To audit both looks like carefulness
Pure coincidence. Completely random. The Post:
Democrats and Republicans in Congress on Thursday expressed alarm that the IRS under President Donald Trump may have targeted two of his political enemies with tax audits, joining in rare unity to call for an investigation into the matter.
The requests came a day after reports that the IRS initiated detailed reviews into the tax records of James B. Comey, the former FBI director, and Andrew McCabe, a deputy who later took over the agency. The two officials at the time had been primary targets of Trump’s ire after they probed the president in connection with his 2016 campaign, leading Comey to raise the possibility this week that the newly revealed audits amounted to political payback.
Knowledgeable people have been saying on Twitter that it’s wildly unlikely to be Just One of Those Things.
For some, the news even invoked the specter of the disgraced Nixon administration, when the president leveraged the IRS — and its vast powers to look into Americans’ finances — to pursue his political enemies before he was forced to resign.
…
The types of IRS audits they experienced are designed to be rare and random. The likelihood that two people so loathed by the former president would get audited within the space of a few years raised concerns for Comey about possible political misuse of the IRS’s authority.
The unlikelihood, that is, or the incredibly vanishingly tiny likelihood.
“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said in a statement. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”
We should know it even if Trump flees the country today.
There is a fascinating, if somewhat dated, book about the frightening power of the IRS to meddle in people’s lives without any oversight from the three branches of government, “The Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon”. It was published two decades ago, but is still relevant today. It is absolutely in character for Trump to use the IRS as a weapon in this way because it is perfectly designed to be one, with the right authoritarian pushing it to do so.
Yeah. If he gets away with all this malfeasance (as seems likely), it will just sent a bad message to future would be corrupt presidents. Be as corrupt as you want, we’re not gonna do a thing to you.
Let’s bear in mind that Republicans held extensive Congressional investigations because an IRS official sent a “be on the lookout” email regarding groups with words like “Tea Party” in their name. As it turned out, this was not an effort to target conservative groups, but a general crackdown on tax abuses by grifters posing as advocacy groups and yes, ostensibly liberal groups were also the subject of such “be on the lookout” notices. That has not stopped the GOP from insisting that “Obama’s IRS” was persecuting conservatives.
Every accusation is a confession with these people.
Multiple shooters using automatic military weapons target unsuspecting groups of vulnerable citizens.
Republicans: “No, Democrats banning automatic weapons is an infringement on our freedoms.”
Politicians may target citizens with tax audits.
Republicans: “OMG bipartisan effort! Bipartisan effort!”
And Republican legislators are citizens! We gotta bipart the shit out of this doggy!