Treasury Official Ask IRS to Rethink Audits of the Pillow Guy and Trump's Other 'High Profile Friends'

Apr 18, 2025

It’s good to be a friend of the president. While Trump orders the IRS to review and possibly revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, a White House official has reached out to the IRS to intercede on behalf of Mike Lindell, a major Trump supporter who peddled conspiracy theorists to explain Trump’s 2020 defeat.

The Washington Post reports:

A Trump administration official in March asked the IRS to review audits of two “high profile” friends of President Donald Trump, including MyPillow chief executive and conservative political personality Mike Lindell, according to two people familiar with the request and records obtained by The Washington Post.
David Eisner, a political appointee at the Treasury Department, wrote to senior IRS staff on March 6 that Lindell had received his second audit letter in two years. A week later, Eisner sent another email on behalf of Kansas state Sen. Rick Kloos (R), who runs a Topeka thrift store and coffeehouse he claims is a nonprofit.
Eisner used the phrase “high profile friend of the president” to describe Eisner and Kloos and wrote that each was “concerned that he may have been inappropriately targeted.”
Tax experts say the outreach on behalf of a Trump political allies is highly unusual and represents a sea change in how political appointees engage with the nonpolitical tax agency.
“That’s so inappropriate,” said Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. “In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case.”

This is a small trial balloon. The Harvard case is a larger one. But the Trump administration is demonstrating the direction it wants to go. The apparatus of the government will not be deployed according to impartial rules but used to benefit Donald Trump’s friends and harm his enemies.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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