Hunter Biden whistleblowers' defamation suit against high-powered Letitia James attorney just went down in flames

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Law & Crime

Oct 16th, 2025, 1:52 pm


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[.]"

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.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/hunter-biden-whistleblowers-defamation-suit-against-high-powered-letitia-james-attorney-just-went-down-in-flames/

---

Link to RULING (PDF) - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.272704/gov.uscourts.dcd.272704.26.0_1.pdf

[riversedge]

1. .....--positions that Biden's attorneys took in the course of representing and advocating for their client,"

it seems to me that lawyers always act aggressive when speaking for their clients.


.............
"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[.]"