IRS requests Treasury watchdog to examine Comey, McCabe audits
WASHINGTON — The IRS commissioner has asked the Treasury Department’s internal watchdog to immediately review the circumstances surrounding intensive tax audits that targeted ex-FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, frequent targets of Donald Trump’s ire during his presidency.
IRS spokesperson Jodie Reynolds said Thursday the agency has officially referred the matter to the inspector general for tax administration after Commissioner Charles Rettig, who was nominated to the job by Trump and is a close ally of the former president, personally reached out.
Reynolds insisted it is “ludicrous and untrue to suggest that senior IRS officials somehow targeted specific individuals” for such audits.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the former FBI leaders were subjected to rare IRS audits of their tax returns. The newspaper said Comey was informed of the audit in 2019 and McCabe learned he was under scrutiny in 2021. Rettig, whose term is set to expire in November, faced blistering criticism from Democrats for helping to shield Trump’s tax returns from the public.
Trump repeatedly attacked Comey and McCabe over the FBI’s Russia investigation that long shadowed his presidency. Trump fired Comey in 2017 in the midst of that investigation, which ultimately was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
McCabe was fired in March 2018 after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded he had authorized the release of information to a newspaper reporter and then misled internal investigators about his role in the leak.
The termination came hours before McCabe was to retire. McCabe won back his full pension as part of a settlement of his lawsuit arising from his firing.
According to the IRS website, the audits the two men and their wives underwent are part of a program that randomly selects tax returns to examine tax compliance and improve the system.
McCabe, in comments on CNN, described the two audits as a “coincidence that ... really is almost impossible statistically” and said they raised questions that should be answered.
Comey said in a statement that he could not say whether anything improper happened, “but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out.”
A senior official at the European Union medicines agency said Thursday that many nations in the bloc are seeing a new wave of COVID-19, driven by highly transmissible mutations of the omicron variant.
The European Medicines Agency’s Marco Cavaleri told an online briefing that the BA.4 and BA.5 mutations are expected to become dominant across the continent, “likely replacing all other variants by the end of July.”
He said that while there is no evidence the variants make people more sick than earlier strains of the virus, “the increase in transmission among older age groups is starting to translate into severe disease.”
The virus is not just spreading again in Europe.
New COVID-19 wave:
The World Health Organization said June 30 that the number of new cases rose by 18% in the previous week, with more than 4.1 million cases reported globally.
Pena Nieto accused: Mexico’s anti-money laundering agency said Thursday it has accused former President Enrique Pena Nieto of handling millions of dollars in possibly illegal funds.
It marks the first formal legal accusations against Pena Nieto, despite a cloud of allegations about corruption during his administration from 2012 to 2018.
The criminal complaint filed by the government’s financial intelligence unit does not mean prosecutors have yet decided to file formal charges. But the head of the unit, Pablo Gomez, said federal prosecutors have received the complaint and are investigating.
Gomez said Thursday that a company run by Pena Nieto’s family had “a symbiotic relationship” with a
firm that received about $500 million in government contracts while he was president. He did not identify the companies, but said they were distribution firms.
Gomez also said Pena Nieto had received money transfers from a relative, apparently linked to the two companies, for about $1.3 million after leaving office.
Theranos fraud trial: A jury on Thursday convicted former Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani of collaborating with disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes in a massive fraud involving the blood-testing company that once enthralled Silicon Valley.
The 12 jurors found Balwani guilty on all 12 felony counts of defrauding investors and the patients who relied on wildly unreliable blood tests that could have jeopardized their health.
Holmes was convicted on four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy this year.
Both Holmes, 38, and Balwani, 57, face up to 20 years in prison.
Mideast weapons seizure:
A British Royal Navy vessel seized a sophisticated shipment of Iranian missiles in the Gulf of Oman earlier this year, officials said Thursday.
The British government statement provided some of the strongest findings to date that Tehran is arming Yemen’s Houthi rebels against the Saudi-led military coalition with advanced weapons smuggled through the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations rejected the U.K.’s findings as “groundless,” saying Iran has “never transported weapons or military equipment to Yemen” in violation of the U.N. arms embargo and “always upheld its international obligations.”
Citing a forensic analysis last month, the British navy linked the batch of rocket engines seized this year to an Iranian-made cruise missile
with a 620-mile range that it said the rebels have used against Saudi Arabia.
Monkeypox cases rising:
The World Health Organization on Thursday reported a 77% weekly increase in the number of lab-confirmed monkeypox cases, to more than 6,000 worldwide, and two more deaths in parts of Africa where the virus has circulated for years.
Most of the cases were reported in Europe and Africa.
The U.N. health agency said the outbreak continues to mainly affect men who have had sex with men, and that other population groups showed no signs of sustained transmission.
WHO counted 6,027 laboratory-confirmed cases of monkeypox from 59 countries as of Monday, an increase of 2,614 cases since its last count for the week ending June 27. It said three people, all in Africa, have died in connection with the outbreak.