Trump’s Justice Department has already indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, and his administration has canceled grants to groups it doesn’t like. But prosecutions are slow, and courts ask for evidence. So the White House has been eyeing a shortcut: an untested provision of the tax code that would let Trump simply declare that a nonprofit has ties to terrorist groups, at which point it would automatically lose its tax exemption. In April, the White House told reporters that no such order was in the works. But The Wall Street Journal reports that officials have been working on one for months:
Trump administration officials have recently been turning to IRS experts to help evaluate the potential implementation of the executive order, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter and a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Another person with knowledge of the discussions said administration officials have been reviewing bank records of nonprofits and other documents to help craft the executive order and determine which groups should be considered as engaging in terrorism or supporting it. ... IRS rules normally require the agency to follow procedures to revoke or suspend nonprofit groups’ tax-exempt status. That includes a detailed audit, formal notice and the right to go into court. A 501(p) designation can’t be challenged on tax grounds; the organization would likely need to sue to demonstrate that it doesn’t have terrorist links. ... During interagency meetings late last year, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asked administration officials why more efforts hadn’t been made to probe nonprofit groups that Miller believed had ties to terrorist organizations, such as antifa, according to a meeting participant.
Note the order of operations here: first decide to brand groups as terrorists, then comb through their bank records to figure out which ones. A group hit with the label would have to prove a negative in court, possibly against classified evidence it can’t see, while paying taxes and losing deductible donations in the meantime. As one former New York assistant attorney general told the Journal, the provision’s “distinct value” is that it reaches domestic groups. That’s the point. And the official pressing colleagues to go after more nonprofits? The diabolical ghoul Stephen Miller, whom Trump named his new chief of staff the same day the story broke.
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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