(PresidentialWire.com)- Last week, the New York Times reported that two high-profile anti-Trumpers found themselves under IRS audit, former FBI director James Comey and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
Within no time, other media outlets picked up the Times story, falsely claiming both Comey and McCabe were the victims of retribution while Trump was president.
Suddenly, all the reporters who laughed off the claims of a weaponized IRS back in 2012 were screeching about a weaponized IRS under Trump.
The only problem is, the New York Times report indicated that while Comey faced an IRS audit in November 2019, Andrew McCabe’s audit didn’t happen until October 2021.
In other words, McCabe couldn’t have been targeted by Trump, since Joe Biden was president at the time the IRS audited his 2019 tax returns.
Part of the reason other news outlets got that wrong is that when he tweeted his story, New York Times reporter, Peter Baker, incorrectly claimed they were audited “while Trump was president.” And since news outlets get their “news” from tweets, other outlets took Baker’s tweet at face value and repeated the incorrect information in their reports.
What is true, however, is the IRS Commissioner at the time both audits were conducted was Charles Rettig, whom former President Trump appointed to the job.
But the assumption that Rettig somehow got the IRS to audit these two anti-Trumpers as “payback” seems a bit over-the-top.
Would the same agency that illegally leaked Donald Trump’s tax information to the New York Times go to bat for Trump by auditing Comey and McCabe on Charles Rettig’s say-so? That seems unlikely.
What is undeniable is that Comey and McCabe both experienced a radical increase in taxable income during that period. The former government employees struck it rich, getting book deals, speaking engagements, and plum “analyst” jobs on cable news. That alone could trigger an audit.
But IRS Commissioner Rettig has referred the New York Times allegations to the Treasury Department’s Office of the Inspector General to see if there’s any truth to them.
