IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler discussed in a wide-ranging “Pod Force One” interview the “unprecedented” level of corruption they said they observed while investigating Hunter Biden before a pardon from his presidential dad, Joe Biden, swept everything “under the rug.”
Shapley and Ziegler, who have since been promoted to leadership positions in the IRS, said the former first family had undue influence on their investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances.
“The Biden family lived five miles down from the office or a few miles down from the office. The guest house where Hunter Biden stayed for a while, five miles from the office,” Ziegler told The Post’s Miranda Devine of the five-year probe into the former president’s son’s $1.4 million tax delinquency.
“Throughout the investigation,” he said, “we heard about Joe Biden coming into the FBI office. I mean, it was really, really concerning from like, ‘Is this honestly the best place to work this tax investigation?’”
“Politics were so strong in in the district of Delaware, the state of Delaware,” he added, “for the first search warrant the judge made an improper comment … and she had to recuse herself from reviewing that affidavit and signing off on it … and everyone knew of the Biden family within that state because it’s so small and it’s such a tight-knit community.”
Hunter Biden ultimately pleaded guilty in federal court in September 2024 to felony tax offenses, but he didn’t end up in jail thanks to then-President Biden issuing a full and unconditional pardon in December 2024 — just as the younger Biden was to be sentenced in a separate gun case.
Ziegler and Shapley went on to lay out the entirety of their case — involving some uncharged accusations of failing to register as a foreign agent while landing lucrative paydays for gigs in Ukraine, Romania and China — before a “sweetheart” plea deal, a guilty plea to tax evasion and an eventual pardon by former President Joe Biden had everything “swept under the rug.”
“The money was going for the family, was always about enriching the Biden family,” added Shapley, who served as supervisory agent on the tax fraud case, “whether it was tuition … or any other types of bills.”
He noted the Biden scion sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company, for roughly five years while pulling down a salary of up to $1 million — despite lacking experience in that industry.
Texts on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop — which was confirmed to be authentic during the first son’s criminal trial on felony gun charges in Delaware in June 2024 — revealed at one point that he’d texted his daughter Naomi to gripe: “I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years.”
“It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” Hunter wrote in the January 2019 exchange.
Citing Hunter’s other exchange with a Chinese business associate before millions of dollars went to Biden family accounts and associates’ accounts, Shapley claimed that a good “shake down” for cash is “like a Biden family tradition.”
“Going back to the video of Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine saying, if you don’t fire Viktor Shokin by the time I leave, and he looks at his watch, he’s like, you’re not getting the money,” the now IRS chief criminal investigator noted in the podcast episode out Wednesday.
“This is like a Biden family tradition almost, right?” Shapley said. “To shake down people to get exactly what you want.”
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The 46th president repeatedly claimed he was not involved in his son’s business, even as House Republican investigators and communications from the discarded laptop produced instances in which he’d met and dined with foreign patrons working with Hunter.
In December 2023, Biden told a Post reporter that claims he acted “either illegally or unethically” with respect to his son Hunter and brother James’ business interests were “a bunch of lies” — despite public opinion surveys showing a majority of Americans felt the opposite.
“The scale here and the amount of access that the family had, and it goes on and on,” Shapley also said, “but the scale is really unprecedented.”
The whistleblowers noted in past congressional testimony and emphasized again in their podcast appearance that some of that influence ended up blocking them from taking key investigative steps — with Shapley saying that some disclosures from the laptop were kept from them by prosecutors, including Joe Biden’s email aliases and “code names.”
“Normally evidence flows to the investigators and then from the investigators to the prosecutors,” Ziegler explained. “And in this case, it flowed from the prosecutors, filtered to the investigators.”
Their book, which was published Nov. 11, is titled “The Whistleblowers vs. The Big Guy,” in a nod to the moniker Hunter’s associates used for the former vice president and future president while pursuing a multimillion-dollar deal with a Chinese energy conglomerate.
In February 2024 testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Hunter claimed he didn’t know “what the hell” one of the associates, James Gilliar, was talking about when trying to get Joe Biden involved in the business talks — while pointing out his dad had left the vice presidency beforehand.
“I shut it down, and the evidence of me shutting it down is the actual things you have as evidence,” Hunter said, according to a transcript of the proceedings.
“Remember that. The agreement, the executed agreement, the executed agreement to create a company that was never operated, that’s what happened. That’s the evidence you have … Nothing to do with my dad, zero.”
Ziegler said on the podcast in response: “I hope that they continue to unravel and pull these strings because there were multi-layers to the potential corruption that was involved in this.”
“You had involvement from the CIA,” he said, citing an affidavit he signed on May 14, 2024, and which was produced by the House Ways and Means Committee describing how officials at the agency allegedly blocked investigators from interviewing Hunter’s “sugar brother” Kevin Morris.
Morris ended up paying $6.5 million of the first son’s legal fees as well as $2 million of his tax delinquency before charges were brought.
Devine noted that the Department of Homeland Security was also pressured into obtaining a visa for Ye Jianming, the chairman of the energy company CEFC.
Ziegler went on: “You had the FBI leadership in New York, who was, that was an aspect of this investigation, who during the same time, that guy, I believe he was a special agent in charge, I don’t remember his name, but they’re finding out that there were some issues going on there. So I think that this story is gonna continue to get bigger and bigger, and I hope that it doesn’t just stop here.”
There’s also the violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which former special counsel and Delaware US Attorney David Weiss discussed in a transcribed interview with congressional investigators earlier this year.
“All the DC charges that was during the time frame of when the money was coming in from Ukraine, and he was the director and the board of Burisma, all of that didn’t get charged,” Shapley said, citing statutes of limitations that lapsed on Weiss’ watch.
“If that ever went to trial, then we would have had to thoroughly investigate the FARA stuff. We would have thoroughly investigated all the money related to Ukraine and it would likely have shown a lot more evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement,” Shapley added. “It’s almost criminal. It was obstruction.”
Neither said they were surprised by the president’s pardoning of his son, but both maintained that they would blow the whistle “again” even given all of the retaliation they faced from their agency and members of the Biden administration.
“Even after losing all of those to the what had happened throughout this last three years, speaking the truth is one of the most important things. I need to sleep at night,” Ziegler said. “When we put our badge on our hip as IRS special agents, we are making a pledge, we belong to kind of a brotherhood. That when we see something that’s wrong, we’re going to say something.”
