The Justice Department's Targeting of George Soros Is a Serious Scandal
Just as it was a scandal when the IRS under Obama allegedly targeted Tea Party groups.
In May 2013, then–President Barack Obama gave a press conference in which he expressed dismay at a recent report out of his administration. "If in fact IRS personnel…were intentionally targeting conservative groups," he said, "then that's outrageous. And there's no place for it." He later promised to get to the bottom of "these failures," which he called "intolerable and inexcusable," and insisted that those involved be held to account. "Regardless of how this conduct was allowed to take place," he said, "the bottom line is, it was wrong."
These remarks followed a disclosure by the IRS that organizations with right-coded terms such as tea party and patriots in their names had been subjected to heightened scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status. This targeting of groups on the basis of their political views was all but universally recognized to be an abuse of governmental power. As an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) representative put it, "Even the appearance of playing partisan politics with the tax code is about as constitutionally troubling as it gets."
Reactions were swift and nonpartisan. The acting commissioner of the IRS was forced to resign, the official at the center of the controversy was placed on administrative leave, multiple investigations were launched, and the mainstream media covered it as a scandal. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow criticized the administration, as did a number of Democratic members of Congress.
It later emerged that the IRS had also scrutinized groups with names featuring left-coded keywords, such as occupy and medical marijuana, leading many progressive and mainstream commentators to dismiss the initial reporting as overblown. Conservatives countered with evidence suggesting that right-leaning groups were disproportionately affected, both numerically (they were more likely to be flagged for review than were left-leaning or ambiguously ideological groups) and in terms of the amount of follow-up information requested and the length of delays experienced.
In the end, an inquiry by the Treasury Department inspector general concluded that "the IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of significant potential political campaign intervention." It did not explicitly find that conservatives had been targeted, but during President Donald Trump's first term the IRS settled a pair of lawsuits brought by more than 40 conservative groups alleging mistreatment.
The extent to which one end of the political spectrum was treated unfairly continues to be contested (and is in some ways a matter of subjective interpretation), but it's worth pausing to notice what the disagreement isn't about.
The position of left-of-center commentators was, in short, that the supposed scandal had turned out to be a nothingburger. Conservatives weren't actually targeted at all. Because the initial report left out the fact that groups of a variety of ideological persuasions had received scrutiny, it created the mistaken impression that conservatives had been singled out—presumably for political reasons—when that wasn't true.
The argument was not that selectively targeting one's political opponents is fine, because elections have consequences. The argument was not that the IRS is an executive-branch agency, which places it under the direct command of the president, who therefore has the rightful authority to order any group to be audited at any time for whatever reason he, the chief executive, might deem appropriate. (Recall that there was never any evidence that Obama even had knowledge of what the IRS was up to—and that when he was told, he immediately condemned it.) And the argument was not that activities like criticizing the president or supporting anti-government protests, which the Tea Party and Occupy movements both did, count as anti-American behaviors that invite a crackdown and justify the use of any and all tools available to the state.
Yet these are precisely the sorts of arguments some conservatives are making today in order to rationalize Trump's attacks on individuals and groups he doesn't like. Frequently, those rationalizations are couched in the not entirely unreasonable argument that Republicans are merely taking up the weapons that Democrats have long used against them. But there are limits to the comparison.
On September 25, The New York Times reported on a directive issued by a "senior Justice Department official" to "more than a half dozen U.S. attorneys' offices," instructing them "to draft plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor who President Trump has demanded be thrown in jail." In multiple ways, this represents a flagrant violation of the rule of law and norms of justice, and in each of them, the situation departs markedly from Obama-era alleged malfeasance.
First and most obviously, the call to investigate Soros' group is part of a pattern in which Trump is not just overseeing executive branch operations but personally weighing in on the substantive exercise of state power and even forcibly overruling those tasked with impartially implementing the law. At least until recently, it was widely recognized that presidents are political actors motivated by political concerns—exactly the types of concerns that are not supposed to enter into decisions about, say, whom the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigates and prosecutes.
Trump has disregarded the expectation that presidents remain at arm's length so as to prevent partisan considerations from implicitly or even inadvertently bleeding over into tasks that must be nonpolitical if the system is to maintain its credibility. Even if he were not intentionally weaponizing the DOJ against his political opponents, his direct involvement would be a red flag. Again, nothing of the kind can be said of Obama and the IRS.
Second is the fact that Trump is weaponizing the federal bureaucracy against his political opponents—explicitly so. As I documented just before the last election, he has repeatedly called for his rivals and critics to be arrested and jailed. For what, exactly? His minions will figure that out later.
This reverses the order of operations that characterizes a legitimate system of justice. As the conservative lawyer (and DOJ alum) Gregg Nunziata pointed out, "The government investigates crimes, finds those responsible, and prosecutes them. Trump would have the government investigate his enemies, find crimes, and prosecute them. This is quite literally a mortal threat to all our liberties."
To begin with a target—particularly one you've chosen for political reasons—and then go looking for misdeeds to punish is a perversion of due process. The perception that that's what was happening is what made the IRS scandal a scandal. The Soros case, where a high-ranking official is asking his subordinates to come up with a reason to subject a major donor from the other party to law enforcement action (as opposed to observing wrongdoing and following the facts from there), is just as scandalous. That it's happening in broad daylight, without shame or apology, makes it immeasurably more destructive to the legal and social order.
Finally, the ostensible rationale in this case is one that should be troubling to civil libertarians and anyone else who cares about free speech. The call to investigate Soros' Open Society Foundations followed immediately on the heels of a report by Ryan Mauro of the Capital Research Center, a conservative advocacy group, which faults the foundation for having "poured over $80 million into groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence" and recommends "various accountability actions, including federal investigations and prosecutions, U.S. State Department and Treasury Department sanctions, revocations of tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees by the Internal Revenue Service, congressional investigations, and civil lawsuits."
A closer examination shows that those supposed ties to terrorism include an awful lot of First Amendment–protected activity. For example, Mauro claims that Open Society has given millions of dollars to grantees "that have endorsed terrorist attacks like those on October 7, 2023, and/or are directly linked to foreign terrorist groups or their known front groups." In many cases, grant recipients are considered to have links to terrorism merely for having downplayed (in the author's view) the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.
Consider this Instagram post by the progressive group 18 Million Rising, which urges "our Asian American community to join in support" for the "Palestinian people rising up against 75+ years of Israeli settler colonial violence and occupation." It features a painting of a crying mother and child bearing the words "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free."
That phrase is deeply offensive to many supporters of Israel, and understandably so. But it's still a phrase—that is to say, a textbook instance of political expression. While it's fine to criticize groups who express ideas you find abhorrent (just as it was fine to criticize people who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk), using the coercive power of the state to punish such speech is another matter. And punishing someone for having a financial relationship with someone else who has expressed unsavory views is even less defensible.
In some cases, the supposed terrorist sympathizer is multiple steps removed from the grantmaking institution: According to the Capital Research Center, some grant recipients do not themselves support terrorism and may even have condemned Hamas' attack on Israel, but mere association with activists who have sided with the Palestinians is presented as reason enough to turn the U.S. government against the Open Society Foundations.
A related claim is that Soros has funded groups such as the Movement for Black Lives that "engage in or materially assist violence, property destruction, economic sabotage, harassment, and other criminality" here in the U.S. Yet few of the report's examples of objectionable behavior involve actual violence, and a considerable number amount to petty infractions and mild civil disobedience. To treat things like "using false IDs" and "revealing the identities of government agents" as "acts of domestic terrorism," as Mauro seems to do, is dubious in the extreme. To further include legal actions, such as posting bail and providing legal defenses to arrested protestors, or saying nice things about the Chinese Communist Party, ought to set off alarm bells for all those concerned with preserving a free society.
When laws are broken, perpetrators need to be brought to justice. It's fair to think that prosecutors should be doing more to respond to genuine violence, property destruction, and actions that egregiously interfere with the normal functioning of society, such as shutting down roads and bridges. But stretching the definition of "domestic terrorism" and allowing it to become an all-purpose pretextual weapon for ideologues in positions of power to use against their enemies is a massive strategic misstep in addition to being unjust.
Imagine if Democrats went after a think tank that gave a prize to Tucker Carlson because Carlson has sided with Russia over Ukraine and platformed Holocaust revisionism. Or if donors to an international pro-life organization were accused of funding the criminal activities of foreign elements because some of the group's members have been arrested for praying outside U.K. abortion clinics. Is this really a path conservatives want to go down? How does the right think things will play out next time left-wing activists—the kind who like to accuse Christian traditionalists of perpetuating a genocide against LGBT bodies—have the ear of White House senior staff?
The Capital Research Center accuses Soros of "a systemic pattern of empowering groups that glorify violence and destabilize societies." This is exactly the kind of language that might be turned against any movement protesting entrenched injustices, from the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to the March for Life today.
Conservatives once understood all of this. In the wake of the IRS scandal, Bradley A. Smith, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, reflected in an op-ed on the "lesson on abuse of power" to be learned from that experience. "The real problems are first, the president and leaders in Congress should not use their power to pressure the bureaucracy to do their partisan bidding," he wrote, "and second, if you give government the tools to regulate political speech, the government will weaponize them for partisan gain by the party in power. No 'criminal' behavior is necessary."