President Biden’s son Hunter filed a lawsuit Monday against the Internal Revenue Service, saying that when agents investigating him told Congress and news reporters about their concerns that the case was not being managed properly, they violated his privacy rights as a taxpayer.
The lawsuit comes as the younger Biden faces criminal charges and escalating legal battles, a failed plea deal and a nearly five-year investigation into his finances, taxes and a gun purchase.
Hunter Biden’s lawsuit says that while he has “all the same responsibilities as any other American citizen,” he also “has no fewer or lesser rights than any other American citizen, and no government agency or government agent has free rein to violate his rights simply because of who he is.”
Biden charges in the lawsuit that when IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley and another agent went to Congress and news organizations complaining of alleged mishandling of the investigation by Justice Department officials, they disclosed information about the probe, and about Biden’s taxes, that the law aims to keep secret.
“This assault on Mr. Biden’s rights involved the public disclosure of his confidential tax information during more than 20 nationally televised and non-congressionally sanctioned interviews and numerous public statements,” the lawsuit charges.
The disclosures included “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,” the lawsuit contends.
IRS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for Shapley, one of the two IRS agents who came forward, called the Biden lawsuit “another frivolous smear” and said they followed the rules to make protected disclosures.
Neither Shapley nor his legal team has ever released “any confidential taxpayer information except through whistleblower disclosures authorized by statute. Once Congress released that testimony, like every American citizen, he has a right to discuss that public information,” the lawyers said in a written statement.
In recent months, Hunter Biden’s legal team has fired a number of legal salvos at those who have accused him of committing crimes and tried to implicate his father in the alleged wrongdoing.
The IRS lawsuit is Biden’s most aggressive move yet on that front, but it also comes as he is besieged by legal issues.
He was indicted last week on gun charges, which were supposed to be resolved in a diversion agreement over the summer. The diversion deal and a related agreement to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges fell apart when the two sides could not agree on whether such a deal gave Biden immunity from additional possible criminal charges from the same period.
Special counsel David Weiss might soon file a new indictment against Hunter Biden in another federal court – potentially in California – over alleged tax crimes that the agents say they found in reviewing his finances from 2014 to 2019.
Also Monday, Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell sent an angry letter to Rep. Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.), arguing that one of the improper disclosures about his client’s taxes in 2018 does not account for what Hunter Biden eventually paid later.
Biden previously paid more than $900,000 to the IRS as he tried to resolve the investigation, Lowell said. Biden’s lawyers and accountants believe he “overstated certain items of taxable income” for that year and is now, in fact, owed a refund.
“Mr. Biden will take all necessary steps to secure the refund of any and all overpayments of tax,” Lowell wrote.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Devlin Barrett
That’s right no tattling on the corrupt liberal’s that should be a crime but if you make up stuff about conservatives then u are patriots
The lawsuit sounds like witness intimidation. The entire whistleblowing was done according to statute, and these lawyers who submitted the frivolous (and SLAPP) lawsuits (and thus engaged in witness intimidation) should be disbarred if not sent to jail. After all, the precedent has already been set by the disbarment proceedings against Trump lawyers (even those who had just a quasi relationship to Trump).