for the marriage. “I do think,” he said, “it played a role in essentially losing that relationship.”
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In a case this controversial, in a climate where tearing down the other side had become reflexive, things were bound to get messier. Hunter Biden’s plea deal – which had him pleading guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges for failing to pay taxes in 2017 and 2018, as well as a pretrial diversion program for a felony gun charge – collapsed in July 2023 when the judge raised concerns about the scope of immunity the deal. “When the judge literally struck down that plea, I cried,” said Ziegler. “I was like, finally, someone gets it.”
The relief would not last. Hunter Biden sued the IRS that September, claiming the agency failed to protect his tax records. (As of this writing, the case remains ongoing.) In September 2024, Ziegler and Shapley sued Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, for defamation, seeking $20 million in damages. This was in response to Lowell’s having written a letter to the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee in June 2023, alleging the agents had improperly released tax information, and characterizing them as “self-styled IRS ‘whistleblowers’ who may be claiming that title in an attempt to evade their own misconduct [which] was an obvious ploy to feed the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father.” (Lowell’s request that the case against him be dismissed was denied.)
And the big one, which shocked just about no one: On Dec. 1, 2024, outgoing president Joe Biden granted a “full and unconditional pardon” to Hunter Biden for federal tax and gun convictions, as well as any other federal offenses he may have committed since Jan. 1, 2014. This, despite repeatedly having stated he would rule out a pardon for his son. (On the last day of his presidency, Biden further issued blanket pardons for six other family members.)
The Hunter Biden pardon was seen, variously, as a display of fatherly devotion; a cynical way to bury Biden family tracks; a preemptive measure to keep Hunter Biden from the well-known vengefulness of the incoming president; and a giant waste of taxpayer dollars and attention.
“The pardon was the biggest positive for the Republican Party and the biggest hit against the Democratic Party that could have possibly happened,” is how Shapley saw it. “The Democratic Party can no longer say, ‘We’re for the little guy, that we’ll hold rich people accountable, et cetera, et cetera.’ And the Republicans, they can always go back and say, ‘Well, the Democrat president lied to the American people and then pardoned his felon son.’”
“Those pardons that were handed down at the last day of his presidency would’ve never happened if we didn’t do what we did,” said Ziegler. “You can try and discredit me as much as you want. But since day one, since we came forward, none of what I testified to changed. There was nothing where I had to come out and say, ‘Oh, yep, what I said there wasn’t accurate.’ We came out, we testified [before Congress], and then we gave them the receipts. Regardless of what anyone else says out there, we follow the law.”
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel agreed when, in December 2024, it determined that Ziegler and Shapley had been retaliated against by the IRS, including their being improperly removed from the Hunter Biden investigation.
Was the Trump administration playing tit-for-tat when they reinstated the agents, who, in 2026, will transition to senior leadership roles within the IRS? Almost assuredly, or at least in part. And yet that has no bearing on the fact that the two men stood firm when all around them others were willing not to; were willing to compromise – some of whom now are greeting Shapley and Ziegler as heroes.
“The rank and file agent here that has paid any intention, they know the burden that I assumed by doing the right thing, and they support me,” said Shapley. “One of them in particular said, ‘You guys did the right thing. You’re going to be teaching ethics classes in two years here.’”
Shapley estimated that “hundreds and hundreds of people” have come out in support. “But none,” he said, “have come out publicly.”
Back home in Atlanta, Ziegler remains incredulous that anyone would think he did what he did for political reasons.
“Why blow up your life, get a divorce, ruin your reputation? Why do all of this?” he asked. “To be honest with you, I want change. I want policy change. I want political change... If you’re Joe Biden, if you’re Hunter Biden, if you are a celebrity, if you are whoever, you are going to get treated the same exact way as someone else. I do feel there is a lot of preferential treatment with the Department of Justice, and specifically the IRS. And I think that we need to stop that.”
As he starts his new job, he is still metabolizing what was done during the course of what should have been a routine investigation: the isolation, the subterfuge, and the slow roll, the people he’d assumed would be and by law should have been allies, instead treating him as expendable.
“There was just so much heartbreak that it became like a depression, became hard to get up and do my job. You just didn’t feel appreciated at all,” he said. “It’s kind of crazy because now that Donald Trump is president, things have kind of changed a little bit. I think some [colleagues] are working from a sense of fear within our agency; that Gary and I will get promoted to positions where we have some power, and the ability to create change in the IRS.”
If it’s within the law, Ziegler says, that’s something his coworkers can count on.
“I knew what we were doing was right,” he said. “And looking back on everything, I would absolutely do it again.”
