The Trump administration is reportedly conducting an overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to pursue left-wing groups, ostensibly for violating their tax-exempt status.
If true, this is not a partisan effort, or a form of retribution for the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, but rather a long-overdue attempt to stop Democrats from abusing tax-exempt status to fund groups whose purpose is not charitable but political.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the overhaul this week, noting that it is to be led by Gary Shapley, who is described as “an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.” The Journal buried the crucial information that Shapley is not just an “adviser,” but also a key whistleblower who exposed the IRS’s attempt to shield Hunter Biden from scrutiny. He had no partisan affiliations when he bucked IRS leadership at the time.
That leadership had long tolerated, or even encouraged, inappropriate investigations of conservative groups. In 2013, it emerged that Lois Lerner and other IRS officials had targeted conservative non-profit groups, who had done nothing wrong, for inappropriate scrutiny. That effort discouraged newly-active Tea Party organizations for applying for non-profit status, and may have affected the outcome of the 2012 election.
In contrast, the IRS continued to ignore apparent violations by groups like the George Soros-funded Media Matters, incorporated as a 510(c)3 “charity” under the tax code even though its sole purpose is to help the Democratic Party. While conservative groups feared prosecution merely for using words like “Patriot” in their titles, left-wing groups were free to fundraise and spend with total impunity on completely partisan causes.
That is why, in my 2024 book The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, I specifically recommended that the president order the kind of investigation that Shapley will apparently be undertaking:
7. Launch IRS investigations of left-wing non-profits that abuse their status for political purposes. Group like Media Matters, which do little except suppress critics of the Democratic Party, are formally recognized as charities under Section 501(c)3 of the tax code. Yet they are abusing that tax-exempt status to raise money for what are essentially political purposes. The IRS must be directed to probe the activities of these groups and punish them, if necessary.
That recommendation is listed in the book’s first chapter, on restoring the rule of law — the top priority after years of “lawfare” and partisan investigations by Democrats and their supporters in the federal civil service.
The idea of IRS investigations of left-wing groups, like the idea of investigating and prosecuting the officials and prosecutors who targeted President Donald Trump and his supporters, is being described by critics as partisan payback. That might be accurate if the president were acting against a broad range of Democratic groups and individuals. Instead, he is narrowly targeting those who abused their power and authority.
That is not partisanship; that is justice. And it will hopefully serve as a deterrent to Democrats who assumed that their tactics would never be examined or punished — so long as they were successful in keeping Trump and other conservatives out of office. Recall how then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) defended his lies about Mitt Romney’s supposed failure to pay taxes to the IRS: it was justified because Romney lost.
Lerner and IRS officials who abused their power to help Democrats win escaped prosecution by the Obama Department of Justice. Likewise with the Biden administration’s protection of the likes of former FBI director James Comey, or former National Security Adviser John Bolton. There has to be public accountability, at the IRS and elsewhere, if American are once again to believe that our society is governed by the rule of law.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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