Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Tuesday that two Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblowers who faced political persecution over their roles in the tax evasion investigation of Hunter Biden will return to the agency as advisers.
Bessent said that Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler will join the Treasury Department as senior advisers after they were wrongfully targeted for their role in the investigation. Shapley was a senior supervisory special agent at the IRS, while Ziegler was a special agent.
“I went and decided I would bring them into Treasury, give them a year to investigate the wrongdoing that’s going on at the IRS, and then they will go back in and Mr. Shapley will serve as the senior deputy for investigations and enforcement,” Bessent said Tuesday on FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria.”
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“So we’ll have them in the Treasury. We’ll learn what’s been going on at the IRS. What’s been wrong? How could this Hunter Biden nonsense have happened? And we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone again, whether they’re Republicans, Democrats or Independents,” Bessent said.
Earlier this month, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., said that the findings of the Office of Special Counsel’s probe into the treatment of Shapley and Ziegler showed the “IRS illegally punished two decorated investigators… for doing their duty and stepping forward with evidence of corruption in the federal government, merely because their efforts implicated President Biden.”
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Smith added that the IRS “issued illegal gag orders and improperly removed these investigators from an investigation.”
Bessent said in his Tuesday interview that it’s “really a travesty what happened here, as these two gentlemen were dedicated civil servants trying to do their jobs, and they were blocked from doing that.”
“We’re going to make sure that never happens again, no matter whether you’re related to the president, no matter how powerful you are,” he said. “Yes, the IRS is going to behave fairly, and we will make sure that happens, and these two gentlemen are going to form the basis for our investigation.”
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