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james comey
House Dem Urges Biden to Fire Trump-Picked IRS Chief Over 'Titanic' Audit Scandal
"If you think the audit of Donald Trump's purported enemies was a random act of God, then I have a bridge in North Jersey I'd like to sell you," said Rep. Bill Pascrell.
Jul 08, 2022
Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey demanded Thursday that President Joe Biden fire the Trump-picked Internal Revenue Service chief in the wake of revelations that the agency conducted rare and intensive audits of ex-FBI director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe.
"The IRS under Donald Trump's handpicked commissioner Charles Rettig has been one catastrophe after another."
"If you think the audit of Donald Trump's purported enemies was a random act of God, then I have a bridge in North Jersey I'd like to sell you," Pascrell, the chair of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, said in a statement, rejecting the tax agency's insistence that it is "ludicrous and untrue to suggest" Comey and McCabe were deliberately targeted by the exhaustive audits, which are supposed to be random.
"There may be no group on the face of this earth that deserves the benefit of the doubt less than Donald Trump and his government enablers," Pascrell continued. "The IRS under Donald Trump's handpicked commissioner Charles Rettig has been one catastrophe after another. The auditing of two law enforcement leaders at Trump's behest is a titanic scandal."
While welcoming news that a Treasury Department inspector general who oversees tax issues is set to investigate the audits--which were first reported earlier this week by the New York Times--Pascrell said that Biden should "fire Mr. Rettig immediately."
"If Mr. Rettig cared at all about this agency he would hand in his resignation today," Pascrell added. "And if he doesn't go, Mr. Rettig should be impeached."
Comey was notified of the IRS audit of his 2017 tax return in 2019, two years after Trump fired him. McCabe, whose 2019 tax return was the subject of close IRS scrutiny, was terminated by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018.
As the Times noted, the odds of being selected for the intense IRS audit in a given year "are tiny--out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the I.R.S. targeted about 5,000, or roughly one out of 30,600."
Rettig's four-year term is set to expire in November. Asked on Thursday whether Biden still has confidence that Rettig can properly run the IRS, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged the question and said, "His term is up in November."
"We don't comment on enforcement actions taken by the IRS," Jean-Pierre told reporters. "He is going to be up in November. So I will leave it there."
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Trump Admits He 'Learned A Lot' From Disgraced President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre
Trump's comments suggest "he learned from Nixon's mistakes how not to get caught," said Kate Brannen of Just Security.
May 08, 2020
Suggesting he needed lessons during his presidency on how to avoid being held accountable for possible misdeeds, President Donald Trump told "Fox and Friends" on Friday that he had "learned a lot from Richard Nixon," the only U.S. president to resign from the office amid an impeachment effort.
During a wide-ranging phone conversation with the morning show hosts, Trump said the lesson he learned from Nixon was "Don't fire people" and suggested a main problem for Nixon was that "he had tapes all over the place."
\u201cTRUMP: "I learned a lot from Richard Nixon -- don't fire people. I learned a lot. I study history ... of course there was one big difference: Number one he may have been guilty and number two he had tapes all over the place."\u201d— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1588939811
"The firing of everybody," Trump said in reference to Nixon's 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre," in which the president fired the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal and accepting the resignations of his attorney general and deputy attorney general. "I should've in one way, but I'm glad I didn't, because look at the way it turned out. They're all a bunch of crooks and they got caught."
The comments suggested Trump learned "how not to get caught," tweeted Just Security editor Kate Brannen.
\u201cTrump saying he learned from Nixon's mistakes how not to get caught.\u201d— Kate Brannen (@Kate Brannen) 1588941393
In fact, Trump has fired several high-profile officials during his term. His ouster of FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 drew comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre, as Comey was leading the investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign and its communications with Russia.
The president also demanded former Attorney General Jeff Sessions' resignation in November 2018 after complaining repeatedly that Sessions had recused himself from the Russia probe.
On Friday, Trump again attacked Sessions over the recusal, saying instead of "being a man" and denouncing the investigation as "a hoax," the former Alabama senator had allowed it to move forward.
Had Trump's current attorney general, William Barr, held the position from the start, the president suggested, the investigation would have never have begun.
Barr drew harsh criticism Thursday after the Department of Justice dropped its case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn over lies he told the FBI--which Flynn pleaded guilty to twice. The dismissal of the case sparked accusations that Barr is representing the interests of Trump, not those of the American public.
Nixon "had tapes all over the place. I wasn't guilty. I did nothing wrong, and there are no tapes," said Trump on Friday, suggesting that even if he was guilty in the Russia case or the Ukraine case which led to his impeachment, there is insufficient evidence to convict him.
While saying he learned not to fire officials, Trump added that he "did a very good thing" by dismissing Comey months after taking office.
On Twitter, former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub wrote that in fact, Nixon may have been able to learn something from Trump's administration in order to avoid being held accountable.
"Nixon only wished for the corrupt senators Trump has in his pocket," Shaub wrote.
While the decision by 10 Republican senators in 1974 to support Nixon's impeachment led to the president's resignation, Republican lawmakers who criticized Trump during the 2016 election have almost unanimously supported the president. By contrast, only one Republican, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), broke with his party in February to vote in favor of removing Trump from office.
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Politicon Lineup Exposes Event as 'Circus': Critics
"Why should the average voter invest in US politics if those running it think it's all a sport?"
Sep 10, 2019
Progressives beomaned the fact that the nation's premiere political convention, Politicon, is once again placing hard-right figures like Jordan Peterson and Ann Coulter onstage with mainstream political commentators in a now-familiar move by the nation's media and government elite that uses the event's lineup to launder the extreme right.
"Politicon is a circus for godless political grifters and it's shocking that so many decent people still participate," tweeted Vox's Carlos Maza.
\u201cPoliticon is a circus for godless political grifters and its shocking that so many decent people still participate.\u201d— Carlos Maza (@Carlos Maza) 1568127961
It's not just Coulter and Peterson--the duo will be joined at the event by former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Iraq War booster David Frum, and others. Former Sen. Al Franken, former Democratic operative Donna Brazile, and CNN's Chris Cillizza are among the mainstream politicos at the event.
"Al Franken coming to you live with my good friend Ann Coulter, with whom I may have some collegial disagreements but at the end of the day we're both Americans god dammit," Twitter user @zlingman said sardonically.
Some of the attendees with history could run into one another, creating the potential for stick situations, The Weekexplained:
Politicon, now in its fifth year, brands itself as an "unconventional political convention," though unconventional is perhaps too soft a term. Sure, former FBI Director James Comey has made the morning (and evening, and late night) show rounds, but now he'll appear on the same stage as Sanders, who spread misinformation about his firing. And Jordan Peterson, a men's rights advocate who, as far as we know, only eats beef, will for some reason give an uncontested keynote.
But it appears unlikely that there will be any conflict as the event is billed as a tony celebration of politics where everyone sets aside their partisanship in order to take part in "endless humor and exhilarating conversation."
The event is the kind of thing that leads people to take a jaundiced view of politics, media critic Adam Johnson said in a tweet.
"This ethos is the single biggest driver of cynicism," said Johnson. "Why should the average voter invest in US politics if those running it think it's all a sport?"
Maybe it's time to start over, opined Willamette University professor Seth Cotlar.
"Is it possible to hit the reset button on a nation's political culture," Cotlar wondered, "and start over from scratch?"
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