President Donald Trump’s administration is hiring two IRS agents who alleged a coverup of Hunter Biden’s tax crimes, tasking them with leading “reform” at the agency.
The Treasury Department announced in a Tuesday press release that whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler will be senior advisors at the department. The agents came into the spotlight in 2023, alleging that federal agents slow-walked investigations into former President Joe Biden’s son and later alleged that the Biden administration tried to wreck their careers for doing so.
“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,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday. The secretary said the two men “will help us drive much-needed cultural reform within the IRS.”
The whistleblowers testified to Congress during Biden’s presidency that leadership in the Department of Justice (DOJ) continuously hindered their roles in probing Hunter Biden, who was later convicted on charges of falsifying tax returns and for false statements relating to the purchase of a gun during his sordid years of foreign business ties and heavy drug use. His father pardoned him of all crimes in his final days in office despite repeatedly promising the public he wouldn’t.
The Biden administration put Shapley and Ziegler’s careers in administrative limbo before President Donald Trump took office, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. Ziegler even testified that the IRS threatened him with “criminal conduct” for sending an email voicing his concerns. The agency never ruled on their claims of professional retaliation against them despite years’ worth of time, their attorney told the DCNF in January.
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who supported the agents’ whistleblower efforts, called their promotion a step toward “justice.” The Trump administration is sending “a clear signal that pointing out wrongdoing is an honorable thing [to] do,” he said in an X post Tuesday.
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