As the Trump administration pushes to weaponize the IRS against the president's political enemies, it could be a "potential death knell" for progressive organizations.
Just as President Donald Trump has used the Department of Justice to seek revenge on his foes, he's also planning a similar move using the IRS, according to a Mother Jones report on Friday from senior editor Michael Mechanic.
And this time, he has promised to seek to revoke the tax-exempt status of liberal organizations.
The Wall Street Journal indicated this week that "sweeping changes" are coming. And Trump is lining up "a target list of progressive donors and groups, the paper reported, including, not surprisingly, billionaire George Soros, that bogeyman of right-wing conservatives, and groups with ties to his Open Society Foundations," with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's adviser Gary Shapley taking the lead.
“This is, without doubt, a very troubling development,” John Koskinen, former IRS commissioner under President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump during the first administration, told Mother Jones. He explains that partisan use of the IRS is illegal.
“Section 7217 of the US Criminal Code prohibits the president or anyone in the White House from suggesting or ordering an IRS audit,” Koskinen said. “Putting administration loyalists in charge of the IRS generally and the criminal division in particular with the expressed aim of auditing individual taxpayers or trying to eliminate the tax exemption of nonprofits the administration does not approve of certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the Criminal Code.”
The Reagan administration also attempted to do this to Mother Jones in the 1980s, and the public won, Mechanic added.
"Such investigations could be used not only in pursuit of criminal cases, but also as a rationale for yanking a progressive organization’s tax-exempt status, eliminating the ability of its donors to take a tax deduction—a potential death knell for any nonprofit group’s ability to survive and support its mission," Mechanic writes.