by John Solomon and Nicholas Ballasy
After helping to recover billions in taxpayer funds from tax cheats, IRS agent Gary Shapley was rising in stature and responsibility. He was in line for a big promotion and his plans for a new project to pursue tax evasion around the globe were on the fast tracks.
But all that, he says, came crashing down after he and a fellow agent blew the whistle last October on what they saw as political tampering from the DOJ in a tax evasion case against first son Hunter Biden.
“The actions taken by my leadership right now could be nothing but retaliation,” Shapley told Just the News in an exclusive interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “They know what prohibited personnel practices are, and they know how to how to try to engage in retaliatory activities that somehow you obfuscate that piece, whether it’s a prohibited personnel practice.”
In the interview plus earlier testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee made public last week, Shapley detailed a series of actions he viewed as retaliatory from the DOJ removing he and his entire team from the Biden case to being passed over for a promotion and seeing his special tax recovery project paused and then canceled.
During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on April 27, IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel was asked if he could commit to not taking retaliatory actions against whistleblowers.
“I can say without hesitation, any hesitation, there will be no retaliation for anyone making an allegation,” he said.
Shapley argued that he’s been retaliated against since October 2022.
“I was passed over for a promotion for which I was clearly most qualified. The special agent in charge and assistant special agent in charge of the Washington, D.C. Field Office have sent threats to the field office, suppressing additional potential whistleblowers from coming forward,” he said in the official interview transcript released by the committee.
“Even after IRS CI senior leadership had been made aware on a recurring basis that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice was acting improperly, they acquiesced to a DOJ request to remove the entire team from the Hunter Biden investigation, a team that had been investigating it for over 5 years. Passing the buck and deferring to others was a common theme with IRS CI leadership during this investigation,” he added.
He and his lawyers said some of the actions aren’t just reprisals but they are going to hurt taxpayers by preventing the IRS from recovering money that bad actors around the world are hiding from the federal government.
“What kind of what kind of mentality is there when an agency is more interested in retaliating against Gary Shapley than they are in putting bad guys, you know, collecting taxes for the taxpayer from bad guys who aren’t paying it,” attorney Jason Foster told Just the News.
Shapley said the status of a separate case involving a $6 billion entity is evidence that he’s being retaliated against after he went public with allegations about the Hunter Biden investigation.
He said the case was moving toward phase one, where actions would be taken against “high income non-filers,” after his team conducting about 120 interviews across the country. He revealed that this investigation was paused a few weeks ago.
“They’re not going to move forward with the phase one and it’s really disconcerting that the AUSAs [Assistant United States Attorneys] working the case are questioning whether or not it’s retaliation because of what’s going on. So there’s just a lot of things moving in the background that support the fact that this is just retaliation,” he said.
Following the release of Shapley’s interview transcript, House Republican committee chairs are seeking interviews with more than a dozen investigators who worked on the Hunter Biden case. The chairs wrote to senior leaders at the U.S. Department of Justice, IRS and the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) calling on them to make the investigators available for transcribed interviews.
Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes described Shapley as one of the most credible witnesses he has seen to date.
“This is the best whistleblower in modern history that I’ve seen,” he said on the Just the News Not Noise TV program. “This guy came prepared. I mean, he had all the goods. He did it exactly the right way and I mean, look, this is the biggest corruption scandal in politics in history. I mean, some $40 million that’s moving around.”
Shapley’s lawyers suggested Friday evening that the retaliation has continued in the form of criticism from Hunter Biden’s lawyers who have accused the agent of leaking, something that his team adamantly denies.
Hunter Biden attorney Abbe Lowell wrote to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith suggesting that Shapley and the other agent had chosen to blow the whistle “in an attempt to evade their own misconduct.”
The “timing of the agents’ leaks and your subsequent decision to release their statements do not seem innocent,” Lowell further contended, before suggesting that Smith had released the transcripts of those interviews to “feed the misinformation campaign to harm our client, Hunter Biden, as a vehicle to attack his father.”
Shapley’s attorneys stated their client has followed proper legal procedure.
“All the innuendo and bluster that Biden family lawyers can summon will not change the facts,” they said in a statement. “Lawful whistleblowing is the opposite of illegal leaking, and these bogus accusations against SSA Shapley by lawyers for the Biden family echo threatening emails sent by IRS leadership after the case agent also blew the whistle to the IRS Commissioner about favoritism in this case—as well as the chilling report that Biden attorneys have also lobbied the Biden Justice Department directly to target our client with criminal inquiry in further retaliation for blowing the whistle.”
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer and Editor in Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and executive roles at some of America’s most important journalism institutions, such as The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill.
Nicholas Ballasy has been breaking news for more than a decade in the nation’s capital and questioning political leaders about the most pressing issues facing the nation. Since 2008, Ballasy has interviewed former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Mitt Romney, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. John McCain, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and more.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House. Background Photo “Internal Revenue Service Federal Building” by Tony Webster. CC BY 2.0.
