The IRS commissioner has requested that the internal watchdog of the Treasury Department look into the details of the extensive tax audits that were conducted on former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who were frequent targets of Donald Trump’s wrath during his administration.
Jodie Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the IRS, announced on Thursday that the organization has formally submitted the issue to the inspector general for tax administration after Commissioner Charles Rettig, who was appointed by Trump and is a close ally of the former president, personally got in touch.
It is “ludicrous and incorrect to claim that top IRS officers in some way targeted specific persons,” maintained Reynolds, for such examinations.
The former FBI directors’ tax returns were subjected to unusual IRS scrutiny, according to a Wednesday New York Times investigation.
According to the article, McCabe discovered he was under investigation in 2021 and Comey learned about the audit in 2019.
Democrats slammed Rettig for assisting in the concealment of Trump’s tax returns; his term is slated to expire in November.
Regarding the FBI’s ongoing Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency for years, Trump has constantly criticized Comey and McCabe.
Amid that inquiry, Comey was fired by Trump in 2017. Special counsel Robert Mueller was then appointed to that position by Trump’s Justice Department.
Months before Trump was elected, the FBI investigation got underway in the summer of 2016.
The FBI had learned that, before the information was public, a former Trump campaign employee had claimed that Russia had hacked emails containing information on Trump’s Democratic opponent for the presidency, Hillary Clinton.
Russian intelligence broke into Democratic email accounts to steal those emails. Before the election, they were made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, allegedly to undermine Clinton’s campaign and promote Trump’s. The probe has received many “witch hunt” calls from Trump.
Numerous defences of the Russia probe were disproved in a 2019 report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, which found that the investigation was lawfully launched and that political prejudice was not the driving force behind the decisions made by law enforcement officers.
The watchdog did point out several issues with the investigation, which prompted the FBI to take action to improve some basic procedures including requesting surveillance orders and working with confidential sources.
After the Justice Department’s inspector general found that McCabe had authorized the distribution of information to a newspaper reporter and then lied to internal investigators about his participation in the leak, he was fired in March 2018.
Just hours before McCabe was scheduled to retire, Jeff Sessions, who was at the time Trump’s attorney general, fired him.
In exchange for agreeing to drop his lawsuit resulting from his dismissal, McCabe received his whole pension back.
The settlement agreement overturned that judgment, removed references to McCabe’s termination from his personnel file, and granted him full pension benefits. McCabe joined the FBI in 1996.
The audits that the two men and their spouses experienced, according to the IRS website, were a part of a program that randomly chooses tax returns for analysis of tax compliance and system improvement.
McCabe, a law enforcement analyst for CNN, said the two audits were a coincidence that was “actually almost statistically impossible” and that they raised problems that needed to be addressed.
It was “proper for the IRS to do the responsible thing and look into it and see if something, you know, went awry in this scheme,” he said.
Read more:-
- The Irs Demands an Investigation Into the Comey and Mccabe Tax Audits.
- Treasury Watchdog Is Examining the Comey and Mccabe Irs Audits.
- IRS Requests That a US Treasury Watchdog Look Into Audits of Former FBI Agents
In a statement, Comey said he was unable to confirm whether anything inappropriate occurred, but added that it made sense to investigate after understanding how rare this audit was and how strongly Trump wanted to harm him at the time.
When asked on Thursday if Rettig has Biden’s support, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre merely mentioned that his tenure will expire later this year.
I’ll leave it there, Jean-Pierre remarked, “He’s coming up in November.”
