(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Hunter Biden, the embattled son of disgraced former President Joe Biden, has dropped his longshot lawsuit against the two IRS whistleblowers who exposed how the federal government shielded him from criminal scrutiny for years.
Filed in 2023, the lawsuit claimed IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler had leaked damaging information to embarrass him. But the suit was based on claims detached from reality.
In a statement, the whistleblowers condemned the now-dropped suit as a desperate attempt by Hunter to silence them.
“It’s always been clear that the lawsuit was an attempt to intimidate us,” Shapley and Ziegler said, according to the New York Post. “Intimidation and retaliation were never going to work. We truly wanted our day in court to provide the complete story, but it appears Mr. Biden was afraid to actually fight this case in a court of law after all.”
They added, “His voluntary dismissal of the case tells you everything you need to know about who was right and who was wrong.”
As reported by the Post, the voluntary dismissal comes weeks after Hunter attorneys—Abbe David Lowell, Christopher Man, David Kolansky and Isabella Oishi—withdrew from the case.
Shapley and Ziegler first made national headlines when they told CBS News in 2023 that the Biden-led DOJ slow-walked a criminal investigation into Hunter’s tax and business dealings.
According to their testimony, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland was the final decision-maker in the Hunter case, despite previous claims that then-U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss had full independence “to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”
The whistleblowers also revealed that DOJ investigators blocked IRS agents from probing potential foreign agent violations. What’s worse, they alleged that prosecutors allowed multiple statutes of limitations to expire.
After years of delays, Hunter was eventually charged with making false statements about drug use on a federal gun form and with willfully failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes.
He never faced charges over his controversial overseas business ventures or what Republicans have long described as an “influence-peddling scheme.”
Hunter was found guilty on the gun charge and pleaded guilty to tax violations. He was ultimately pardoned by his father, who became the first president in U.S. history to exploit his pardon powers to shield his son from criminal accountability.
The cover-up did not end there.
Biden also pardoned all his siblings and their spouses for any criminal conduct committed over the last 11 years.
Meanwhile, Shapley and Ziegler were promoted after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025.
Shapley now serves as deputy chief for IRS Criminal Investigation, while Ziegler was appointed a senior adviser for IRS reform in the Treasury Department.
