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‘Quite the track record’: Lois Lerner ‘lackey’ tapped to head ‘centralized’ office for 87,000 new IRS agents

August 30, 2022 | | Print Article

The Internal Revenue Service will establish a centralized office to implement elements of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act that allows for the hiring of nearly 87,000 new agents.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told employees last week that the new office will be responsible for “substantive tax provisions as well as the significant transformation efforts,” and he tapped Nikole Flax, deputy commissioner in charge of the Large Business & International Division, to lead the effort to establish the office, according to the Daily Signal.

“We have a unique, once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the IRS in a way to help taxpayers and fundamentally improve our tax administration work that is vital to the success of our country,” Flax is quoted as saying in a memo Rettig sent out on Friday. “This is an exciting opportunity, and we will be moving quickly with our work.”

If the name Nikole Flax sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. Townhall managing editor Spencer Brown noted in a piece published on Tuesday that she “has quite the track record of working to target conservative groups and organizations.”

He described her as “one of Lois Lerner’s lackeys from the Obama-era IRS scandal — one that saw the agency target conservative and tea party-affiliated groups as a political arm of the Obama-Biden administration.”

“Once the IRS was caught in its scheme of treating conservatives disparately from liberal organizations, Flax was one of several senior IRS officials who had their emails conveniently get ‘lost,'” Brown wrote, going on to cite reporting from Katie Pavlich that said Flax “visited the [Obama] White House 35 times after talking with former head of tax-exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.”

Gabe Hoffman, producer of the documentary “An Open Secret,” tweeted a reminder that Flax was one of the agents whose hard drives “crashed” during the 2014 investigation of the IRS targeting conservative groups — there was no backup and her emails were lost.

He cited The Burlington Times News, which reported that in addition to Lerner’s hard drive crashing, “six other IRS computer hard drives crashed in exactly the same time frame. Every one of these belonged to an IRS employee in Cincinnati’s tax-exempt office or at headquarters in Washington, D.C. Each of these six other employees played a role in targeting tea party groups.”

For those who might suggest that the White House wouldn’t be so bold if the intent was to use the expanded IRS capability to target political opponents, keep in mind that President Biden just tapped former CIA and Pentagon chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, to join his Intelligence Advisory Board. As BizPac Review reported, Bash “is not only an MSNBC pundit, he also boasts the dubious distinction of being one of the 50-plus intelligence officials who signed on to a 2020 letter which stated the Hunter Biden laptop story was a case of Russian disinformation.”

It certainly doesn’t leave conservatives with a warm fuzzy feeling. As seen on social media, folks seem to understand what may very well lie in store.

Here’s a quick sampling of responses to the story from Twitter:

Tom Tillison
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