Garrett Ziegler

Garrett Ziegler doesn’t have a degree in personal finance. He doesn’t personally know the president’s son. But Ziegler, whose first job out of college was working as a low-level aide in the Trump White House, has fashioned himself into a Hunter Biden specialist, compiling personal and financial records from anywhere he can get them. Then, his nonprofit posts them online. Ziegler, who served as a staffer for Trump aide Peter Navarro, a MAGA hard-liner and election denier, left the White House in early 2021. In October 2022, Ziegler announced that the nonprofit he founded, Marco Polo, had published a voluminous report on the Hunter Biden's laptop, claiming to have unearthed at least 459 criminal or regulatory violations. In February 2023, Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell challenged the tax-exempt status of Marco Polo’s parent company, ICU, writing to the IRS that it “has operated as little more than a thinly disguised political operation to attack the Biden administration and the Biden family.” Ziegler said that his personal criticism of the Bidens does not reflect the official views of his nonprofit. Before working in the Trump administration, Ziegler had few ties to politics. Aside from his cousin Ron Ziegler, who was press secretary for President Richard M. Nixon, his family mostly worked in agriculture and insurance, he told his hometown newspaper in Illinois in 2018. He graduated from St. Louis University in 2018 with a degree in economics before moving to Washington. He and his wife, Allie, have since moved back to Illinois, where he portrays himself on social media as a devout Lutheran and family man.