Thanks to oversight watchdogs with some nice sharp teeth, IRS intimidation of inconvenient witnesses has been curbed. The mission accomplished progress report was buried by media chatter about useless trivia but news managed to make it out anyway.
IRS intimidation halted
The IRS has been illegally intimidating witnesses. Particularly, ones like Matt Taibbi, who’s testimony exposed rampant collusion between the feds and Twitter, to specifically censor conservative views. The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released it’s first victory report but the media doesn’t want to hear it.
“Following the tremendous oversight and focus of both the Committee and Select Subcommittee, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel repealed the practice of unannounced field visits altogether.”
The title staffers slapped on it is “Fighting the Weaponization of the Internal Revenue Service: The End of Abusive Unannounced Field Visits.” IRS officials aren’t happy to read it. That’s because the report “details the Internal Revenue Service’s long history of abuse.”
IRS opened Matt Taibbi tax probe on Christmas Eve following ‘Twitter Files’ document dump https://t.co/RyPLeMYN0c pic.twitter.com/CA0vdvSzOt
— New York Post (@nypost) May 24, 2023
Joe Biden didn’t start this dumpster fire. The committee listed “countless examples that date back to the Roosevelt Administration.” That doesn’t make it alright.
The report made a point of “addressing current examples of how the IRS has abused its power to target Americans.” That’s when they got to part about Matt Taibbi.
On March 9, the independent journalist digging through internal company records to prepare audit reports on the issue, “testified before the Select Subcommittee about his reporting on the Twitter files and how the Biden Administration worked with social media companies to censor Americans.”
A note on his door
After dropping bombshell testimony on Congress, Taibbi returned home to find a little note from the IRS stuck on his door. It seems that they suddenly found some problems with his back taxes which couldn’t be solved with a simple phone call.
The way the lawmakers see it, the move was a blatant attempt to intimidate the journalist into keeping his mouth shut. The visit was “unprompted.” It was “unannounced.” It also turned out to be based on nothing.
“Following this intrusive and violating practice that has become an extremely common tactic of the IRS, the Committee and Select Subcommittee set out to determine whether the field visit was an attempt by the IRS to intimidate a key witness testifying to Congress.”
Has @POTUS weaponized the IRS again?
IRS agents showed up at Matt Taibbi's home the same day he testified about the Twitter Files. Unbelievable.
I hope IRS Commissioner Werfel is transparent and provides the documents related to the @mtaibbi situation. pic.twitter.com/SHt6Z32Sva
— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) April 19, 2023
Especially because he was there to talk about “the most serious” government abuse “he witnessed in his career as a journalist.”
After Congress grilled the IRS about it in March, officials produced “267 pages of documents” in May. “None of which corroborated the agency’s version of the story.” In fact it looks like planned intimidation.
The agency “opened its examination of Taibbi’s 2018 tax return nearly four years later, on Christmas Eve 2022. This was also 3 weeks after Taibbi published the first Twitter Files thread, detailing countless government abuses.” It gets worse. “Yet rather than try and contact Taibbi through less intrusive means, the assigned IRS agent scheduled its field visit for March 9 — the day Taibbi would testify before Congress.“
