Internal Revenue Service

Just hours after Equifax CEO Rick Smith wrapped up his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce committee – the first in a series of Congressional “fact-finding missions” about the hack - Politico reported that the IRS last week awarded the disgraced credit monitoring bureau with a $7.25 no-bid contract even as the company struggled to address suspicions that it mislead investors and customers by withholding information about one of the most damaging data breaches in US history.

The IRS would never push legal boundaries in order to pursue the ideological agenda of a political party in Washington D.C., right?  Well, aside from that time that Lois Lerner used her position inside the IRS to target Tea Party Organizations in order to help Obama get re-elected in 2012, of course.

In just over six weeks, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen’s term expires. This allows President Trump to choose a new IRS chief who may have two high-profile and sensitive jobs: helping implement the the president’s proposed tax cuts and overseeing an audit of his tax returns.

Trump hasn’t nominated anyone to replace Koskinen yet, but as Bloomberg reports, Koskinen, who was hired by President Barack Obama and is loathed by congressional Republicans, who tried to impeach him in 2016, is unlikely to be reappointed.

In its latest exclusive 'bombshell' report, CNN has just announced that Special Counsel Mueller's team is now working directly with the IRS to collect financial information on Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.  Of course, given that the FBI and Mueller raided Manafort's home over two months ago and speculation of an imminent indictment has been circulating for days/weeks, it would seem like this wouldn't be much of a surprise...but anything to keep the 'Russian collusion' headlines coming...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators are leaving no stone unturned in their crusade to find something they can use to try and turn a member of Trump’s inner circle, The Daily Beast is reporting, citing a source close to Mueller, that the special counsel’s office has teamed up with the IRS’s Criminal Investigations Unit. The “elite” IRS investigations squad will help ensure that investigators apply the maximum possible scrutiny to the finances of Trump’s inner circle in an investigation that’s nominally about election fraud.