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The former IRS Chief of Exempt Organizations had read Front Page Magazine and he wasn’t happy.

In a letter to the Washington Post, Marvin Friedlander, a 40-year-veteran of the government’s most feared arm, expressed his displeasure about one of our articles praising President Trump.

“FrontPage Mag, an arm of the Freedom Center, published the following: ‘President Donald Trump fulfilled a key campaign promise yesterday when he announced that the United States will pull out of the potentially economically disastrous Paris Climate Accord that President Obama imposed on the country in his final months in office. In so doing, Trump is taking on all of this global warming poppycock,'” Friedlander fumed at the quote from one of our articles.

And then the former IRS boss claimed that the David Horowitz Freedom Center was violating tax laws because our articles were not “sufficiently full and fair to permit the public to form an independent conclusion.” This is a standard which BLM, the ACLU, the SPLC, Media Matters and thousands of other leftist 501(c)(3)s have never been asked to follow.

While anyone can write a letter to the paper, Marvin Friedlander wasn’t just anyone. The former head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Division in D.C. had been part of the “inner circle” of Lois Lerner, who had been at the heart of the IRS conservative targeting scandal.

The IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Division (which was shut down after the IRS was caught targeting conservative groups) provided direction for enforcing nonprofit regulations and had handled the more complex cases. Friedlander had previously told the Washington Post that he had even “trained many of the determinations staff members in Cincinnati”.

While Friedlander had retired before the scandal, he went on defending the IRS and denying that political motives had been involved in the targeting of conservative organizations. His own politics are no secret. He has recently vowed to move to England if Trump wins again and urged, “make sure ‘The Donald’ never again gets his grubby hands on the White House.”

And here Friedlander was telling the Washington Post that by running an article supportive of President Trump and critical of Obama, Front Page was violating tax laws by engaging in “propaganda” and urged more funding so “the Internal Revenue Service can enforce tax law.”

While Friedlander had long since been retired by then, he enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the Washington Post which had quoted him in its articles on the IRS targeting scandal.

And there was nothing random about the former IRS honcho’s letter to the Washington Post.

The letter came in response to a Washington Post article accusing the Freedom Center of being a key part of a “shadow universe of charities” that had ” joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise”.

David Horowitz had famously written his book “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party” about the leftist nonprofit takeover of the Democratic Party.

And this was payback.

The Post article claimed that “the Freedom Center has helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment” who.”include some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration: Attorney General Sessions, senior policy adviser (Stephen) Miller and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon” and argued that “Horowitz’s story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics.”

It was a pitch by a big government paper read by every major bureaucrat in D.C. to the IRS to investigate the Freedom Center in order to stop Trump. And the former head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Division chimed in to agree with this partisan political lawfare.

The Post’s attack on the Freedom Center rested on its claim that we “had assumed a leading role in the hard-right branch of the network” and that we were violating IRS rules because we were “openly involved in fighting a political war with the left.” That multiple huge leftist nonprofits like Media Matters were involved in fighting a war with conservatives was however not an issue.

The article fixated on the number of people involved with the Freedom Center who had gone on to prominent roles in the Trump administration and the movement, but it’s routine for Democratic Party administrations to staff their ranks with veterans of leftist nonprofits like The Center for American Progress and The Center for a New American Security with no objections.

The Post was trying to incite an IRS investigation of the Freedom Center not because it actually opposed think tanks and other nonprofits becoming influential, but because it opposed Trump.

And the paper may have also been holding a grudge against us.

On May 26, 2017, Front Page Magazine had run an expose of how profitable fake news was for mainstream media papers including the Washington Post. We had called out its editor, Marty Baron, by name, for embracing a business model of spreading lies about political opponents.

On June 3, a little over a week later, the Washington Post had run a major hit piece on us calling for the IRS to shut us down. It seemed highly unlikely that this was a random coincidence.

The Post didn’t get its wish right away, but it kept it up. There was a follow-up article later that year and other media outlets joined in. Next year, the paper and other outlets targeted Gov. Ron DeSantis for speaking at one of our events which it falsely described as “racially charged.”

A year later, the IRS informed us that we were under investigation. The investigation ultimately followed a similar (although not identical, avoiding his preference for the legally controversial “full and fair” standard and its troubling “methodology”) track laid out by the former member of Lois Lerner’s inner circle by focusing on editorials published at Front Page Magazine.

The IRS accused us of “electioneering” and intervening to hurt Hillary and help Trump. This was utterly untrue. We had not endorsed any candidates or campaigned for them. We had however reported on, among other things, Hillary’s corruption and scandals. Including her emails.

94% of donations from IRS employees had gone to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is impossible for us to know whether any private backdoor contacts led to this witch hunt. Or whether the Washington Post had successfully incited a government investigation in print.

Like the victims of the Lerner era, we’ll never know for sure all the behind the scenes intrigues, but the Post never made any secret of its agenda to target the Freedom Center for playing a “leading role in the hard-right branch of the network”.

In its view the David Horowitz Freedom Center was the missing link between the Trump administration and the conservative movement, and shutting it down would harm both.

Someone at the IRS signed off on doing that and we have fought that battle for 5 years.

After $600,000 in legal expenses and more in lost donations, the David Horowitz Freedom Center is on the edge. We have spent 5 years fighting to survive because we offended the right people.

According to the Washington Post, “long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming.” And while the Left has spent much of its lawfare on Trump, it reserved some of it for David and the organization that he created.

We’re not under investigation because we did something wrong but because they’re afraid of us.

Please see the video below for more information: