Donald Trump did everything he could to make former FBI Director James Comey and former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe miserable. He fired them, denying McCabe a pension. He attacked them publicly. His Justice Department investigated them for crimes. So the news that both men were “randomly chosen” for particularly invasive IRS audits is … suspicious.
Just one out of 30,600 tax returns filed in 2017 was selected for this type of audit. Comey’s was one. Being selected was a little more likely for tax returns filed in 2019: 1 in 19,250. It nonetheless strains credulity that McCabe’s was that one following Comey’s selection.
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The audits were part of an IRS research program that is not supposed to be vulnerable to political influence. Taxpayers are supposed to be chosen by statistical software, and the process “does not entail employees manually selecting individuals for examination,” according to the agency.
“Your federal income tax return for the year shown above was selected at random for a compliance research examination,” according to the letters both the Comeys and the McCabes received. “We must examine randomly selected tax returns to better understand tax compliance and improve fairness of the tax system. We’ll give you the opportunity to explain any errors we may find during the examination.”
Comey and his wife learned that they were entitled to a $347 refund—but only after spending $5,000 in accountant’s fees. McCabe and his wife owed, and paid, what he described to The New York Times as a small amount—presumably on top of a similar amount in accountant’s fees.
It would have been illegal for anyone in the executive branch to have requested such an audit, and the IRS, in a statement, denied that Charles Rettig, the Trump-appointed head of the agency, had played any role.
“Commissioner Rettig is not involved in individual audits or taxpayer cases; those are handled by career civil servants,” the statement said. “As I.R.S. commissioner, he has never been in contact with the White House—in either administration—on I.R.S. enforcement or individual taxpayer matters. He has been committed to running the I.R.S. in an impartial, unbiased manner from top to bottom.”
For the IRS commissioner to have personally intervened would be almost cartoonish levels of corruption, which does not mean the Trump administration wouldn’t have been capable of it. But Trump was very loudly sending messages that he wanted bad things to happen to Comey and McCabe, and there are a lot of IRS staff who could have quietly, furtively responded by putting them through the audit wringer.
“Lightning strikes, and that’s unusual, and that’s what it’s like being picked for one of these audits,” former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Times. “The question is: Does lightning then strike again in the same area? Does it happen? Some people may see that in their lives, but most will not—so you don’t need to be an anti-Trumper to look at this and think it’s suspicious.”
Now that they know they were both audited—something they learned only from the Times—both Comey and McCabe want some answers.
“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said in a statement. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”
The IRS told the Times, generically, that it turns allegations of wrongdoing over to the inspector general for tax administration in the Treasury Department “for further review.”
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