James Comey and Andrew McCabe, who both headed the FBI and both clashed with then-President Donald Trump, found themselves miraculously selected for “random” deep-dive audits by the Internal Revenue Service in 2019 and 2021. The chance of both Comey and McCabe being randomly selected out of more than 150 million annual tax returns is astronomical. The chance is far greater that they were targeted specifically by someone willing to do Trump’s corrupt bidding.
It is illegal for the IRS to selectively target audits for political purposes. Neither Comey nor McCabe knew the other was also being audited until informed by The New York Times. Letters informing both of their audits contain identical introductory wording attesting to the audits being “random.” The IRS is headed by Charles P. Rettig, appointed by Trump in 2018. Upon arrival at the IRS, he pledged to slash staffing by more than 2,000 positions, fulfilling a Trump goal. Under Rettig’s watch, someone at the IRS leaked the tax returns of two of Trump’s billionaire enemies: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, and investor Warren Buffett. Rettig also came under criticism during his confirmation hearings for failing to disclose more than $1 million in income from Trump-branded hotel rental units.
So it’s not as if Rettig is an innocent bystander, which is why the apparently targeted audits of Comey and McCabe merit the investigation that the IRS ordered Thursday. Former IRS Commissioner John A. Koskinen told The Times that “you don’t need to be an anti-Trumper to look at this and think it’s suspicious.”
Trump took aim at both Comey and McCabe for different reasons. Comey, a Republican, had refused to pledge loyalty to Trump early in his presidency and criticized Trump once he left the job in 2017, drawing a series of harsh attacks from Trump on Twitter. McCabe took over as acting director, also rejecting loyalty demands by Trump. He was fired in 2018 amid an investigation into a news media leak damaging to Trump. McCabe’s dismissal was timed to occur hours before he qualified for his pension, leaving him nothing. Trump applauded it.
So it’s hardly unthinkable that Trump could have instigated the audits, even if McCabe’s came months after Trump had left office. President Joe Biden has retained Rettig as IRS commissioner. Both Trump’s and Rettig’s offices disavowed knowledge of the audits.
Trump’s penchant for retaliation against his critics is legendary and is a focus of the ongoing House select committee hearings into the Capitol insurrection.
During the Obama administration, the IRS came under fire for audits of tea party organizations suspected of abusing their tax-exempt status to engage in political advocacy. Those audits, for which the agency apologized, were at least defensible on legal grounds. But those against Comey and McCabe can hardly be explained any other way than pure harassment by someone fulfilling the wishes of a vindictive president.
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