A federal judge is allowing a whistleblower complaint to proceed against the Clinton Foundation, ruling the IRS “abused its discretion” in trying to dismiss allegations of nonprofit wrongdoing by one of America’s most famous political families.
U.S. Tax Court Judge David Gustafson denied the Internal Revenue Service’s request for a summary motion, ruling the whistleblower complaint by John Moynihan, a former Drug Enforcement Agency official, and Larry Doyle, a corporate tax compliance expert, “provided ‘specific credible documentation’ supporting their allegations” of possible tax-exempt legal violations by the Clinton charity based in Arkansas.
Gustafson said the agency’s Whistleblower Office (WB) wrongly denied Moynihan’s and Doyle’s claims simply because the IRS Criminal Investigation (CI) office sent an email saying the issues in the complaint were closed. The judge said he had reason to believe from the evidence that the IRS and the FBI engaged in some investigative activity.
The record “fails to support the WBO’s conclusion that CI had not proceeded with any action based on petitioners’ information. Accordingly, we deny the motion on the grounds that the WBO abused its discretion in reaching its conclusion, because not all of its factual determinations underlying that conclusion are supported by that record,” Gustafson wrote.
Gustafson dropped several hints of FBI involvement in an IRS investigation, quoting in his ruling from non-public information in the IRS records in which the whistleblowers discuss their contacts with law enforcement:
“The FBI in [redacted] has thanked us profusely and praised our report excessively. As one individual close to the investigation commented to me, ‘you and your colleagues have saved numerous federal agents thousands of hours of work.'” …
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