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By Aliss Higham
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sought legal advice about placing Donald Trump's name on COVID-19 stimulus checks, a new investigation has found.
In April 2020, the Treasury Department ordered that then-President Trump's nameshould appear on Economic Impact Payments—a key pillar of the U.S. government's coronavirus relief measures—that were sent to tens of millions of Americans.
It was the first time a president's name would appear on IRS expenditures. At the time, Democrats said the decision to include the president's name was a political gambit by Trump to garner more support for his reelection and may be illegal.
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Now, Bloomberg has found via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that the IRS sought legal advice after a handful of top officials expressed concerns that the move could politicize the government agency. The name inclusion and a letter sent to the IRS by the White House and signed by Trump were both matters of concern, the emails show. Usually, a civil servant will sign checks and letters issued by the Treasury Department as a matter of nonpartisanship.
Emails contained in the FOIA request to the IRS show that officials were concerned they were being used to promote Trump's reelection in November 2020—a breach of the Hatch Act, which limits certain political activities of federal employees and some state and local government employees who work in connection with federally funded programs.
Newsweek reached out to the IRS and the Treasury Department for comment via email outside of regular working hours.
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"Did Counsel push back on this? Did anyone raise the concern about how this makes the IRS appear?" one IRS official wrote in an April 9, 2020, email to IRS commissioner Charles Rettig and other agency officials.
"The one thing I want to document and get for us on the IRS side is a position from" ethics officials "that the IRS is not violating the HATCH act," Kenneth Corbin, a Wage & Investment commissioner, wrote in an April 11, 2020, email to Deputy Commissioner Sunita Lough. "I imagine we want this cover for all parties at the IRS."
Emails from the IRS's legal counsel show lawyers concluded there was "no clear legal prohibition" in including Trump's name on the checks and that the letter was also legally sound.
Even after lawyers approved the matter, the IRS had to grapple with a potential delay in sending the checks, which was attributed to a flurry of tasks to be undertaken by IRS workers due to last-minute modifications. These included formatting Trump's name on the checks, determining if the letter he signed would bear White House letterhead, incorporating "patriotic branding," and deciding if it should be mailed in a separate envelope. IRS officials also deliberated over whether to translate "White House" to "La Casa Blanca" in a Spanish-language version of the letter.
Despite the checks making it out on time, prior to their mailing, The Washington Post discovered the plan, writing in its report that the IRS "is now racing to implement a programming change that two senior IRS officials said will probably lead to a delay in issuing the first batch of paper checks," resulting in complaints being made to the IRS.
"For your awareness, people are now calling to complain about the checks being held back because the president wants his name on them," an IRS official from Rettig's office wrote in an email the following day.
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