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.”
