As the Biden administration continues its attempts to consolidate power within the federal government and among its leftist allies, there's a familiar face being tapped to lead Biden's effort to surge power, resources, and agents to the IRS — and she has quite the track record of working to target conservative groups and organizations.
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 — will be leading the Biden administration's expansion of the IRS and stated goal of hiring 87,000 new agents.
Nikole Flax, who most recently served as the deputy commissioner in charge of the IRS' Large Business & International Division, has been with the IRS since 2008. According to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Flax will be leading "the creation of a new, centralized office for implementation of all IRS-related provisions" outlined in the boondoggle falsely named the "Inflation Reduction Act." There's little Democrats love more than a chance to work on "centralized" anything within the federal government.
Flax will play a role in spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars Congress handed to the IRS for, among other things, hiring tens of thousands of new agents for enforcement. In an agency-wide email sent to all IRS employees with the news, Flax excitedly said that the agency has "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." She also promised "we will be moving quickly with our work," despite the federal government's notoriously clumsy and ineffective bureaucracy.
Back in the not-so-distant past, when Flax worked directly with then-Exempt Organizations Unit Director Lois Lerner as chief of staff to former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, the IRS was caught engaging in the intentional slow-walking of tax registrations for conservative groups, even denying some explicitly because they would have undertaken activities hostile to the goals 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," along with Lerner's, as Katie reported in 2014. "One of those officials is former chief of staff to former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax," Katie also noted. "The 'lost' emails fall during the time period when 'the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups," according to the House Ways and Means Committee."
As a refresher, the emails that *were* recovered from Lerner and other high-ranking officials included explanations of their main goal in going after conservatives and tea party groups: "One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing stuff," Lerner wrote.
Flax also, as Katie reported here, "visited the 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." What was Flax doing at the White House? Who did she talk to? Was she reporting progress or taking orders? All that's known is that Flax will again now have a leading role within the IRS as the Biden administration steps up its attacks on conservatives by labeling vast swaths of Americans as fascists.