Trump Brings In Recycled Goon To Make IRS Go After His Enemies Some More
Surprise, surprise.
Every day gets a little more fascist-scented around here, with the regime using every tool in its bag of tricks to go after anyone exercising their First Amendment right to decline to smooch Donald Trump’s droopy behind.
Because if you do not say YES, KINGS and HURRAY FASCISM, you are a terrorist doing violence!
And now Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are installing a Bessent adviser/buddy, Gary Shapley, to weaponize the IRS. Shapley is perhaps best known for claiming HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP COVERUP, and he was acting IRS commissioner for an entire 48 hours in April — one of three acting commissioners in one week — until Elon Musk complained about him and then Bessent and Musk got into a whole screeching catfight about it that reportedly came to body blows. Whatever Shapley’s deal is, grown men sure are passionate about him!
PREVIOUSLY!
And now Shapley’s back, like herpes. Reports the WSJ:
Shapley has told people that he is going to replace Guy Ficco, the chief of the investigative unit, who has been at the agency for decades, and that Shapley has been putting together a list of donors and groups he believes IRS investigators should look at. Among those on the list are the billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and his affiliated groups.
But hold up, Hoss. The IRS’s criminal division investigates crimes. You’re supposed to start with the crime and then find the people and groups who did the crime, silly, there’s rules and procedures for that stuff. Also, it is okay for nonprofits to be involved in political activity, as long as it isn’t their primary activity, a rule with plenty of grey area, that the right wing has taken full advantage of.
And the IRS’s criminal division is staffed by career tax lawyers, who surely have little interest in risking their law licenses by getting creative.
So Shapley wants to just skip right over all those pesky lawyers:
The Internal Revenue Manual, the agency’s procedure handbook, spells out the involvement of chief-counsel lawyers and the CI chief in criminal cases. It includes extra steps for sensitive cases, such as those involving federal elected officials and tax-exempt groups.
Shapley wants to change the manual so that the chief-counsel lawyers have less of a role[.]
You know Shapley already has compiled a list of targets. And so has Pam Bondi, who sent a memo in September urging US attorneys’ offices across the country to probe “Open Society Foundations and consider an array of criminal charges including fraud, money laundering, racketeering and providing material support for terrorism.”
Too bad all those goons in the administration can’t put their heads together to compile a list of ways to make the eggs cheaper!
But not even Trump could seriously believe that Soros, who has been a right-wing target since Arthur Finkelstein was advising Viktor Orbán more than 20 years ago, actually funded any terrorism, or even failed to properly document deducting a single postage stamp. If there’s any crime that Soros could have gotten got for, surely one of his legion of haters all over the globe would have already found it.
The chief executive may be huffing and puffing and pounding on his website and in interviews and to whoever will listen that investigators need to single out and target his enemies list to vindictively prosecute, and how the Soroses should face federal charges under the RICO Act and “should be in jail.” But in the real world, donating to NPR does not count.
And there was no violence attributed to any left-wing protestors at the last No Kings rally, either, no matter how much Bessent might claim it was the HARDEST CORE.
However, No Kings is supported by more than 200 groups, including the ACLU and teachers’ unions, and the Service Employees International Union, and wouldn’t Trump LOVE to put them all out of business! And sure, maybe, like Letitia James and James Comey, Shapley can cherrypick some tax gotcha to a grand jury that they’ll bite on to cry CRIMES. When you’ve got all the powers of the federal government at your disposal, there’s no end to how much harassment and legal expense you can put a person or group through! And no limit to your platform to smear them! Enough to bankrupt them, the regime is surely hoping.
Meanwhile, the IRS has decided that it will just ignore the Johnson Amendment, which bars churches in particular from “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
But there’s another issue with all that vengeance: the IRS has recently furloughed nearly HALF of its workforce, and reduction-in-force notices were just sent to more than 1,400 Treasury Department employees, many of them workers at the IRS. A court just blocked Trump and Russell Vought’s plan to fire everybody during the shutdown, but it still leads one to ask, who is going to do all of this WEAPONIZING? Guess the plan is for the IRS workers to do not much else but make sure George Soros didn’t deduct too many staples and paperclips.
Imagine if BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA etc. etc.! Remember how in 2013 news broke that in 2012 “the IRS had admitted that some of its personnel looked for words such as ‘tea party’ and ‘patriots’ on organizations’ applications for tax-exempt status,” and that “If those words appeared, the groups’ applications were given extra scrutiny and action on their requests was delayed”?
Conservatives screamed and crapped their pants! The IRS is supposed to be politically independent! Political activities are allowed by nonprofits as long as it isn’t a charity’s primary focus! (And they can’t endorse candidates, etc.) The White House apologized immediately. The inspector general inspected immediately!
Also, turns out it was not OBAMA ordering that. It was a few low-level IRS employees in one office in Cincinnati, and their supervisors were not even aware they were doing this. The workers control-F-ed those terms because they’d gotten a surge of applications from hinky-sounding groups seeking nonprofit status, and it was their job to make sure that a group’s primary purpose was not just engaging in political activity like some kind of a tax-dodging PAC. And groups with names, like, say, Tea Party Patriots sure do sound like they are mostly about politics! What more, none of the groups were even deprived of nonprofit status, and the Tea Party Patriots still have it to this day. But conservatives have been crying about this isolated incident ever since, as proof that the Obummer/Killary/Biden DEEP STATE is out to get them all.
In conclusion, here is some related mom advice that you did not ask for: with all the data leaks and chaos going on, consider getting an IRS identity protection PIN, which can help secure your information, so that, say, a scammer can’t claim your child as their deduction. And if you have any kind of tax issues, now is the time to work them out, because even now during the shutdown there are still helpful IRS agents answering the phones. In a few weeks, though, who knows if that will still be the case.
Our hearts go out to all of these traumatized civil servants getting laid off, who are worried about getting fired, or working without pay, while Trump is trying to find ways to screw them out of pay for work that they already did, and is seeking vengeance on anyone who dares speak out against him or his fudge factory of Nazi-hugging incompetents.
They sure don’t deserve this! None of us do!
[Wall Street Journal gift link / New York Times gift link]
Love the "INVEST IN AMERICA" chyron...
...as $20B sets sail for Argentina.
Trump assumes all his enemies are as big tax frauds as he is.