Speaker 1: All right. Well, we have another possible crime that Donald Trump or people
around him may have committed. This one relates to what I call a revenge audit by the IRS.
This is a couple of things to understand about this. And one, of course, is that what we have
right now is something circumstantial and suspicious that is increasingly being
focused on Trump and people around him. We don't yet know the full story,
but this is Salon has reported on the reality that both James Comey and Andrew McCabe were subjected
to IRS audits. Now, these audits are very rare. And so to see two high ranking FBI officials,
both targeted by audits that have a one in 30,000 per year prevalence, it starts to raise some red
flags. Former FBI Director James Comey and his top deputy, Andrew McCabe faced rare, intensive
IRS audits after investigating former President Donald Trump, according to The New York Times.
Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017 and McCabe, who was similarly as Comey fired after investigating
Trump, were selected for, quote, random audits known as autopsy without the benefit of death.
These are like the most invasive audits out of about 153 million individual tax returns
from 2017. Only 5000 people were selected for this type of invasive audit each year.
Now we'll get to the math. Okay. But the point is, these are extremely rare. And for the former
f, the FBI director and the former FBI deputy director to both be targeted by these audits,
it starts to be a little strange. Comey, McCabe and their spouses defied the odds being selected
for the audit after being fired. The two men were selected for an IRS research program that
uses compliance research examinations to try to catch tax cheats. Unlike typical audits,
these audits force individuals to produce bank records, copies of checks, receipts and letters,
effectively recreating their finances for the year in question. This takes months and often costs
thousands in accountant fees. In my experience, and I've not been audited, but in talking to
accountants about it, it's more than thousands for this. This this could be tens of thousands.
The IRS said in letters to both men, your federal income tax return for the year shown above
was selected at random for a compliance research examination. We must examine randomly selected tax
returns to better understand tax compliance and improve fairness of the tax system.
The minuscule chance of the two top FBI officials being selected at random raised questions about
whether Trump appointees in the government or IRS purposely targeted them. Lightning strikes. And
that's unusual. And that's what it's like being picked out for one of these audits,
said IRS commissioner, former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The question is, does lightning
then strike again in the same area? Does it happen? Some people may see that in their lives,
but most will not. Trump's spokeswoman has denied even knowing about these audits. Okay,
so let's do some math. And I know the math is not easy on this, so I know that the math people will
tell me whether I'm wrong. So first first things first. If the odds of this audit is one in 30,000
or the odds are one in 30,000. If you say what are the odds of two specific people facing the same
audit, you would get one in 900 million, assuming that every person is equally likely to be audited.
That doesn't really reflect the situation in particular because you would imagine
that a large number of might. My guess is that even if we believe the audits are random,
they're probably not being done for people below a certain level of income. And that would probably
be for two reasons. One, that the amount that the IRS even stands to recover from someone who might
have cheated on their taxes if they made 40 grand is very, very low. So so that's one thing. And
number two, the mechanisms that are often used to avoid taxes or evade remember avoidance and
evasion are two different things. One is legal, one is not are much more commonly used by people
of higher incomes. So it's it's not even the right number because it's not the entire population
that is probably even really at risk for this type of audit. It's some subset of that above a certain
income level. Okay. But the other thing about this is that there's the missing context of, well,
it's actually four people because it's these two guys and their spouses and I believe they were in
different years. So if your risk of this is one in 30,000 each year, if we look over like the three
year period where Trump could have theoretically directed. If this are indicated, someone should
do this. Then it's sort of like three in 30,000. It gets complicated. But I think what we have to
understand are a couple of things. One, this is very rare. And two, to see both of the top FBI
people targeted with this supposedly randomly during a time when they were adversarial to
the president who appointed people to the IRS. We know the president is one of the most vindictive
and childish, probably the most vindictive and childish president that we've ever had. It is
weird. And so I'm not ready to say Trump directed this. I'm not ready to say it was even necessarily
within Trump's purview. But it's strange enough that it should be investigated. And one of the
things we have to remember also is like, imagine that it was something Trump did. In theory,
this is a federal crime. But Trump really exposed how easy it is to just ignore all of the checks
and balances on people in positions of power. And if this was a retaliatory IRS audit, whoever
directed it, aside from whoever did it, should be investigated, should be charged, if that's
what that's what happened. But Trump flouted all sorts of different norms in checks and balances,
and at least for now, there have not really been any consequences. So we learned that the framers
set up some checks and balances, but they clearly assumed no one would ever flout them. That's flow
duty to the degree that Donald Trump did. And so how strong are those checks and balances if they
can be ignored with essentially no consequences? We will continue to get answers to that.