Left: IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley, left, and Joseph Ziegler, an IRS Agent with the criminal investigations division, are sworn in at a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing with IRS whistleblowers, Wednesday, July 19, 2023, in Washington (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough). Right: Hunter Biden leaves federal court, Sept. 5, 2024, in Los Angeles (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File).
Longtime IRS agents who emerged as whistleblowers, claiming that tax probes of Hunter Biden were slow-walked and stymied, have lost a defamation lawsuit against Biden”s high-profile attorney Abbe Lowell, as a federal judge concluded it would be “futile” to let them amend their complaint.
Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, said Thursday that Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler failed to show that Lowell made defamatory statements or acted with actual malice when he wrote “aggressive” letters to Congress pointedly accusing them of committing crimes by leaking grand jury and tax information.
“These statements are not isolated accusations of wrongdoing, as presented in the Complaint, but rather reasoned—albeit aggressive—positions that Biden’s attorneys took in the course of representing and advocating for their client,” the judge wrote, before describing Lowell’s words as “constitutionally protected legal opinions” stated in a government forum during a “highly charged criminal investigation[.]”
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During the summer of 2023, Shapley and Ziegler made waves, whether in numerous media interviews or testimony before Congress, alleging that “unethical slow-walking and preferential treatment” and “deviations from the normal investigative process” made it impossible to bring felony tax evasion and “fraud or false statements” charges connected to Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his father Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States.
Biden, with Lowell on the case, responded with lawsuits of his own, against the IRS and Shapley and Ziegler, railing against “unauthorized” disclosures of his tax return information.
Shapley and Ziegler countered in their defamation suit that Lowell “falsely and maliciously accused” them of “committing crimes — namely, the illegal disclosure of grand jury materials and taxpayer return information — despite the fact that they never publicly discussed return information that was not already public.”
In Leon’s view, however, Shapley and Ziegler fell well short of pleading their case, necessitating a dismissal and a refusal to allow them to amend their claims.
Norm Eisen, left, and Abbe Lowell attorneys of Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, walk out of the federal courthouse in Washington, Friday, Aug. 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
“Our system of justice is adversarial, and the reader expects that criminal defense attorneys are not neutral arbiters!” Leon said, with emphasis. “While that does not give an attorney a free pass to say whatever he pleases, Lowell provides the reader with the legal and factual bases for his statements, and the reader would understand, and expect, that Biden’s attorneys were advancing a legal position that was advantageous for their client.”
Lowell currently represents New York’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James in her bank fraud prosecution and Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook. He previously represented Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and represented Hunter Biden in tax and gun prosecutions before then-President Biden pardoned his son of his crimes.
The opinion from Leon hit the docket one day after the Wall Street Journal reported that the IRS intends to shake up its criminal division to potentially make it easier for the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups.
Shapley — the onetime acting commissioner of the IRS turned IRS Criminal Investigation deputy chief and senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — is said to be a driving force behind the proposed changes, according to the WSJ report.
