James Comey and Andrew McCabe, former FBI officials who infuriated Trump, faced intensive IRS audits

Buy1Sell2 · Jul 7, 2022

Frederick Foresight said:
Good find!
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Thank you.

TreeFrogTrader · Jul 7, 2022

gwb-trading said:
President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged criminal misconduct
https://www.citizensforethics.org/r...ring-record-of-uncharged-criminal-misconduct/
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Biden should be in prison - for corruption and sexual assault.

Buy1Sell2 · Jul 7, 2022

TreeFrogTrader said:
Biden should be in prison - for corruption and sexual assault.
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Agree in toto.

Mercor · Jul 7, 2022

gwb-trading said:
President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged criminal misconduct
https://www.citizensforethics.org/r...ring-record-of-uncharged-criminal-misconduct/
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Another misleading headline

Looking at the chart I see many of these
No reports of an active or previous criminal investigation
and these
Investigation closed while Trump was president

The active cases mostly involve Black State DA's using their states money to hound Trump
Seems coordinated

Cuddles · Jul 7, 2022

Frederick Foresight said:
I think there's still hope. I think they're working on it, looking to get it exactly right since trump has a long history of having slithered away from his misdeeds.
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oh honey!, bless your heart

Overnight · Jul 7, 2022

What ever happened with Trump's IRS audits? They have been going on for 10 years. Trump will never ever be charged for any crime while he is alive. This was obvious before he was Prez, and it will be the same for far after he has served his second term which is starting in 2024. People here think I am nuts? Well, let's face it, Biden failed the USA. He really fucked up.

Trump is your 2024 president. Who they going to nominate on the Dem side? Pelosi? Warren? Clinton? AHHAHAH! Fucking joke.

ph1l · Jul 8, 2022

It's because they couldn't hold their jobs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/07/08/irs-trump-comey-audit/

By firing his enemies, Trump made their taxes more interesting to the IRS
James B. Comey and Andrew McCabe became highly paid self-employed taxpayers, who are likelier to be audited by a research program
By Jacob Bogage
and
Josh Dawsey
July 8, 2022 at 1:28 p.m. EDT
Former FBI director James B. Comey is sworn in before testifying at a June 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, were both subject to rare IRS audits after President Donald Trump fired them. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The tax audits that examined the returns of two former senior FBI officials and adversaries of former president Donald Trump are part of a little-known research program designed to help the Internal Revenue Service collect data on possible future tax cheats.

James B. Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former FBI director and deputy director, were subject to inquiries from the IRS’s National Research Program for their tax returns from 2017 and 2019, respectively. Those audits are designed to help the IRS capture data on certain types of tax filers who are more likely than others to misreport their incomes, even inadvertently, and they’re different from the enforcement audits designed to nab people for breaking the law. IRS algorithms select taxpayers for National Research Program audits from a pool that disproportionately includes high-income taxpayers who are self-employed, or who generate revenue through sole proprietorships or from investments.

Comey and McCabe were government employees for years, drawing predictable salaries that were reported to the IRS along with their tax withholding, and they would not have fallen into those categories during that time.

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But then Trump fired them — Comey in 2017, and McCabe in 2018. Comey wrote two lucrative books and started giving paid speeches, and McCabe joined CNN as an on-air law enforcement analyst. Those arrangements, say tax policy experts and former high-ranking IRS officials, would have made both men far more likely to be chosen for a research inspection than they were as FBI employees, because the pool of high earners with such eclectic income streams is significantly smaller.

The rare audits were first reported by the New York Times. Lawmakers and the IRS commissioner have asked the agency’s top tax watchdog to investigate.

IRS chief faces questions over audits of Trump foes

Trump raged about Comey and McCabe constantly — advisers say they were near the top of his proverbial enemies list as president — and former officials told The Washington Post that Trump mused frequently that they should be investigated. But former IRS officials said the National Review Program would be hard to use as a deliberate weapon.

By firing the two men, though, Trump set the pair up to make much more money than they did at the FBI — launching them into a new tax bracket that the IRS examines much more frequently than it does even well-paid government employees.

The odds of both men being pulled into the research program’s audits by coincidence shortly after Trump fired them may seem slim, but former top tax policy officials told The Post they were certain that’s what happened — though they acknowledged that it looked suspicious.

“We like to see patterns, so that’s what we’re seeing,” said Mark Mazur, the Biden administration’s former assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, who previously led the IRS office in charge of the enigmatic research program.

The idea of using the IRS against political adversaries certainly crossed the former president’s mind.

Trump, who famously refused to release his own tax returns and claimed they were under audit, regularly complained that the IRS had been “a pain in the ass” to him over the years, one former official said, and he was “incredibly well versed” in previous accusations that past administrations had tampered with the IRS for political purposes.

One former senior official said Trump would rant that people should be investigated and audited, though neither of the two officials who spoke to The Post said they ever heard Trump give specific orders to that effect. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

“They did it to us,” Trump would say in 2017, accusing the IRS of carrying out politically motivated audits of pro-Republican groups under President Barack Obama, a storyline conservative media had focused on frequently, though no evidence emerged to support such a claim. “He would say this person should be investigated, this person should be audited. I never heard him give a direct order,” one of the former officials said.

The IRS has worked for years to avoid giving even the appearance of political bias, though Trump administration officials said that would not have deterred the former president.

“He did not care one bit about what the rules were supposed to be,” one of the former officials said.

Through a spokesman, Trump said he knew nothing about the audits of McCabe and Comey, even as he criticized the two men.

The agency has faced previous suspicions that its examinations had been leveraged by political actors. Shortly after the 2012 presidential election, Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner during the George W. Bush administration, received a call from an investigative reporter about the coincidental enforcement audits of two aides to Mitt Romney, now a senator from Utah, who was the Republican challenger to Obama that year.

“I said to the reporter: ‘Please tell me you have something more than that the individuals said they were under audit shortly after the election,’” Everson said. The story never ran. Everson said it would be impossible for the IRS to quickly start a set of investigations after a presidential election, even if it wanted to. “Things happen, and in the political world they talk and conjure up conspiracies.”

The research program involves audits that are intrusive and complicated for taxpayers to deal with, but they’re very different from the enforcement audits most people think of when they worry about hearing from the IRS.

Enforcement audits are aimed at specific individuals suspected of violating the tax code. Their purpose is to collect revenue and deter further cheating. For the research audits, taxpayers are selected at random by an algorithm, and the procedures don’t mean that the IRS suspects fraud. The agency uses the results to regularly reprogram its enforcement software so it can more accurately go after questionable activity in the future.

“The fact that he’s in a [National Research Program] sample, a stratified random sample, how is this payback?” one former top IRS figure said of Comey.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service, the IRS’s internal consumer rights watchdog, has for years asked Congress to compensate taxpayers who are chosen to sit for a research audit, since many individuals spend hours procuring financial documentation for examiners and often retain counsel because they feel intimidated by the process.

“These folks, they weren’t selected because you had concerns,” said Nina Olson, who served as national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019. “They’re really doing a public service.”

The research program, IRS insiders say, is seen as an annoying necessity within the agency. When the tax collector began the program in 2001, it sent highly trained enforcement agents to examine close to 15,000 taxpayers each year. The depth of the study frustrated the agents, who were not recovering revenue, and members of Congress, who received complaints from constituents about the invasive nature of the program, according to a former top IRS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about sensitive internal discussions.

Details of the research program are closely held because the agency fears that information leaks about topics the IRS is studying could embolden would-be fraudsters.

The tax agency in recent years has surveyed between 4,000 and 5,000 taxpayers, a significant drop that experts say is indicative of the IRS’s chronic lack of resources and its pivot away from enforcement activity, especially against high earners.

In 2019, the last year for which data is available, 53 percent of individual enforcement audits were completed against taxpayers with incomes less than $50,000, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, and 8 in 10 of those filers claimed anti-poverty tax credits.
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UsualName · Jul 9, 2022

Is this the third or fourth investigation on McCabe and Comey? I can’t recall.

wildchild · Jul 9, 2022

Frederick Foresight said:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nati...0220707-fic6fqj6nzfxhhb74lyoygv3gu-story.html

WASHINGTON — Among tax lawyers, the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the IRS is known, only partly jokingly, as “an autopsy without the benefit of death.”

The odds of being selected for that audit in any given year are tiny — out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the IRS targeted about 5,000, or roughly 1 out of 30,600.

One of the few who received a bureaucratic letter with the news that his 2017 return would be under intensive scrutiny was James Comey, who had been fired as FBI director that year by President Donald Trump. Furious over what he saw as Comey’s lack of loyalty and his pursuit of the Russia investigation, Trump had continued to rail against him even after his dismissal, accusing him of treason, calling for his prosecution and publicly complaining about the money Comey received for a book after his dismissal.

Comey was informed of the audit in 2019. Two years later, the IRS, still under the leadership of a Trump appointee after President Joe Biden took office, picked about 8,000 returns for the same type of audit Comey had undergone from the 154 million individual returns filed in 2019, or about 1 in 19,250.

Among those who were chosen to have their 2019 returns scrutinized was the man who had been Comey’s deputy at the bureau: Andrew McCabe, who served several months as acting FBI director after Comey’s firing.

McCabe was later dismissed by the Trump Justice Department after its watchdog accused him of misleading internal FBI investigators. Like Comey, he had come to be perceived as an enemy by Trump, who assailed him, accused him of treason and raised questions about his finances long after pushing for his dismissal and prosecution, a pattern that continued even after Trump lost the 2020 election and began trying to overturn the results.

Comey and McCabe — whose spouses were also audited because both couples filed joint returns — provided the letters initiating their audits to The New York Times. Comey provided the Times with a privacy release allowing the IRS to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request about his case. Neither man knew that the other had been audited until they were told by a reporter for the Times.

The minuscule chances of the two highest-ranking FBI officials — who made some of the most politically consequential law enforcement decisions in a generation — being randomly subjected to a detailed scrub of their tax returns a few years after leaving their posts presents extraordinary questions.

Was it sheer coincidence that two close associates would randomly come under the scrutiny of the same audit program within two years of each other? Did something in their returns increase the chances of their being selected? Could the audits have been connected to criminal investigations pursued by the Trump Justice Department against both men, neither of whom was ever charged?

Or did someone in the federal government or at the IRS — an agency that at times, like under the Nixon administration, was used for political purposes but says it has imposed a range of internal controls intended to thwart anyone from improperly using its powers — corrupt the process?

“Lightning strikes, and that’s unusual, and that’s what it’s like being picked for one of these audits,” said John A. Koskinen, the IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017. “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.”

How taxpayers get selected for the program of intensive audits — known as the National Research Program — is closely held. The IRS is prohibited by law from discussing specific cases, further walling off from scrutiny the type of audit Comey and McCabe faced.

IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig, who was appointed to the post by Trump in 2018, declined to be interviewed about the audits, discussions he may have had with Trump or his political appointees, or how compliance research examinations work. But in a written statement, the agency said he had no role in selecting candidates for audit.

“Commissioner Rettig is not involved in individual audits or taxpayer cases; those are handled by career civil servants,” the statement said. “As IRS commissioner, he has never been in contact with the White House — in either administration — on IRS enforcement or individual taxpayer matters. He has been committed to running the IRS in an impartial, unbiased manner from top to bottom.”

Pressed on whether the IRS would look into the questions raised by the Comey and McCabe audits, the agency noted in its statement — without referring specifically to their cases — that whenever it learns of allegations of wrongdoing, it reaches out to the inspector general for tax administration in the Treasury Department “for further review.”

Asked about the audits, Trump, through a spokesperson, said, “I have no knowledge of this.” He went on to point to reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general that were critical of Comey and McCabe.

Former IRS officials and tax lawyers said that given the array of reforms imposed on the agency after the Watergate scandal, they believed it would be difficult for a president or an appointee to direct an audit at a political opponent.

But the officials and lawyers said that because Trump repeatedly tried to use the powers of the federal government against his rivals and to overturn the election, and because the IRS conducted an extensive audit on two people whom he routinely pushed to have prosecuted, the tax inspector general or Congress should investigate the circumstances.

Comey’s audit, which lasted more than a year, revealed that he and his wife, Patrice Comey, had overpaid their 2017 federal income taxes. They received a $347 refund.

“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 IRS 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.”

McCabe said that his audit determined that he and his wife, Jill McCabe, owed the federal government a small amount of money, which they paid. He said he now believes the audit has concluded.

“The revenue agent I dealt with was professional and responsive,” McCabe said. “Nevertheless, I have significant questions about how or why I was selected for this.”

Under the Microscope
The audits conducted on Comey, McCabe and their spouses, according to the letters they received from the agency, were carried out under an IRS research program to learn who is — and who is not — paying their taxes.

The agency uses these “compliance research examinations” to determine the tax gap and adjust its dragnets, including a closely guarded formula that is intended to catch tax cheats. The number of audits carried out declined beginning with returns for 2015 because of budget strains before turning up somewhat in 2018 and 2019, the most recent years for which figures are available.

“Your federal income tax return for the year shown above was selected at random for a compliance research examination,” the letters to both the Comeys and the McCabes said. “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.”

In many instances, the agency catches taxpayers who undergo the audits understating their incomes and overstating their deductions, forcing them to pay penalties and interest. Even if a person has done nothing wrong, the process can take months and cost thousands of dollars in accountant fees.

Unlike a typical audit that asks individuals to explain a specific part of their taxes, these audits comb through the full return, forcing taxpayers in some cases to go to great lengths to essentially recreate their finances for the year in question.

Those being audited are often forced to produce bank records, copies of checks, receipts and letters documenting donations to determine whether they are properly reporting income and expenses and are not hiding assets.

In the case of the Comeys, it cost $5,000 in accountant fees. The IRS agent conducting the audit spent at least 50 working hours on it, including meeting face to face with the family’s accountant, who drove several hours to meet the agent, according to internal IRS documents produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Times.

Along with having to produce all of his personal financial information, such as brokerage and bank statements, Comey gave the IRS a copy of his family’s Christmas card that had a photograph to prove that he had the children he had claimed as dependents.

The audit went so deeply into his finances that his accountant had a back and forth with the agency about how much the Comeys had spent on office supplies purchased more than two years earlier. In an series of documents the accountant provided to the IRS in February 2020, the accountant said that Comey, originally going by memory, had provided far too low an estimate about how much he had spent on them.

“I have attached an invoice to support the cost of the MacBook Air for $1,761,” Comey’s accountant wrote to the agent in a letter. “He also bought a printer and toner, charged on his AMX, 9/29/17. Mr. Comey has requested a copy of the statement for that month. I will also fax that document to you, when I get it. "

A month later, Comey’s accountant pushed back on the invasiveness of the audit, likening it to a federal investigation.

“We had a long conversation,” the agent wrote in her notes about the call. “He said he couldn’t understand this audit, and this is how a fraud case is audited. He also couldn’t understand why I requested all bank statements.”

The agent said that she explained to the accountant that this was how the audits were conducted if someone like Comey, who had business expenses, did not keep formal books.

Politics and Taxes
Comey and McCabe generated ire across partisan lines during their tumultuous tenures at the FBI. Along with being atop Trump’s list of enemies, Comey in particular was blamed by many Hillary Clinton supporters for the election of Trump because of how he handled the investigation of her emails during the 2016 election.

The type of audit that the Comeys and McCabes faced was devised to select taxpayers through a statistical software program that groups them by certain undisclosed factors. The system “does not entail employees manually selecting individuals for examination,” the agency said.

It is illegal under federal law for anyone in the executive branch — with a few narrow exceptions — to request that the IRS conduct an audit or an investigation of someone’s taxes. Any IRS employee receiving such a request is required to report it to the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration. Those caught violating the law can be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Trump, as president, attacked Comey regularly, calling him a “dirty cop” who “should be tried for treason” and “should be arrested on the spot!”

He similarly attacked McCabe, including accusing him of treason. A year before McCabe’s audit began, Trump, while still president, publicly asked about McCabe’s finances, repeating a long-standing false claim about donations that his wife had received when she ran for Virginia state Senate.

“Was Andy McCabe ever forced to pay back the $700,000 illegally given to him and his wife, for his wife’s political campaign, by Crooked Hillary Clinton while Hillary was under FBI investigation, and McCabe was the head of the FBI??? Just askin’?” Trump tweeted in September 2020.

At a minimum, some lawyers said, Trump’s public statements about Comey and McCabe, and the fact that the man Trump appointed to the IRS was running it at the time of the audits, could create a perception that the IRS might have been used to carry out a political vendetta.

“When something like that happens, the president’s involvement inevitably casts a shadow over an otherwise routine government function and harms the public’s confidence in the fair administration of taxes,” said Scott D. Michel, a longtime lawyer who specializes in tax disputes.

The audit of the Comeys began in November 2019. The audit of the McCabes started in October 2021, nine months after Trump left office. At the time both audits occurred, the IRS was run by Rettig, whom Biden has allowed to stay on for a term set to expire in November.

During the 2016 election, Rettig, a Los Angeles-based tax lawyer, said that because Trump was under audit, he should “absolutely not” release his tax returns.

The IRS audit of the Comeys’ 2017 return started in 2019, three months after Trump blew up at his attorney general at the time, William Barr, over his decision to not charge Comey with a crime for how he handled memos that Comey kept on his interactions with the president. Comey had signed a lucrative book deal in 2017.

In the middle of Comey’s audit, in January 2020, it was publicly disclosed that he and a longtime friend and adviser, Daniel C. Richman, were under investigation by the Justice Department on suspicion of leaking information related to Comey’s decision making in the investigation of Clinton.

Prosecutors were focused on whether the two men had provided classified information to reporters as they tried to provide a rationale for why Comey held a news conference to announce the conclusion of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal email account. The investigation of Comey and Richman was closed without anyone being charged.

In the days after Comey was fired in May 2017, McCabe took over as acting FBI director and opened investigations into whether Trump had obstructed justice in firing Comey and whether the president, because of his ties to Russia, was a counterintelligence threat to the United States.

The Justice Department in 2018 fired McCabe and took away his pension, a move that Trump applauded. The department conducted a wide-ranging investigation into McCabe after his firing.

His audit focused on his 2019 return. That year, with McCabe still a regular target of criticism from Trump, Justice Department prosecutors told McCabe’s lawyers that they planned to ask a grand jury to indict him, claiming he had made false statements to internal bureau investigators.

Despite presenting evidence to the grand jury, no charges were ever filed, leading some legal experts to conclude that the grand jury had made the rare move of deciding that there was no basis to charge him.

Shortly after Merrick Garland became attorney general last year in the early months of the Biden administration, Justice Department lawyers began negotiations with McCabe’s lawyers to resolve a lawsuit he had brought against the department, claiming that his firing was retaliatory and politically motivated.

In October 2021, the department settled, reinstating McCabe’s pension and cleansing his personnel record of his firing. Around that time he received the letter from the IRS beginning the audit. Last month, McCabe was told it had been completed.
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Translation:

The Jan 6 committee has failed and democrats are looking for their next hoax. Rumor has it that the documents that show Trump's scheme were provided by Jussie Smollett himself.

Frederick Foresight · Jul 9, 2022

wildchild said:
Translation:

The Jan 6 committee has failed and democrats are looking for their next hoax. Rumor has it that the document Trump's scheme were provided by Jussie Smollett himself.
More...

Is that fear I smell on you, WC? Or is it something else?