Trump Considers a Blatantly Illegal Plan to Use the IRS to Probe and Harass Donors Who Oppose MAGA
A long-standing abuse of presidential power is the use of the Internal Revenue Service as a tool for getting information on the president’s political opponents and subjecting them to legal harassment intended to dry up sources of money for the opposing party. Donald Trump is inevitably getting around to employing this tool.
The news was broken by The Wall Street Journal, which is behind a paywall, but it is summed up by Fox News:
The Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, the push centers on installing Trump allies at the IRS criminal-investigative (IRS-CI) division and reducing the involvement of agency lawyers in those criminal probes.
Those changes could allow politically motivated probes to be pursued, and they’re being driven by Gary Shapley, an advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to the report.
Shapley has said that he will replace longtime IRS-CI chief Guy Ficco and has been developing a list of donors and groups he thinks IRS investigators should look into, the Journal reported. That list includes billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and groups affiliated with him, a senior IRS official and another person briefed on the list told the outlet. …
President Donald Trump said last month in an appearance on “Fox and Friends” that Soros and others have funded left-leaning protesters and added, “we’re going to look into Soros because I think it’s a RICO case against him and other people, because this is more than like protests. This is real agitation. This is riots in the streets, and we’re going to look into that.” …
According to the Journal‘s report, the administration has focused on using the IRS-CI division after other efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of certain non-profits faced challenges from IRS lawyers, who argued the agency would need to have a lengthy investigative record to do so legally.
Notice that this is specifically directed at suppressing public protest against Trump and his policies, a key step in an authoritarian ruler’s consolidation of power. The Executive Functions blog provides some historical context to explain how incredibly illegal this is:
As reported, this is a full-on assault on a long-standing policy, expressed in law and norm, that the IRS should be kept clear of political misuse. President Nixon was impeached for attempting to abuse the IRS’s power for political gain. Following that incident, and with overwhelming bipartisan support, the tax code was amended to prohibit “the President, the Vice President, any employee of the executive office of the President, and any employee of the executive office of the Vice President” from “conduct[ing] or terminat[ing] an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” The law imposes fines and imprisonment as penalties for violations, and it requires that any employee who receives any request or directive to violate the statute report it to the Inspector General for Tax Administration.
Bob Bauer, who writes at Executive Functions along with Harvard conservative law professor, Jack Goldsmith, also notes the irony that it is Republicans who last blew the whistle on apparent politicization of the IRS against Tea Party activist groups during the Obama administration. But Trump treats every complaint about abuse of power by the other side as a blueprint for how he can abuse power once he is in office in a much bigger way.
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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