It has been one year since ProPublica published leaked IRS data disclosing the personal financial information of the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers.
A full year and the people responsible for preventing the data leak in the first place remain persistently, and frustratingly, silent regarding their plans to ensure it never happens again.
Where there should be transparency and a campaign to assure the average taxpayer his private data are secure, there is a wall of silence. The IRS’s tight-lipped approach to the leak boggles the mind, especially considering the agency is already generally disliked and distrusted. One would think that now, more than ever, the IRS would be eager to get in front of the leaking scandal. But one would be wrong.
“If you’re running the IRS,” former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson told me, “you run the tax system of the country. You’ve got to communicate the whole thing. It’s to the taxpayers, it’s to the tax practitioners, it’s to the government, it’s to the media, and anything else.”
Everson, though critical of the IRS’s lack of communication regarding the leak, is proud of the agency he once oversaw, added that “the ProPublica leak itself and the failure to address the leak and reassure taxpayers that their data will be protected has wounded the Biden tax agenda. The failure to reassure the American people the data is safe has eroded Americans’ faith in government itself at a time when the nation can little afford it.”
Everson is not alone in his frustration.
It’s a “huge deal,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week.
“I am as anxious as you are to find out what happened,” she said, adding she has no new information regarding what happened or when the FBI or the inspector general expects to have answers. “I really am anxious to see some results here.”
ProPublica, for its part, continues to benefit from felonious behavior. (Leaking personal IRS data is a serious crime.) In fact, it published a follow-up article in April of this year, once again divulging the confidential financial information of wealthy private citizens. Unsurprisingly, the newsgroup has said very little about how it obtained the data.
Though federal investigators are reviewing the leak, there has been little in the way of transparency or public communication explaining how exactly it happened or how federal authorities plan to fix the problem.
Even the current IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, has expressed frustration at the lack of communication and the seeming lack of progress in the investigations.
“The delay in getting answers for the public certainly impacts the ability of the public to have trust and respect for the Internal Revenue Service,” he said recently.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said last year that investigating the leak would be at the top of his to-do list. Yet here we are a year later with no better idea of what happened or how they plan to fix it than we had in 2021.
The leak is bad not just for the Biden tax agenda but also for faith in the government, Everson said.
“This issue of protecting taxpayer data isn’t going to be ‘transitory.’ It’s going to be with us forever because we’re more data-driven as time goes on,” he said.
Everson concluded that “it’s imperative the government gets this right and is able to protect data that needs to remain private. It’s not just taxpayers — it’s medical data [too]. … They’ve got to do a better job of communicating without compromising the investigation.”
‘Real liberalism‘
San Francisco voted overwhelmingly last week to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a far-left progressive with an almost cartoonishly soft-on-crime approach to law and order.
But don’t blame progressive policies for Boudin’s unceremonious and incredible fall from grace.
Blame Republicans, says New York Magazine. After all, the magazine argued with a straight face, San Francisco isn’t really a liberal city.
“San Francisco,” writes the magazine’s deputy editor, Justin Miller, “governed by Republicans for most of the 20th century, doesn’t rest on a New Deal foundation and increasingly lacks a working-class population to bolster progressive candidates.”
They actually made the argument that “real liberalism hasn’t been tried in San Francisco.”
The article, titled “The Limits of San Francisco Liberalism,” continues, claiming the city “has never been its left-wing caricature.”
San Francisco hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the year Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty. The city is located in California’s 12th Congressional District, which is rated D+37 by the Cook Political Report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has represented San Francisco for the past 35 years.
But don’t blame liberal policies for Boudin’s ouster.
Progressivism can’t fail. It can only be failed.
Russia, Russia, Russia
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s spokeswoman was directed by the Justice Department recently to file as a foreign agent for the work she did on behalf of the former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Christina Pushaw worked for Saakashvili between 2018 and 2020, earning an estimated $25,000. When she was contacted by the Justice Department and informed that her work likely required that she file the appropriate paperwork under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, she did.
None of her past work for Saakashvili, which included writing op-eds and supporter outreach, is a surprise, by the way. She speaks about it often.
Yet for the geniuses at Florida Politics, the FARA filing means Pushaw is basically a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The local Florida newsgroup tweeted, and then deleted, a political cartoon that bore the caption: “DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw belatedly registers as a foreign agent of a Russian politician.” The cartoon, which featured a rough caricature of the spokeswoman, also showed her speaking in Russian, with the translation reading, “He told me he didn’t do it and I believe him. … I’m practicing my Russian when I meet Putin!”
Do they not know Georgia and Russia are separate countries? Do they not know roughly 20% of Georgia is under Russian military occupation? Do they not know of Georgia’s long-standing fight to remain a free and sovereign nation, separate from Russia, especially after the horrors of Soviet occupation? Do they believe these countries are interchangeable? Do they believe Georgia is basically Russia? This is what Moscow believes, hence the 2008 invasion, but it would be interesting to know what the editors and cartoonists at Florida Politics believe.
Suggesting Pushaw is a Russian agent for the work she did for Saakashvili would be like suggesting she’s a Putin ally for advocating on behalf of Ukraine. It would be like claiming she worked for a “Chinese politician” because she worked for a Taiwanese official. It’s ignorant.
This is to say nothing of the fact that Pushaw herself is a frequent and vocal Putin critic. It’s to say nothing of the fact Saakashvili was the president of Georgia during the war in 2008, leading the fight against Moscow’s invasion. He was Volodymyr Zelensky before there was a Volodymyr Zelensky.
A Russian stooge?
Are there any adults or people with access to the internet left in these newsrooms?
Becket Adams is the program director of the National Journalism Center.
