This guy; former IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters, 94 years old who died on Tuesday. Walter, a South Carolina Republican was appointed to head the IRS by Richard Nixon in March 1971. Nixon had fired the previous IRS Commissioner, Randolph Thrower, also a Republican (and who died earlier this year at the age of 100), when he resisted Nixon's plans to use the IRS to investigate his enemies.
(Walters) According to the New York Times in one of the White House tapes, Nixon said of the new commissioner
“I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends."
On September 11, 1972 the White House Counsel, John Dean, summoned Walters to his office and gave him a list of 200 "enemies" they wanted investigated. Walters, with the concurrence of his boss, Treasury Secretary George Schultz, refused to do anything regarding the list. When told of Walters' resistance, Nixon instructed Dean:
"You’ve got to kick Walters’s ass out first and get a man in there."Walters left office in April 1973.
USA Today reported that in an interview shortly before he died Walters said:
"I'm distressed at what's happening and particularly with IRS . . . IRS must be run nonpolitical. Our tax system otherwise will fail and we can't afford that".
On a side note, THC is reliably informed that it is John Dean who, at the President's request, has been running the super-secret White House investigation that allowed the President to proclaim that "there is not a smidgen of corruption" at the IRS. THC anxiously awaits the release of the detailed findings from the investigation.
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