Former congressman Billy Long of Missouri, who famously deployed his skills as a professional auctioneer on the House floor during a debate, is President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service after its acting director Melanie Krause’s resignation over the administration’s effort to use tax information to identify people in the country illegally.
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down, co-hosts Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers take a post-tax filing deadline look at the history of the IRS being used to go after political opponents.
Most recently, the Joe Biden administration sicced the IRS on journalist Matt Taibbi. After Taibbi testified about the Hunter Biden laptop in front of Congress, IRS investigators showed up at his door and hauled away several boxes of seized material. Taibbi has said it was done purely to intimidate him, and the boxes were returned a month later without being unsealed.
Franklin Roosevelt deployed the IRS against his nemesis, steel magnate Andrew Mellon in the 1930s. Richard Nixon turned the IRS loose on his political opponents in the 1970s. President Bill Clinton’s two sexual harassment accusers, Juanita Broadrick and Paula Jones, were both somehow targeted by IRS investigators for audits during the Clinton administration. Famously, Barack Obama used the IRS along with a bureaucrat named Lois Lerner to punish “Tea Party” organizations by denying their applications for tax-exempt status while granting it for left-wing dark-money groups in 2012 and 2013.
One of Lerner’s former top deputies, Holly Paz, is still there at the IRS and running one of its most important divisions — the Large Business and International Division. As Schweizer explains, this unit scrutinizes the tax returns of the roughly 100,000 businesses with assets worth more than $10 million.
Back in 2013 and working under Lerner, Paz participated in an internal IRS investigation relating to the agency’s discrimination against tea-party groups. She got in trouble for neglecting to mention that fact when testifying before Congress about the scheme. It was rumored at the time that she was fired but instead was placed on administrative leave. Marlon Paz, her husband, works for one of Washington’s most well-connected law firms, Schweizer notes.
(…) Schweizer says he thinks Billy Long will be a “breath of fresh air” at the IRS. “He’s a real man of the people,” Schweizer said. In the past, among other controversial opinions Long has said that he might favor dissolving the IRS or substituting a flat or fairer tax code to make tax obligations simpler to meet. (Read more: Breitbart News, 4/17/2025) (Archive)