Guest Post by Ron Paul
Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show.
What should be of great concern is the possibility that the person who leaked the returns — who the paper says has legal access to President Trump’s tax records — is an IRS employee seeking to undermine the president. This would hardly be the first time an IRS employee has leaked confidential information because he disagreed with the taxpayer’s politics. In 2014 the agency had to pay the National Organization for Marriage 50,000 dollars after an IRS employee gave names of the group’s donors to the group’s opponents.
In 2014-2017, my Campaign for Liberty group was repeatedly threatened by the IRS because it refused to give the agency the names of and other information about its top supporters. Fortunately, the IRS rescinded the regulation forcing groups like Campaign for Liberty to violate supporters’ privacy or face legal penalties. However, campaign finance reform legislation that recently passed in the House of Representatives would require the IRS to resume collecting this information, and the New York attorney general is suing the IRS to force the agency to reinstate the regulation.
The right of groups like Campaign for Liberty to protect their supporters’ privacy was upheld by the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Alabama. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”
Traditionally, presidents have used the IRS to harass their political opponents instead of presidents’ opponents using the IRS against them. Franklin Roosevelt audited people critical of the New Deal and supportive of the America First movement. Lyndon Johnson ordered audits of opponents, and John Kennedy shared tax return information with Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.
During the Obama administration, the IRS targeted groups opposing Obamacare. The agency went after anti-Iraq War groups during the George W. Bush years.
If the Times did obtain Trump’s tax returns information from an IRS employee, that employee is not in the same category as whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning who exposed government wrongdoing. The leaker or leakers of President Trump’s information are releasing private tax information.
The IRS regularly violates the civil liberties of taxpayers generally. In fact, the income tax system forcing taxpayers to reveal potentially incriminating information on their tax returns violates the principles of a free society. Americans’ liberty and prosperity will never be secure until Congress repeals two great mistakes of 1913: the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
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IRS saying that people are their “customers” is like a rapist calling their victims “girlfriends”.
Its 2028, the dems have won congress and aoc is president. Her first exec order is that privacy is illegal and all tax returns are on the internet……..I am awakened after only 5 hours of sleep after a long work day, by my wife running upstairs yelling for me to come down. In my sleepy ears i swear i hear something about our tax returns taped to our front door window and people outside with bats. I sprint to the front door and right there is the first page of my tax return taped to the outside window. Beyond it is 20 or so punks all in black with masks holding sticks hitting my cars. I have been targeted because i made money…..more money than what these people feel i should need. While i worked 17 hour days and they sat around smoking legal weed. In their stupor their anger is boiling they deserve more from people like me.
Seems like a paragraph from a dystopian novel but reality soon. I would give $10,000 to anyone under age 35 that could hang with me for a full work week without, crying for mommy, complaining of tiredness, or threatening to quit. This is no longer about personal responsibility, thats dead. Its about pure entitlement and laziness. I claim work discrimination…..people like me that work hard for a living are being discriminated against by the dems, the media and tech companies. They enrage the progs to hate us yet they love the free shit our taxes pay for them to exist in their laziness. Until one day, we wake up and decide to join in the laziness and john galt their asses……..and smile wide as we watch them all wonder about in a stupor questioning why or what happened ……smiling indeed.