The enemies list and the IRS

The memo is in the White House counsel’s own words: the question was “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” It suggested grants, federal contracts, lawsuits and prosecutions as tools, and a coordinator to run it. [1]

Lists were drawn up: a short priority list sent in September 1971, and longer lists of reporters, donors, actors and Democratic politicians. To be on one was to be marked as a target by the President’s staff. [2]

The IRS was the sharpest weapon. In 1972 Dean handed the IRS commissioner a list of about 200 Democrats. The House Judiciary Committee made the misuse of the IRS part of its abuse-of-power article. On this view, the enemies list was not a joke or a filing exercise. It was a plan to punish dissent, and it was put into motion. [3]

The memo and the lists are authentic and are not in dispute. [1][2]

What happened next is where accounts differ. Johnnie Walters, IRS commissioner from 1971 to 1973, said that when Dean gave him the list, Treasury Secretary George Shultz told him to lock it in his safe. “We did not touch a single person on that list,” Walters said in 2013. He later handed it, sealed, to the staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. The former Nixon Library director Tim Naftali put it this way: “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.’” [3]

Dean’s own account in 2014 is that he wrote the memo hoping it would be rejected, that the list “never went outside my file drawer”, and that “the federal machinery was never used to screw them.” That conflicts with Walters’s memory of receiving the list from Dean. Both men are recalling events forty years later. [4][3]

Article II of impeachment, approved by the Judiciary Committee, charged that Nixon tried to get the IRS to start audits and investigations for political reasons. The committee found the attempt; it was not a finding that audits of the 200 names took place. [5]