Trump’s Biggest Donor wants IRS to go away. Trump needs to Stay Away

 by TLB Editorial Staff

There is a lightening rod attached to President Donald Trump called the Internal Revenue Service. Trump’s biggest donor Billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah are in a $7 billion battle with the IRS for back taxes. The Mercers want IRS commissioner John Koskinen to be replaced in hopes that will make their “tax bill” go away.

The D.C. Liberals are licking their chops and wringing their hands in anticipation of Trump replacing Commissioner Koskinen so they can call foul and start Impeachment Proceedings against the President. Do they really think he is that short sighted?

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Trump’s biggest donor wages war against the IRS: Billionaire Robert Mercer’s fighting nearly $7 billion in back taxes

via Jeremiadus

Money in politics is as old as politics itself. While some Democratic partisans like to imagine it doesn’t happen on the left, it is notable just how the philanthropy and campaign donations of large liberal donors like Google, George Soros or General Electric just happen to coincide with their business interests. That being the case, a look at the electoral and business ambitions of President Donald Trump’s largest political donors, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, reveals an incredible amount of intersection.

Like big-time conservative donor Cary Katz, who only started giving to the hard right after his business was upended as part of a little-known provision in Obamacare, Robert Mercer’s family foundation donated almost exclusively to conventional charity groups and medical researchers, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, until coming under intense IRS scrutiny.

Rebekah Mercer began redirecting the philanthropy after her father’s primary company, Renaissance Technologies, became the subject of an IRS inquiry into its practice of temporarily storing investment incomes in bank accounts as a method of avoiding higher tax rates. In 2010, the agency ruled that firms utilizing “basket options” were engaged in illegal tax avoidance and warned Renaissance Technologies, the world’s most profitable hedge fund, to discontinue the practice.

Renaissance declined to do so and in the intervening years, the agency has been collecting evidence, apparently, in preparation for a future court case. According to a 2014 Senate report reviewing some of the allegations, the company could owe at least $6.8 billion in back taxes.

Since the 2010 IRS ruling, the Mercers have dramatically stepped up their giving to conservative groups, particularly to those engaging in full-on attacks against the IRS and the agency’s commissioner John Koskinen.

The agency has long been on the receiving ends of journalistic attacks from Breitbart News, the conservative website that was formerly headed by Trump’s top adviser Steve Bannon. The Mercers are widely believed to have been responsible for elevating Bannon into his prime position within Trump world.

The family also began investing heavily in supporting the political ambitions of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican senator who has repeatedly promised to “abolish the IRS” if he were elected president. Cruz has a variety of connections to hedge funds both in his own right and through his wife Heidi, a long-time employee of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. In a 2015 interview, Cruz explicitly mentioned hedge fund owners, arguing that they should pay the same tax rate as other Americans. If enacted, his proposal would have raised income tax rates for people with incomes around the median level and lowered them for the ultra-rich.

“Zero income tax, zero payroll tax, zero nothing,” Cruz told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in 2015. “Beyond that, everyone pays a flat 10 percent. And that applies across the board so that the hedge fund billionaire pays the same rate as the secretary instead of paying less as they often do now.”

The case against Renaissance began before Koskinen’s term, however. The IRS chief became controversial in right-leaning circles after the agency was accused of improperly delaying the processing of applications from Tea Party groups in 2015. The agency was also revealed to have delayed several non-profits who leaned leftward.

While thus far the Trump administration has done nothing against the IRS besides lob a few verbal criticisms, Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics adviser in the George W. Bush administration, told the McClatchy News service that doing anything that appeared to help Mercer would look “terrible.”

“The guy’s got a big case in front of the IRS,” Painter told the news organization. “He’s trying to put someone in there who’s going to drop the case. Is the president of the United States going to succumb to that or is he not?”

Trump himself is also involved in litigation with the IRS. He has repeatedly claimed that he will not release his personal tax returns because his businesses are currently under IRS investigation.

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TLB source for this article, with our gratitude, is Jeremiadus – An Experiment / Experience In Literary Journalism.


 Follow TLB on Twitter @thetlbproject

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