Donald Trump and his elite squad of gunslingers are putting so many things right in Washington every day that it’s tempting to sit back, marvel at the fast-paced action and cheer from the sidelines.
But in all the jubilation, we mustn’t forget the whistleblowers.
During the previous administration, these are the heroes and truth-tellers who came forward to warn America about the corruption of Joe Biden, the FBI and DOJ. They and their families have gone through living hell as a result. Here are a few who need help.
Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler
The IRS whistleblowers got good news recently when the US Office of Special Counsel found, after a 20-month investigation, that the IRS had issued illegal gag orders to stop them from testifying to Congress about the corruption of their inquiry into Hunter Biden, and improperly removed them from the investigation after the IRS learned they were blowing the whistle.
But they remain in no man’s land, marginalized, frozen out of promotions, and under constant threat of losing their jobs, all because they did the right thing and angered their cowardly bosses.
Instead of being punished, they deserve to be rewarded and promoted for their integrity. Shapley ran the SEAL Team Six equivalent of the IRS. He led criminal investigations into massive corporate tax fraud, including the $2.6 billion Credit Suisse case, recouping hundreds of millions of dollars for the American taxpayer. Ziegler was his top investigator. Yet they are now hamstrung by their bosses every day. Ziegler’s marriage failed due to the stress.
There would be nobody better than Shapley to take over as head of IRS Criminal Investigations, with Ziegler at his side. They have demonstrated integrity and competence under fire.
In fact, while Trump’s nominee for IRS commissioner, former Missouri Rep. Billy Long, is waiting for Senate confirmation, appointing Shapley acting commissioner would be a brilliant way of vindicating him, shaming his persecutors, and sending a message that the Trump administration stands on the side of the virtuous.
As Empower Oversight president Tristan Leavitt, who is representing the whistleblowers, put in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley Wednesday, “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.”
Gal Luft
The Israeli-American professor languishes in a Cyprus jail after the DOJ piled on a bunch of spurious charges of being an unregistered foreign agent, on top of what he says are bogus arms-trafficking charges to stop him from testifying about Hunter and Jim Biden.
In 2019, before Joe Biden announced his candidacy, before his son Hunter abandoned his laptop in a Delaware computer repair shop, Luft went to the DOJ in Brussels and warned them that the future president was compromised by China because his son and his brother Jim were being paid tens of thousands of dollars a month by CCP-linked energy company CEFC. He heard nothing more until he was indicted one week before the midterm elections in 2022 that would give Republicans control of the House and the power to investigate Biden’s corruption. Luft was arrested while visiting Cyprus from Israel three months later, skipped bail, and was on the run for 18 months until he was rearrested in Cyprus last September.
Meanwhile, Hunter basks in a retrospective pardon that protects him and his father from prosecution for any crimes committed since January 2014.
“I believed I was doing the right thing reporting to the US government about the crimes of a man and his family vying for the highest office in the world,” Luft told me in a message smuggled out of his jail cell last month. “I believed I was sparing the country an ordeal and dangers to US democracy.
“I could not expect that six years later, I would write this from a prison cell in Nicosia while Hunter Biden is pardoned for all his criminal actions.
“Your new book, ‘The Big Guy,’ is an indictment of the deep state and its coverup of Biden crimes. The real threat to American democracy is not Russia or China. It is the same self-appointed power-hungry bureaucrats who put me where I am.”
Luft is hoping for a presidential pardon, and an inquiry into why the DOJ did not act on his information about the Bidens.
Devon Archer
Hunter Biden’s former best friend in business has been in limbo for eight years with a prison sentence hanging over him for a fraud conviction in a joint business venture with Hunter that went wrong. The Teflon former first son escaped unscathed while Archer took the bullet. He and his family have endured death threats and intimidation after he made the courageous decision to testify against the Bidens to Congress. Just before he testified last year, the Manhattan US Attorney’s office sent US Marshals to his home on a Saturday to get him to report to prison in what he took as an attempt to intimidate him. He has lost everything except the love of his family and friends who have stood by a good man. He lives in the hope of a pardon from President Trump so that he can put the Bidens behind him.
FBI heroes
Former agent Steve Friend is not the only man of integrity who stood against the weaponization of the FBI against conservatives, but he was the first to go public, and did so in these pages. He blew the whistle on the FBI’s use of the Jan. 6 investigation to harass Trump supporters and violate their constitutional rights. He revealed that the Washington, DC, FBI field office was cooking the books to exaggerate the threat of domestic terrorism.
As retaliation, he was suspended without pay 29 months ago, had his security clearance revoked, and was refused permission to take other jobs to feed his family.
His friend, Garret O’Boyle, also part of an FBI whistleblower group who call themselves The Suspendables, was treated even more shabbily. In 2022, after the FBI transferred O’Boyle from Kansas to Virginia, he sold his home and relocated his family, including his pregnant wife. But when he turned up to work, the FBI suspended him without pay, mistakenly alleging he had leaked information about a criminal investigation to Project Veritas. O’Boyle says that his unjustified punishment was retaliation for his protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.
O’Boyle and Friend should be reinstated with full back pay and an apology.
“I’m not sure anything will ever make us whole,” says O’Boyle. “Within the first couple months of my suspension I told my wife, ‘We’re different people now.’
“It’s never been about money for us, but getting my back pay would be a welcome and previously unimaginable step towards earthly restoration. More than an apology, I want the people who have weaponized the security clearance process against those they deem their enemies to be held accountable.”
Amen. We owe these men a debt of gratitude.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
