Thread by @tristanleavitt

🚨🚨 Today IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have taken the extraordinary step of filing a motion to intervene in Hunter Biden's lawsuit against the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Read why below... 🧵 courtlistener.com/docket/6780378…

They filed it so they can do what the IRS has failed to: make clear that their protected disclosures were legal, pursuant to whistleblower protection laws, and critical to safeguarding the principle of equal treatment under the law regardless of party or familial relationship.

Hunter Biden first filed his lawsuit against the IRS last September after Congress called out his lobbying of his father's Administration to criminally charge the IRS whistleblowers (instead of himself!). waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/upl…

Normally a lawsuit like this would be defended by DOJ's Federal Programs Branch, which I worked with when I was general counsel for the @USMSPB. But instead, DOJ assigned two attorneys from the Tax Division--one of the very offices Shapley and Ziegler blew the whistle on.

When the IRS finally responded in Jan. 2024 to Hunter Biden's lawsuit, it failed to move to dismiss the whole lawsuit. We contacted DOJ and explained the taxpayer secrecy laws' whistleblower provision at 26 USC § 6103(f)(5) and the congressional process.

When Hunter Biden filed an amended complaint after that, DOJ had another bite at the apple. But once again, their February 27 court filing failed to even *reference* the whistleblower protections, much less cite why that is a basis for dismissing the whole lawsuit altogether.

Of course, DOJ's client here is the IRS--the same agency that took the whistleblowers off the Hunter Biden case, imposed illegal gag orders on them, and tried to make it look in Hunter's criminal prosecution like the whistleblowers are under investigation.

There are clear conflicts here, and on April 4 we wrote a 20-page letter to Attorney General Garland laying out our concerns.

Only then did DOJ finally drop a footnote in a filing last Friday that they don't believe the IRS whistleblowers broke the law. Yet DOJ is still not moving to dismiss Hunter Biden's case in its entirety, despite several good-faith bases for doing so.

So we're asking to allow the whistleblowers to join the lawsuit and represent their own interests.

The filings consist of a 20-page Motion to Intervene, a Motion to Dismiss, and a 36-page memo in support of the Motion to Dismiss. You can find them here: empowr.us/irs-whistleblo…

The memo in support also has as an exhibit a 5-page chart that shows exactly where each "disclosure" Hunter Biden alleges Shapley and Ziegler made in the media had already been lawfully released by @WaysandMeansGOP, and was thus no longer covered by Section 6103 confidentiality.

In just the first 8 days after the @WaysandMeansGOP statutory release on June 22, 2023, the information was mentioned 3,956 times in 41 countries, including all 50 states. It clearly became part of the public domain.

Below are some highlights from the Motion to Intervene:

➡️ p. 1: Clear conflict between the interests of Hunter Biden, the IRS whistleblowers, and the governmental entities on which they blew the whistle

➡️ pp. 2-3: Shapley and Ziegler deserve the opportunity to defend their own interests, not leave it to the IRS and the Tax Division they blew the whistle on

➡️ pp. 11-14: Shapley and Ziegler have concrete interests in the lawsuit's outcome, like their careers, their reputations, and fending off other consequences like retaliatory criminal prosecution

➡️ pp. 14-15: While the IRS has some interests in common with the whistleblowers, so too may Hunter Biden if the lawsuit is not dismissed

➡️ pp. 16-17: Shapley and Ziegler deserve to have a voice and their own advocates

.@CBSNews: IRS whistleblowers ask judge to dismiss Hunter Biden's lawsuit against the tax agency
cbsnews.com/news/irs-whist…