There is A Lot Going On, of course, but I am not quite willing to move on from this weekend's newest purge of an official who apparently wasn't quick enough to commit crimes on the say-so of either the presidential omnifelon or whichever rote functionary was claiming to speak for him in whichever office they needed crimes from.
On Friday, Trump fired his own latest IRS commissioner, ex-House Republican Billy Long, and this one came as a surprise for a whole bunch of reasons. The biggest is that Long seemed a rare near-perfect hire on the part of the Trump administration. The only qualifications the administration seeks, when rummaging at the bottom of Republican barrels for new top-level Republican appointees, are a willingness to kiss Donald Trump's ass harder and more often than anyone else in America and the bit we mentioned above: A willingness to commit possibly-criminal acts if someone in the White House asks for them without balking. The Heritage Foundation, Claremont Institute, and Donald himself left his first administration feeling betrayed by the unwillingness of so many agency underlings to break laws that conservatism's fascist planners disliked and wanted to see done away with, so early on we heard their vows that that wouldn't be happening again.
So Billy Long seemed a hell of a "get," just a few short months ago. Not only has Long always been willing to polish Trump's undercarriage to a mirror-like sheen, his primary interaction with the IRS up until his nomination was involvement with an apparent corporate tax-dodging scheme so brazen and large in scope that the IRS was forced to temporarily halt applications for the associated tax credit to sort it all out.
Want an IRS commissioner willing to bend the law to serve Dear Weird Leader? It'd be hard to go wrong picking a guy who literally worked as a salesman for a company that made its money promising to get companies tax credits that all those other accountants weren't willing to claim. A real estate guy, House Republican, and dude with a malleable view of tax laws? It's like he was grown in a lab to be one of Trump's special buddies.
Long was confirmed to the position by the U.S. Senate in mid-June, and his tenure at the agency lasted until August 8th. That's the day the man was shitcanned in usual Trump fashion, and at this point the IRS commissioner's desk is racking up a kill rate that evokes Spinal Tap:
A string of acting commissioners then led the agency, several of whom quit earlier this year as the Trump administration leaned on the I.R.S. to abandon its longstanding protections of taxpayer information and share data with immigration officials. One of the previous acting commissioners, an I.R.S. agent named Gary Shapley, was replaced within just a few days this spring after [Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent] protested to Mr. Trump that Elon Musk had installed the I.R.S. leader without consulting him, The New York Times previously reported.
Bessent and Long also seemed to have a shaky working relationship, which at this point should probably have us asking the question "is there anyone in Washington who gets along with Scott Bessent?" And then something happened on Friday, and whatever it was must have been a hell of a fight because by the end of the day Billy Long didn't just get fired, the Trump White House essentially deported the guy.
Mr. Long wrote on social media that he would be nominated to become the next U.S. ambassador to Iceland. âIt is a honor to serve my friend President Trump and I am excited to take on my new role as the ambassador to Iceland,â Mr. Long wrote. âI am thrilled to answer his call to service and deeply committed to advancing his bold agenda. Exciting times ahead.â
Oh, Lord. Despite the administration desperately trying to spin this ambassadorship as being somehow previously in-the-works, it's all very clearly a Trumpian lie. Trump fired Biden's IRS commissioner, lost a string of "acting" replacements, pitched a months-long battle for this guy's confirmation, and just weeks after the confirmation finally goes through the administration is insisting that Actually, never mind, all of that was just temporary while they, uh, worked out which country to send him to.
And it turned out to be Iceland. Iceland! They're sending a House Republican from Missouri off to be Ambassador to Iceland, or at least that's the current claim, a place known for weather that will popsicle-ize a Missourian in a week and a place where every resident now hates the Trump administration and all the Trump administration represents with a volcanic passion because of Trump's current battle against Greenland (Trump has quite loudly insisted that the United States will be seizing the place no matter what anyone has to say about the matter), which has gotten Icelanders hot under the collar thinking about what that represents for them.
So it's not even a cushy sinecure, he's being sent off to a place where he won't be able to leave the embassy without getting booed and ridiculed everywhere he goes.
Despite both sides valiantly attempting to spin this as some sort of step up in the world for Billy, sort of like when your childhood dog got really sick and "as a reward" your parents sent it off to a farm upstate where it could run and play and sign important papers that only important farm dogs get to sign, it ain't. This is Long being sent off to what Trump considers to be America's Siberia.
By Friday evening, speculation was rampant over just what Long could have done that would get him shitcanned roughly six weeks into his official tenure. Obviously the man must have refused to do some crime that agency lawyers warned him was too crimey for even this White House to later sweep under the rug, but we'll never know because that's not the sort of thing administration insiders are going to willingly admit to andâwhoops, scratch that. Looks like it took just 24 hours for the probable answer to appear:
The Internal Revenue Service clashed with the White House over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants hours before Trump administration officials forced IRS Commissioner Billy Long from his post Friday, according to two people familiar with the situation.
The Department of Homeland Security sent the IRS a list Thursday of 40,000 names of people DHS officials thought were in the country illegally and asked the IRS to use confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
According to that Washington Post report, the IRS quickly complied, found it could verify "fewer than 3 percent" of the names the DHS goon squad was demanding, and then trouble arose when "White House officials" asked the IRS to hand over additional information about that 3 percent that the agency is, by law, not allowed to hand over.
Long had previously told agency executives that his agency would not furnish confidential taxpayer information outside of the confines of the IRSâs agreement with DHS, the people said.
The Post fills most of the rest of its piece with egregious flimflamming from White House liars, because apparently Post editors will be fired if even their big "Trump tried to do yet another crime" scoops don't primarily feature pro-Trump voices blowing smoke up our asses. That's we see a White House claim that Long's "promotion to ambassador was previously slated to happen," which is so obviously a lie that of course the Post needed to give that shameless jackass anonymity to claim it.
Long is the sixth IRS commissioner Trump has gone through this yearâagain, those are Spinal Tap drummer numbers even for an administration already infamous for shitcanning anyone who looks like they might know what they're talking about and replacing them with new, possibly drunken daytime television hosts who definitely don't know a single damn thing about what they're talking about.
In any administration other than Captain Dementia's current magical wonderland of white supremacy and bribe-seeking, that would be a news-cycle-shattering scandal all on its own. The Trump administration has either fired or forced the resignation of their acting IRS head roughly once a month, during this first half-year, and in most if not all cases it's been reported to have happened because the person in charge refused to go along with a requested crime, not a nebulous pseudo-crime but one of the written down and put into big fancy books ones.
That feels like a big deal! It now appears that the IRS has become one of the foremost battlegrounds between Trump's crime-attempting top appointees and the rule of law, which is not something most people probably expected when the rule of law first started to collapse around us.
Speculatively, I can only imagine that it's because there's real prison sentences attached to expropriating confidential federal government information, at least unless you store what you've swiped in an unused club ballroom in which case it's apparently all on the up-and-up again because Rich People. There's a lot of rules and regulations in government that fascist enablers can evade without any real chance of personal consequences, but the people sitting at the government computers who know the commands to pull up confidential, illegal-to-distribute taxpayer information are subject to actual handcuff time if they try to pull off the same.
And, as it turns out, there are not all that many people even in Trump's own orbit who still think the big crook will have their back if they get caught doing crimes on his behalf. Of those, most of them have already been hired, and a few of the most gullible are now the "acting" heads of half a dozen different agencies as efforts to staff up the administration with crime-doers wheezes and sputters.
The big binder of potential Trump staffers is not as big as it once looked. At this point it appears it consists of whichever drunks Trump himself sees on television, padded out with twenty and thirty somethings with so little experience that they don't know which things are crimes and which aren't.
I know, I know. There's a whole lot of hurt going on right now, and every time somebody on television says "Epstein" Trump announces he's going to invade a new American city or start a new trade war or club a different endangered bird to death in his Oval Office Pleasure Dome. I get it.
But I still think the administration targeting the Internal Revenue Service as the place where they themselves think the most crimes need doingâthat feels significant. Because, as the DOGE boys inadvertently reminded us, this is one of those few areas of law where federal workers face real big-boy penalties for ignoring certain laws. A lot of what Trump's doing will never be prosecuted, because you can apparently impound the funds of Every Damn Thing In Government and not be held personally responsible no matter how much actual death your actions might cause. Give out somebody's private tax data, though, and you might run up across one of the few laws left with teeth in it.
For now, anyway. Until Chief Justice John Roberts comes up with an unsigned paragraph or two asserting that yeah, we're just gonna erase those laws too for the time being.
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