Summary
Gary Shapley, best known for blowing the whistle on Hunter Biden, was forced out as acting commissioner of the IRS after just 72 hours.
Sources said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “complained” to Donald Trump that Shapley was “installed without his knowledge” and “at the behest of billionaire Elon Musk.”
Bessent claimed Musk and his DOGE acolytes had “done an end run around him.”
The Times does not list any specific actions that led to him getting sacked. Shapley will remain at the IRS as a senior official in its criminal investigation division.
Remember the last acting agent before this guy (sp four days ago) was Melanie Krause.
She stepped down rather than allow Americans private IRS filing data to be given to ICE. Scott bessett and Kristi noem signed that agreement without her knowing. She found out because it was on Fox News that the data had been given over. Again not clear that it was at all legal to do so.
Three days with this mini-mooch interim guy had at least one goal: (1) make the IRS remove Harvard’s statuses. He did that on day 1 of 3.
But possibly (2) could be just long enough to have approved other stuff that the serious acting admins wouldn’t do. Such as: additional data exfiltration by doge, more layoffs, or other sweeping decisions for political purposes…
Well, he’s tried to remove Harvard’s statuses, but that’s going to go to the courts very soon. And I have no idea how that’s going to play out… It’s not Harvard against Trump, it’s every university in America against Trump.