You should probably not even know who Frank VanderSloot is. Not that he isn’t an impressive American. He leads a successful company and he’s earned tremendous respect in the business community. But usually a man like that is not a household name.
But Frank VanderSloot’s name became very high-profile during the 2012 presidential campaign because the Obama campaign smeared him, including him on a list of major Romney donors and claiming with no evidence whatsoever that he had a less-than-sterling reputation.
And as we learned in recent days, it didn’t end there. In the four months after Mr. VanderSloot was attacked by the Obama campaign, he also received notices of two IRS audits – one of him personally and one of his business – as well as a Labor Department audit of his business.
Three federal agency audits in four months? There must have been pretty serious issues prompting that kind of attention from the federal government.
But there weren’t. VanderSloot passed all the audits with flying colors. It cost him $80,000 to pay attorneys and accountants to handle the many issues the audits presented, and when it was all said and done he had been hassled but couldn’t be found to have done anything wrong at all.
Now you don’t think the IRS or any other federal agency would use its power to harass a political opponent of the president, do you? Up until a few days ago, you might have found this hard to imagine. I wouldn’t, and that’s because of my own experience. In the mid-1990s, shortly after I very publicly criticized Hillary Clinton’s proposed health care reforms, I too received a very unwelcome call from the IRS, and underwent an audit similar to the one Mr. VanderSloot endured. It cost me a lot of time and money, but ultimately it turned out I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Except criticize a Democratic administration.
Can I prove the audit was politically motivated? No. Neither can Frank VanderSloot. But after everything we’ve seen in recent days concerning the IRS’s admitted targeting of Tea Party groups, what do you think the real truth is?
A lot of Democrats are always demanding that donors to political organizations be disclosed. In principle, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, but why do they really want the disclosure? Is it only so they can target these people for harassment?
Frank VanderSloot didn’t only get harassed by the IRS. He was also the subject of a hit piece by the left wing magazine Mother Jones, which claimed in promotion of the piece that VanderSloot was Mitt Romney’s “gay-bashing buddy,” in spite of the fact that Mr. VanderSloot had never said anything to justify that characterization.
I realize people on the left despise rich people, especially rich people who give generously to Republicans, but that does not give them the right to personally smear them – and it certainly doesn’t give government agencies acting in the service of a Democratic president the right to abuse their power by attacking them.
It makes you wonder just how deep the politicization of the IRS goes, and how high up goes the chain of command that is causing these things to happen. I think it’s time House Republicans used their subpoena power to find out.
