Election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell has been in the news quite a bit lately. A few weeks ago, for example, the MyPillow founder expressed an interest in launching a Republican gubernatorial campaign in Minnesota.
A couple of weeks later, someone described as a “correspondent” for Lindell’s media operation appeared at a White House press briefing and asked a cringeworthy and overly sycophantic question about Donald Trump, sparking widespread ridicule. This week, the conspiracy theorist was back in the news, telling a judge he’s struggling to pay court-imposed sanctions because his finances are “in ruins” and “nobody will lend me any money anymore.”
But things aren’t all bad for Lindell. As The Washington Post reported, he apparently still has friends in high places.
A Trump administration official in March asked the IRS to review audits of two “high profile” friends of President Donald Trump, including MyPillow chief executive and conservative political personality Mike Lindell, according to two people familiar with the request and records obtained by The Washington Post
According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, David Eisner, a Trump appointee at the Treasury Department, contacted senior IRS staff last month about an audit Lindell was facing. Soon after, the same official reportedly contacted the tax agency again, this time about a Republican state senator in Kansas named Rick Kloos.
Eisner reportedly used the phrase “high profile friend of the president” to describe Eisner and Kloos, and wrote that each was “concerned that he may have been inappropriately targeted.”
A related report in The New York Times noted that the IRS did not act on Eisner’s outreach, but the efforts “alarmed agency staff that President Trump hoped to use the tax collector to protect his friends and allies from normal scrutiny, concerns that have only grown as the Trump administration clears out agency leadership and pushes it to carry out Mr. Trump’s directions.”
And therein lies the point: If the IRS is going to survive and maintain its integrity, it must maintain its independence. The agency cannot be a political weapon — though, in the Harvard case, there’s reason to believe Trump sees it as a partisan tool — and just as notably, it can’t offer special treatment to the president’s pals and those politically aligned with the White House.
Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate across multiple Democratic and Republican administrations, told the Post of the allegations, “That’s so inappropriate. In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case.”
A spokesperson for Trump’s Treasury Department made no effort to deny the claims, instead telling the Times that Eisner “acted appropriately” and simply shared “relevant information” with the IRS. (Eisner did not respond to requests for comment, the Post reported, and a representative from the IRS declined to comment.) Kloos’ attorney, meanwhile, told the Post that the Kansas legislator is “certainly not a close friend of the president”; he doesn’t know why Eisner contacted the IRS on his behalf; and he’s been engaged in a yearslong court fight over his organization’s tax-exempt status. As for Lindell, he suggested that this is all just a misunderstanding and that the Treasury Department had “misconstrued” his request, which he said actually stemmed from a problem he was having with the Employee Retention Credit. I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this one.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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