Trump FIRES IRS Leader Over Immigrant Data Refusal

Donald Trump recently fired IRS Commissioner Billy Long for seemingly no reason, but it didn’t take long for the pieces of the puzzle to come together. Reports have revealed that Long refused to comply with the Administration’s order months ago to turn over personal data on immigrants, and that decision to protect the data that he’s not supposed to turn over is what allegedly led to his firing. This administration wants nothing to do with people who won’t blindly follow orders, even when those orders violate the law. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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

Over the weekend, Billy Long, the IRS commissioner, who was only recently confirmed by the Senate two months ago, was unceremoniously fired by the Trump administration. And at the time it happened, like right in that moment, it was kind of weird, right? Why are you suddenly firing the IRS Commissioner who's only been on the job for two months? Well, it didn't take long for the reason to come out. See, it turns out that during these two months that Billy Long had been the IRS Commissioner, he had repeatedly, as recently as last Thursday, refused to turn over confidential, private, personal information on taxpayers that this administration thought could be illegal immigrants.

Let me go deeper here for many months now, as part of their crackdown on anybody who's here that has brown skin, the Trump administration has enlisted all sorts of different government departments. One of them being the IRS, which of course is ironic because we're told by Donald Trump that these people coming over are criminals. But you're not looking for them in jails. You're looking for them in taxpayer databases because they're actually contributing to society and for the record not getting any benefits in return. So, uh, by the way, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, the latest year for which complete data is available, almost a hundred billion dollars. These people are contributing roughly every year. But this administration doesn't want their a hundred billion dollars of tax dollars. We want the IRS to comply and give us their addresses, give us your information.

And believe it or not, actually to a degree, the IRS did comply because Department of Homeland Security turned over a list of, I think, uh, 400,000 names, uh, 40,000 names, excuse me. They turned over a list of 40,000 names and said, here, we think all these people are illegal immigrants working in this country and contributing to its greatness, but, uh, give us all their information. And the IRS at the time was like, yeah, we could actually only find like 3% of these people. The rest of 'em, we don't even know where you got these names, but they're not even in the database. So they kind of did do it. But then according to the reports on Thursday, they told Billy Long, they said, okay, well give us the info you have on the 3%. And he said, I'm actually not gonna do that. Uh, because that is a violation of, you know, the, the laws and rules that we have in place. The IRS is not supposed to give independent, personal, confidential data on individual taxpayers to anybody unless there is a formal investigation, which by the way, the IRS are the ones who conduct those.

So we can't do that, and we're not going to do that, even if it's the president of the United States asking, we can't do that. So that's that. And then of course, he was fired. And the problem is, of course, we had somebody that was willing to stand up, willing to tell Donald Trump, no, I'm not gonna participate and be an, you know, extension of your Gestapo. I'm not gonna do it. And now that person is gone and that person will be replaced with somebody who will do it. In fact, right now, the acting IRS commissioner is none other than, uh, the, uh, uh, treasurer Scott Besant, secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant, who of course is one of Donald Trump's most loyal and arrogant. I can't stand to see his arrogant little face on tv, but he's now in charge.