Burnham explains further that there was a regular process in place for the White House to receive confidential IRS information. “On May 23, 1961, [Mortimer M.] Caplin, then serving as Kennedy’s brand-new IRS commissioner, had written a long memorandum explaining that a few months before he had allowed Carmine Bellino, a special consultant to President Kennedy, to inspect IRS files ‘without a written request.’ ” Vernon (Mike) Acree, an IRS official, explained: “Right after Kennedy was elected, I got called down to Caplin’s office. He introduced me to Bellino. Caplin said Bellino was a special assistant to the president and could have anything. One of my assistants set Bellino up in a little office in the IRS headquarters building. I remember that one day during the Kennedy years that my assistant provided Bellino a stack of tax records about ten inches high that had been submitted by The New York Times. We weren’t told why the White House wanted to see the Times’s returns and didn’t ask.” “The tax information I made available to Kennedy and Nixon was not unusual.” Acree added, “I had provided the same service to the White House people under Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson.”77
Furthermore, after being nudged by President Kennedy, and with his knowledge and that of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Caplin instituted an audit program aimed at groups on the “right” that were critical of the president and his policies. In April 1976, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee reported: “By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project [as the 1961 Kennedy program was known] established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting ‘dissidents.’ ”78
The abuses also reached into the FBI. Indeed, the FBI tracked virtually every move of Martin Luther King. CNN reported, in an interview with author David Garrow, that “the FBI began secretly tracking King’s flights and watching his associates. In July 1963, a month before the March on Washington, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover filed a request with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to tap King’s and his associates’ phones and to bug their homes and offices. In September, Kennedy consented to the technical surveillance. Kennedy gave the FBI permission to break into King’s office and home to install the bugs, as long as agents recognized the ‘delicacy of this particular matter’ and didn’t get caught installing them. Kennedy added a proviso—he wanted to be personally informed of any pertinent information.”79
President Kennedy even had installed a secret recording system in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room as well. He personally ordered Secret Service agent Robert Bouck to undertake the task. In his book The Tunnels, author Greg Mitchell wrote: “Three previous presidents had installed listening devices, but they had used them sparingly. Franklin Roosevelt made a few recordings in 1940; Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower left behind less than a dozen hours of tapes each. Kennedy’s plan would give him far more opportunity than that. JFK aimed to document face-to-face conversations with aides and visitors, for his own use and/or the historical record. Without telling anyone why . . . At Kennedy’s direction, he installed the Oval Office microphones under the President’s desk and in a coffee table. Kennedy could activate them with the discreet push of a button on his desk. The microphones in the Cabinet Room were hidden behind drapes and could be turned on and off by a button at the head of the table where Kennedy sat.”80
Widespread domestic espionage and tax investigations only got worse under Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson.
Like several of his predecessors, but even more so, Johnson used the IRS and the FBI, as well as the CIA, for unconstitutional and unlawful purposes. For example, the Heritage Foundation’s Lee Edwards, who had served as director of information for the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, tells how Johnson used the CIA and FBI to spy on the Goldwater campaign.
“Former intelligence officer E. Howard Hunt, best known for his role as an orchestrator of the Watergate bugging,” wrote Edwards, “told a Senate committee in 1973 that his CIA superior ordered him to infiltrate the Goldwater campaign. Hunt claimed to have questioned the order, only to be told that it had been a personal request of President Johnson and that the information he received would be delivered to a White House aide. CIA Director William Colby confirmed the White House’s role in the illegal surveillance while addressing a congressional hearing in 1975. That the CIA is prohibited by law from operating within the U.S. didn’t matter to the Johnson campaign. The Goldwater people never suspected that one of them was a spy for the Democrats.”81
Edwards explained that “the FBI arranged for widespread wiretapping of the Goldwater campaign. Sure enough, campaign reporters could soon be heard asking specific questions about the candidate’s travel plans that had only been discussed by Goldwater aides behind closed doors. To protect themselves, Goldwater staffers began using pay phones outside their headquarters. . . . Johnson also illegally ordered the FBI to conduct security checks of Goldwater’s Senate staff. . . . In 1971 Robert Mardian, who had been regional director in the Goldwater campaign, became assistant attorney general for internal security. During a two-hour briefing with [J. Edgar] Hoover, Mardian asked about the procedures for electronic surveillance. To Mardian’s amazement, Hoover confessed that in 1964 the FBI had wired the Goldwater campaign plane, under orders from the White House. When Mardian asked Hoover why he had complied, the director answered, ‘You do what the president tells you to do.’ ”82
The focus of Johnson’s espionage was not just his presidential opponent but his own Democratic Party convention months before, when he feared the Kennedys might challenge his legitimacy, and he wanted complete control of the process. Hence Johnson called in the FBI to surveil his own party’s convention. As Professor Robert Dallek, author of Flawed Giant—Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1961–1973, explains: “To keep track of [Robert] Kennedy’s doing and bottle him up, Johnson asked the FBI to send a team of men to Atlantic City. Ostensibly, the thirty agents assigned to the squad were ‘to assist the Secret Service in protecting President Johnson and to ensure that the convention itself would not be marred by civil disruption.’ ”83
The then-attorney general, Robert Kennedy, knew nothing of this, nor was he the only subject of the FBI’s monitoring. “For seven days . . . ,” writes Dallek, “the squad kept ‘the White House apprised of all major developments during the Convention’s course.’ Using ‘informant coverage . . . various confidential techniques,’ a wiretap on [Martin Luther] King’s hotel room, and ‘a microphone surveillance of the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] and CORE [Congress of Racial Equality],’ and ‘infiltration of key groups through use of undercover agents, and . . . agents using appropriate cover as reports,’ [FBI deputy Cartha] DeLoach provided [Walter] Jenkins [one of Johnson’s top cronies] with ‘44 pages of intelligence data’ and ‘kept Jenkins and [Bill] Moyers [another top Johnson crony] constantly advised by telephone of minute-by-minute developments.’ ”84
In fact, Dallek writes that when Vice President Hubert Humphrey would later receive the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1968, “to keep close tabs on the inner workings of Hubert’s campaign, Johnson had the FBI tap Humphrey’s phones. If Humphrey were going to come out against the [Vietnam] war, Johnson wanted advance notice and a chance to dissuade him.”85
Johnson also put the IRS to maximum political use. Burnham observed that “[d]uring the Johnson administration . . . the focus of the IRS’s never-acknowledged effort at political control swung from the right-wing to individuals and organizations concerned with racial matters or with opposing the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Unlike the Kennedy period, no evidence has yet emerged that directly links President Johnson to what became increasingly frenetic efforts by the FBI and the IRS to defang and declaw the critics of his administration. However, not too much should be made of this lack of documentary evidence. On January 1, 1967, Cartha DeLoach, J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy, wrote a memorandum to Hoover stating that the White House had informed him that
‘the President does not want any record made’ that would prove his direct involvement in FBI intelligence operations directed at war critics. . . . The record contains a great deal of information, however, proving that the IRS, the FBI, and several other federal agencies were involved in a large number of such projects during the years that LBJ occupied the White House.”86
Johnson also outdid Kennedy in secretly recording discussions in the White House. Dallek explains that “[t]he record of Johnson’s presidency hardly suggests a man who was fastidious about constitutional guarantees of privacy or excessive government intrusion into private conversations and behavior. During his five-plus years in office Johnson secretly recorded over 10,000 conversations without the knowledge of other parties on the telephone or in his White House offices. . . .”87
As the Democratic party-press has extensively reported for decades, President Richard Nixon and his administration used the various federal investigative, enforcement, and security agencies to harass, monitor, and deter political and policy opponents. And Nixon famously used the taping system in the Oval Office as well. However, in Nixon’s case, unlike his predecessors, he faced real consequences for these activities.
In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee charged Nixon with various impeachable acts, including abuse of power in Article II. It stated, in part:
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.88
In Section 1 of this charge, Nixon is said to have “act[ed] personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”89
In Section 2, Nixon is said to have “misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.”90
Post-Nixon, the most egregious abuse of power involving the politicization of the IRS occurred during the Obama administration, when hundreds of Tea Party groups were targeted by the IRS. Some were investigated, some were audited, and some had their tax-exempt status questioned or applications for tax-exempt status delayed.
President Obama had denied any knowledge of the IRS’s activities and, ultimately, he dismissed the scandal as phony. In a December 2013 interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Obama said, in part: “If . . . you’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that—I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization, deserves a tax-exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged.”91
After initial attention and curiosity, most newsrooms and journalists lost interest as well. Their attitude can best be summed up by far-left website Salon’s political reporter, Alex Seitz-Wald, who wrote on July 9, 2013: “The first few days of the IRS scandal that would consume Washington for weeks went like this: Conservatives were indignant, the media was outraged, the president had to respond, his allies turned on him . . . and only then, the Treasury Department’s inspector general released the actual report that had sparked the whole controversy—in that order. It’s a fitting microcosm of the entire saga, which has gone from legacy-tarnishing catastrophe to historical footnote in the intervening six weeks, and a textbook example of how the scandal narrative can dominate Washington and cable news even when there is no actual scandal.” Ironically, Bill Moyers, among President Johnson’s most reliable and effective hatchet men, was so impressed with Seitz-Wald’s piece that he posted it on his own website.92
In October 2017, as reported by Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times: “The Trump administration agreed Thursday to pay $3.5 million to tea party groups snared by IRS targeting during the Obama administration, saying the intrusive scrutiny was illegal and cannot be allowed to happen again. The government also reversed its tune on former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner. Instead of being a hero who tried to stop the targeting—as the Obama administration concluded in 2015—the Justice Department and IRS now say she failed to stop her employees and hid the bad behavior from her bosses for two years. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who announced the settlements, offered an apology to more than 450 groups that were part of two lawsuits against the IRS. As part of the agreements, the government admitted that the IRS forced tea party groups into illegal delays and unconscionable scrutiny, including questions about their political beliefs, plans to run for office and names of financial backers.”93
Rather than recognizing that the Trump administration earnestly acted to right a very serious wrong involving an abuse of power by the IRS during the Obama administration, the reaction from most of the mass media was a collective and cynical yawn. Moreover, there is not a hint that President Trump or his administration have illegally used the IRS, FBI, or CIA, as did several earlier presidents and administrations.
CHARACTER
Whatever President Trump may or may not have done in his personal life before becoming president—which has been of intense interest to the Democratic party-press—there has not been any credible glimmer of moral improbity or faithlessness during his service in the Oval Office. Not so with several of his more recent predecessors, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson tops among them, which was ignored by the mass media.
President Kennedy had scores of extramarital flings and affairs both before and while he was president—with actresses, secretaries, married women, friends, a mobster’s girlfriend, etc. Perhaps two of the most concerning such instances involved an alleged East German spy and a nineteen-year old intern.
As Professor Larry Sabato details: “In July 1963, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that he knew about the president’s past relationship with an alleged East German spy named Ellen Rometsch. The wife of an army officer who had been assigned to the West German embassy, Rometsch supplemented her income by turning tricks for Washington’s best and brightest. Her pimp was a high-profile Senate aide named Bobby Baker, who had close ties to Lyndon Johnson. In late August 1963, Rometsch was flown back to Germany on a U.S. Air Force transport plane at the behest of the State Department. According to author Seymour Hersh, she was accompanied by LaVern Duffy, one of Bobby Kennedy’s colleagues from his days on the McClellan Committee. Records related to Rometsch’s deportation have either vanished or were never created in the first place.”94
Then there was Kennedy’s seduction of a young intern who had just arrived at the White House. “The well-supported story of Mimi Alford,” writes Sabato, “a nineteen-year-old White House intern at the time of her involvement with JFK, is impossible to overlook. Initiated into JFK’s sexual world just four days into her internship, Alford lost her virginity to Kennedy
as he conducted what can only be called a deeply inappropriate affair with a young charge; it even included a Kennedy-directed episode of oral sex with aide Dave Powers while Kennedy watched. This behavior, barely hidden from others within the White House and involving government resources to shuttle Alford to and from the traveling president, has caused some to question Kennedy’s basic fitness for the highest office. Many have tried to reconcile JFK’s high-minded, skilled public persona with his sleazy, reckless private self. It is simply impossible to match up the two sides rationally, and it is certainly inadequate to say that the rules of his time or a sometimes empty marriage permitted or justified these escapades. Any private citizen with modest responsibilities would be condemned for them, and as president, JFK risked his White House tenure, the welfare of his party, his policy goals, and everyone he supposedly held dear.”95
Lyndon Johnson was no better. Dallek writes that “[a]lthough Johnson had a reverential regard for the presidency . . . he didn’t see his personal crudeness as demeaning the office. As throughout his Senate and vice-presidential years, he remained an exhibitionist and a philanderer who didn’t mind flaunting his conquests. When a woman reporter at a private session with several journalists asked him a tough question, he ‘reached down and pulled his crotch and said, “Well . . . I don’t know.” And he was scratching himself. It was terrible.’ During his vice presidency, the press called his Senate office ‘the nooky room.’ . . . [H]e wanted beautiful women working for him and viewed them as fair game. . . . Lady Bird shut her eyes and ears to some of this behavior. What she didn’t know or acknowledge preserved her from painful offenses. . . .”96
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