WASHINGTON – Empower Oversight has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for failing to respond to multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for its communications related to IRS whistleblowers Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Gary Shapley and Special Agent (SA) Joe Ziegler and the protected disclosures they made to Congress.
The lawsuit comes as Shapley and Ziegler’s legal team appeals a recent ruling denying their request to intervene in Hunter Biden’s lawsuit against the IRS and as a recently filed defamation lawsuit moves forward against Biden family lawyer Abbe Lowell for claiming they broke the law by releasing non-public information. Empower Oversight launched a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign for this and other whistleblower defamation lawsuits at www.DefendWhistleblowers.com.
Empower Oversight’s seven FOIA requests on DOJ communications regarding Shapley and Ziegler date back to September 2023. DOJ has cited “unusual circumstances” for refusing to provide the requested records by the statutory deadlines.
“After SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler came forward the Justice Department suddenly negotiated a sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden. Soon thereafter, Biden family lawyers started lobbying their client’s father’s Justice Department to prosecute these two very courageous whistleblowers, and someone—either the Justice Department or Biden family lawyers—leaked that fact to the press. This is just a small part of the retaliation and lies the whistleblowers have endured. It’s time for the Justice Department to come clean about what role it played in all of this,” Empower Oversight president Tristan Leavitt said.
According to public reports, DOJ initiated negotiations on the Hunter Biden plea deal on May 15, 2023—approximately one month after SSA Shapley’s counsel first contacted Congress seeking to blow the whistle, and the same day SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler were told they were being removed from the Hunter Biden case.
Approximately six weeks later, after the House Ways and Means Committee voted to release the IRS whistleblower testimony to the public, the New York Times revealed that Biden family lawyers had sent a letter to DOJ asking it to investigate the whistleblowers. When Biden’s lawyers later argued to Judge Maryellen Noreika that the IRS whistleblowers had violated taxpayer privacy and grand jury secrecy rules, Judge Noreika rejected their arguments. Two days later, the New York Times reported Biden’s lawyers continued to argue to DOJ that “by disclosing details about the investigation to Congress, they broke the law and should be prosecuted.”
The Biden family lawyers’ efforts resulted in three House Committees writing to both the Biden lawyers and to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting their communications with one another, which are not privileged. On September 14, 2023, Abbe Lowell produced the communications to the committees and republished them to the press, the basis for the IRS whistleblowers’ recent defamation lawsuit.
When Hunter Biden subsequently filed a lawsuit against the IRS claiming his taxpayer privacy had been violated, DOJ assigned the case to its Tax Division—one of the offices Shapley and Ziegler had blown the whistle on. The Tax Division initially failed to defend against the false allegations, omitting any mention of the whistleblower provision in the taxpayer privacy laws and only belatedly burying in a footnote that DOJ did not believe the whistleblowers broke the law. Because of DOJ’s failure to vigorously defend against the lawsuit, Empower Oversight wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting additional DOJ communications, and SSA Shapley and SA Ziegler ultimately moved to intervene in Hunter Biden’s lawsuit. The motion was recently denied, which Shapley and Ziegler are appealing.
To read the statement from Shapley’s legal team about the intervention appeal, click here.
To read the defamation lawsuit, click here.
To read the FOIA lawsuit, click here. Empower Oversight is represented in the lawsuit by the American Center for Law and Justice.
To read about the previous FOIA requests click the following links:
Sept. 7, 2023 FOIA request
Sept. 25, 2023 FOIA request
Sept. 26, 2023 FOIA request
April 4, 2024 FOIA request (letter to Garland)
May 7, 2024 FOIA request
May 13, 2024 FOIA request
June 5, 2024 FOIA request
###