Inspector General Says Trump Did Nothing Wrong By Ordering IRS Audits Of His Enemies

The inspector general investigating whether or not Trump acted inappropriately (illegally) by ordering IRS audits of his political enemies came out last week and said he didn't see anything suspicious or wrong with the audits of Andrew McCabe and James Comey. He said the audits were random and no one messed with the computer code to make those people get audited. But that's NOT what the inspector general was supposed to be looking at, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently I mentioned the fact that the Inspector General at the IRS was in fact investigating recent claims made by John Kelly, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, that Trump ordered Kelly to have the IRS audit his political enemies, Andrew McCabe and James Comey. When the IRS found out about this, they said, oh God, we gotta get the Inspector General on it. He's gonna look into this and determine if any bad things illegal things happened. Well, late last week, the Inspector General finally came out and said, you know what? I looked into this and, uh, I didn't say anything. Nope, nothing wrong. Couldn't find any problems. In fact, he says, look, we hired an outside firm to, you know, go through the computer code and, and see if they could manage to pull up these two individuals in a random audit search. You know, basically using the same computer algorithms to pick random people, uh, to audit. And they said, well, the, the independent contractors, they came up with the same results. So clearly Donald Trump did nothing wrong.

Okay? First and foremost, the audits were not the problem. The fact that these two individuals were selected for audits, which by the way, first of all, is about the same odds as getting struck by lightning, I think 10 times in a row. But the audits weren't the problem. The audits weren't illegal. What is illegal, according to United States law, is the President of the United States asking directly or indirectly the IRS to audit or to not audit a specific individual US taxpayer. The request is what was illegal if it was made, and that is what the Inspector General should have been investigating. It doesn't matter if you can recreate it and randomly get those two individuals to pop up for an audit. What matters is whether or not Donald Trump made the request, because again, the request itself is what breaks the law. It doesn't matter if the audits didn't happen, if he still requested it, it was illegal.

So here's what could have happened. If the Inspector General's telling the truth, and I don't believe for a second that he is, Trump could have made the request to the irs, and the IRS could have said, no, we're not gonna do that. Then they go to their little computer program, start picking random people for audits, and it could be a hell of a coincidence that both Comey and McCabe popped up. So like, oh, sh wow. Look at that. He wanted these people. I told him no, but now, now I have to because they came up.

That's basically what you're saying in your report could have happened, but you didn't bother to look at the why. You didn't bother to look at the piece of it that was actually illegal. Instead, you came out with this bogus report, cleared Donald Trump of a crime that could have carried a five year present sentence. There's no justice, there's no justice in this country. I'm sorry, I'm running out of any kind of faith that Trump will ever be held accountable for anything. Because this is bs, this should have been open and shut. Kelly, John Kelly said he had evidence in the Inspector General, just threw it all away.