An attorney for two IRS whistleblowers who alleged a Justice Department cover-up in the tax investigation of Hunter Biden accused Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday of allowing conflicts of interests that have led to alleged retaliation against his clients — and prosecutors aiding the president’s son in criminal cases.
In a letter obtained by The Post, Empower Oversight president Tristan Leavitt demanded Garland “put a stop” to any retaliation against the IRS agents and eliminate conflicts of interest related to cases involving the first son.
“On issues related to the whistleblowers, Department attorneys and Hunter Biden’s attorneys are simply not adversarial in these cases,” Leavitt said. “They are acting as if they are on the same side.”
“These conflicts demand your immediate attention,” he added. “The public deserves to know whether and to what extent you have done your duty to mitigate these conflicts of interest and to ensure that the Department stops whistleblower retaliation rather than actively participating in it.”
Leavitt added that he has never been told whether his clients — IRS supervisory special agent Gary Shapley and special agent Joseph Ziegler — are the subject of a federal investigation despite their conduct being lawful.
Hunter Biden defense attorney Abbe Lowell has repeatedly accused the whistleblowers of potential misconduct after they disclosed details about his client’s tax filings to Congress — an act protected by federal whistleblowing statutes.
The first son’s former defense lawyer, Christopher Clark, also requested a DOJ investigation into the whistleblowers, calling the IRS disclosures to lawmakers and the media a “clear-cut crime.”
Shapley and Ziegler made the protected disclosures to the House Ways and Means Committee last year before the implosion of Hunter’s probation-only plea deal on tax and gun charges in Delaware.
The committee voted to release those interviews and the two later publicly testified that the DOJ blocked them from taking certain investigative steps, including interviewing witnesses and accessing evidence from the first son’s abandoned laptop, during their five-year tax probe of the president’s son.
Shapley and Ziegler also accused federal prosecutors in the office of Delaware US Attorney David Weiss of tipping off Hunter’s defense team about a planned search of his storage locker — and claimed Garland had lied in sworn congressional testimony about Weiss’ ability to bring charges against the first son.
Garland elevated Weiss to special counsel status Aug. 11, weeks after the “sweetheart” plea deal, as critics called it, collapsed in a Delaware federal courtroom.
Weiss went on to indict Hunter, now 54, in Wilmington for lying about his crack cocaine addiction on a federal gun-purchasing form, and in Los Angeles for evading $1.4 million in tax payments and falsifying IRS filings between 2016 and 2019.
Shapley and Ziegler filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel against Weiss days after being removed from the tax case last year, one of many related potential conflicts of interest, given Weiss’ alleged “preferential treatment involving Mr. Biden,” according to Leavitt.
Leavitt also noted in his letter that IRS agents blew the whistle on DOJ officials intimately involved in both cases, as well as in a separate lawsuit Hunter’s attorneys filed against the IRS for alleged improper leaks of his tax information.
The Justice Department has “bizarrely” excluded in case filings the federal laws that protect whistleblowers from prosecution for disclosing tax information, Leavitt added, in a seeming attempt to stick it to IRS agents by suggesting their conduct was improper.
“[T]he Department pretends this critical portion of the taxpayer privacy law doesn’t exist and conspicuously avoids citing or relying on it in relevant filings—even though it would be helpful to the Government’s position,” the Empower boss said.
Weiss’ team in recent filings referenced “multiple IRS communications” that the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates retaliation against federal employees, ordered the prosecutor to retract “given their failure to comply with whistleblower protection laws.”
But his prosecutors did request redactions in a filing about a “potential ongoing investigation” allegedly related to the IRS whistleblowers, House impeachment leaders revealed in a letter earlier this week.
The IRS civil suit also poses conflicts of interest, since it is “being led by two attorneys from the Department’s Tax Division—one of the very offices about which [Supervisory Special Agent] Shapley and [Special Agent] Ziegler made protected disclosures to Congress about the slow-walking of the case against the President’s son,” Leavitt said.
“The Department’s behavior raises the prospect that the Department may fail to zealously defend the Government’s interests in this lawsuit, simply out of a desire to see critics of the President’s son punished,” he added.
The Post has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.