In what might be the most inauspicious moment in the annals of American justice since William Jennings Bryan testified during the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Robert Hunter Biden has sued the Internal Revenue Service.
The reason: Whistleblowers told the world that he’s a tax finagler because — shame on them — they didn’t think he should receive special treatment because he’s the president’s son. The whistleblowers said federal officials undermined their probe of Biden.
The IRS violated the law, Biden alleges, when the whistleblowers and their attorneys spoke about the tax dodger’s tax dodging publicly. Biden is embarrassed, the lawsuit risibly alleges. And he deserves a big pay day for said embarrassment.
The Lawsuit
How a man video-recorded naked with a prostitute and wielding a gun could suffer embarrassment is a question for another day.
It suffices to say that Boy Biden is embarrassed, and the 27-page lawsuit explains how the IRS embarrassed him.
Biden didn’t lose his rights because he’s Sleepy Joe’s son, the lawsuit explained. And Biden didn’t sue because of the probe. Rather, the lawsuit “is about the decision by IRS employees, their representatives, and others to disregard their obligations and repeatedly and intentionally publicly disclose and disseminate Mr. Biden’s protected tax return information outside the exceptions for making disclosures in the law.”
Biden “cooperated fully” with the IRS as it tried to uncover just how much money he owed the agency. Yet “IRS agents have targeted and sought to embarrass Mr. Biden via public statements to the media in which they and their representatives disclosed confidential information about a private citizen’s tax matters,” the lawsuit alleges:
While Mr. Biden has been the victim of various leaks regarding the IRS investigation previously, most recently, two IRS agents — Mr. Gary Shapley and Mr. Joseph Ziegler — and their attorneys raised the stakes to unprecedented levels with their numerous public appearances and statements that blatantly violated Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code by engaging in a campaign to publicly smear Mr. Biden.
Worse still, the two whistleblowers knew that publicizing someone’s tax information violates federal law. Yet they “willfully” did so anyway, the lawsuit alleges.
Shapley’s attorney appeared on CBS, Fox News, and John Solomon’s podcast to discuss Biden’s tax shenanigans, and Shapley too appeared on CBS. Both appeared on Megan Kelly’s show. The lawsuit even cites the letter from Shapley’s attorney to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Shapley testified before the committee, and despite the warning not to discuss his testimony, he appeared on television:
The public disclosure of Mr. Biden’s confidential tax information in the face of these unambiguous admonitions included multiple interviews of Mr. Shapley that aired, and continue to air, on Fox News, CBS, The Megyn Kelly Show, and John Solomon Reports, and interviews of Mr. Ziegler that aired on CNN, The Megyn Kelly Show, and John Solomon Reports. During these interviews, Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler provided unsubstantiated and selectively chosen allegations of nefarious and potentially criminal behavior. These disclosures went beyond confirming the existence of an investigation or audit; rather, interviewers provided detailed allegations regarding the specific tax years under investigation, the amounts of deductions, the nature of those deductions, and allegations of liability regarding specific tax years and the amount thereof, that could only be known to them based on a review of the physical tax returns themselves.
After that, the two men revealed new allegations against Biden to CNN’s Jake Tapper, the lawsuit alleges.
The first count of the lawsuit alleges “willful or grossly negligent unauthorized disclosure of Biden’s tax information. The second count alleges a violation of the privacy act:
The IRS willfully and intentionally failed to establish appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to insure the security and confidentiality of records, including Mr. Biden’s confidential tax return information, and failed to protect against any anticipated threats or hazards to those records’ security or integrity, including those that could result in substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to any individual on whom information is maintained.
Biden wants the IRS, meaning the taxpayers, to cough up $1,000 damages “for each and every unauthorized disclosure,” along with punitive damages and attorney’s fees.
The lawsuit alleges 15 public disclosures.
Shapley’s Testimony
Again, forget Biden’s nude hijinks with a semi-automatic pistol and lady of the evening and his indictment on three felony gun charges.
Shapley testified that federal officials stymied the probe into Biden’s tax returns.
When the IRS prepared a search warrant for a storage unit of Biden’s, a U.S. attorney “simply reached out to Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told him about the storage unit, once again ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed,” Shapley told the committee:
My special agent in charge at the time emailed that she would be informing the director of field operations and the deputy chief of IRS-CI [Criminal Investigation] of her, quote, “frustration with the United States Attorney’s Office not allowing us to go forward with a search warrant.” To this day, I have no way of knowing if the documents from that unit were among those ultimately provided to our team.
As well, IRS agents wanted to question Hunter’s former business partner, Rob Walker, about the infamous “Big Guy” email dated May 13, 2017. It said Joe Biden would receive 10 percent of a deal Hunter supposedly inked with Chinese communists. Just before the 2020 election, former business pal Tony Bobulinski divulged the Biden-China connection and confirmed that the Big Guy was Joe Biden.
“Among other things, we wanted to question Walker about an email that said: ‘Ten held by H for the big guy,’” Shapley testified. “We had obvious questions like who was H, who the big guy was, and why this percentage was to be held separately with the association hidden.”
But, once again, a U.S. attorney squelched that inquiry. “She did not want to ask about the big guy and stated she did not want to ask questions about ‘dad,’” Shapley said.
