TOP AIDE: TRUMP WANTED IRS INVESTIGATIONS OF FOES
Ex-White House chief of staff says targets included Comey
While in office, President Donald Trump repeatedly told John Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, that he wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the IRS, Kelly said.
Kelly, who was chief of staff from July 2017 through the end of 2018, said in response to questions from The New York Times that Trump’s demands were part of a broader pattern of him trying to use the Justice Department and his authority as president against people who had been critical of him, including seeking to revoke the security clearances of former top intelligence officials.
Kelly said that among those Trump said “we ought to investigate” and “get the IRS on” were former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe. His account of Trump’s desires to use the IRS against his foes comes after the revelation by the Times this summer that Comey and McCabe had both been selected for a rare and highly intrusive audit by the tax agency in the years after Kelly left the White House.
Trump has said he knows nothing about the audits. The IRS has asked its inspector general to investigate, and officials have insisted the two men were selected randomly for the audits.
Kelly said he made clear to Trump that there were serious legal and ethical issues with what he wanted. He said that despite the president’s expressed desires to have Comey and McCabe investigated by the IRS, he believes that he led Trump during his tenure as chief of staff to forgo trying to have such investigations conducted.
After Kelly left the administration, Comey was informed in 2019 that his 2017 returns were being audited, and McCabe learned in 2021
that his 2019 returns were being audited. At the time both audits occurred, the IRS was led by a Trump political appointee.
Trump regularly made his demands in response to news reports in which he thought his perceived enemies made him look bad. The president would carry on about having them investigated to the point that Kelly thought he needed to tell the president that what he wanted was highly problematic, explaining, in sometimes heated conversations, that what Trump wanted was not just potentially illegal and immoral but also could blow back on him.
Trump would eventually let the idea go, Kelly said, but during subsequent outbursts about his enemies he would again bring up his desires to have them investigated.
Throughout Trump’s presidency he regularly, in both public and private, ranted about Comey, whom Trump had fired in May 2017, and McCabe, who played a leading role in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Kelly said that along with Comey and McCabe, Trump discussed using the IRS and the Justice Department to investigate former CIA Director John Brennan; Hillary Rodham Clinton; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Trump; Peter
Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, an FBI official who exchanged text messages with Strzok that were critical of Trump.
“The U.S. government, whether it’s the IRS or the Justice Department, should never be weaponized or used to retaliate, and certainly not because someone criticizes you in the press or is your political opponent,” Kelly said in response to questions. “The average federal employee or FBI agent or IRS agent goes to work and executes the laws and regulations and shouldn’t be put in this position.”
A spokesperson for Trump denied that the former president had ever discussed using the IRS.
Unlike many former top Trump administration officials, Kelly has said little publicly since Trump left office and not written a book.
But in response to questions over months, Kelly said he chose to respond now because Trump had publicly claimed last week that he had used the Justice Department and the FBI to help Gov. Ron DeSantis win election in Florida in 2018. Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff at the time, said Trump never made such a request. If he had, Kelly said, it would have been an improper use of the Justice Department and the FBI.