by Empower Oversight Staff
Empower Oversight today said that after 20 months of investigating, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) has confirmed that the IRS could not support its decision to remove agents from the Hunter Biden tax probe in retaliation for their protected whistleblower disclosures. Career nonpartisan staff at OSC, the agency that investigates whistleblower retaliation in the Executive Branch, found the IRS issued illegal gag orders and improperly removed IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley and IRS Special Agent Joseph Ziegler from the Biden investigation after the IRS learned they were blowing the whistle on preferential treatment for the former president’s son by Biden-appointed U.S. Attorneys.
Empower Oversight released OSC’s findings in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Chuck Grassley. In the letter, Empower Oversight president Tristan Leavitt asked Grassley to take his quadrennial request for a Rose Garden ceremony for whistleblowers to the next level and ask the president to elevate whistleblowers who have demonstrated outstanding performance and integrity to positions of authority to help reform their agencies.
“These career law enforcement professionals are being handcuffed, disrespected, and mistreated by supervisors in ways that are the polar opposite of how they were treated before making protected whistleblower disclosures,” said Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight. “Far from facing retaliation, these two are the sort of government employees who should be rewarded for their accomplishments and hard work with promotions to more senior leadership positions. Those who retaliated against them should be held accountable as required by the law, at a bare minimum.”
Despite OSC’s findings, Shapley and Ziegler continue to face ongoing retaliation, including changes in job duties, unreasonable scrutiny, and being bypassed for promotions. Leavitt’s letter includes a new protected disclosure to Congress about a specific example of the type of retaliation the whistleblowers face daily. As recently as January 2025, IRS management altered the date on a request from Shapley, seemingly to conceal its own delays and misrepresent the timeliness of Shapley’s request relating to an ongoing law enforcement operation.
Along with representing several whistleblowers, Empower Oversight is working to increase protections for whistleblowers and is calling for swift action to hold accountable those responsible for the retaliation.
“If real corrective action is not taken soon, the message to future whistleblowers will be crystal clear: keep your mouth shut,” Leavitt continued in the letter. “If IRS senior management can bully and ruin the careers of these public servants with no consequence for the retaliators and no meaningful remedy for the whistleblowers, no one will ever speak up again.”
For a copy of the letter to Grassley, click here.
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