A White House official asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate an audit into pillow tycoon Mike Lindell, a well-known Trump supporter, over concerns he was being inappropriately targeted.
Treasury official David Eisner reportedly wrote a letter to the IRS saying that the MyPillow CEO, “a high-profile friend of the President recently received an audit letter, from what I understand, his second in two years.”
According to the New York Times, the note added that Lindell was “concerned that he may have been inappropriately targeted.”
The letter rang alarm bells in the service, with officials worrying that the president may be seeking to protect his friends from examination.
Lindell told the Times that the letter was the result of a mix-up.
He said he reached out to the tax-collecting agency asking why companies that received employee retention tax credit should have to amend returns for previous years. “It’s nonsensical government waste and I really want to try and get this rectified,” he added.
Lindell faced legal action after claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. His lawyers said several defamation lawsuits he faced in connection with his claims left him millions of dollars in debt.
On Wednesday, Lindell told a federal judge in Washington that he had no money left to pay over $50,000 in sanctions to voting software firm Smartmatic over his false election claims.
“I’m in ruins,” he said during a motion hearing. “I borrowed everything I can. Nobody will lend me any money anymore. I can’t turn back time… but I will tell you, I don’t have any money.”
Donald Trump has reportedly tried to use the IRS to target his political enemies, and this week asked it to look into removing the tax-exempt status for Harvard University after the Ivy League school refused to agree to the administration’s demands to tackle antisemitism on campus.
Lindell might have an idea of what it’s like to be in Harvard’s shoes.
In 2023, the pillow magnate told MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon that the IRS had launched five audits probing three years’ worth of employee payments, which he believed were linked to his support for Trump.
“What they’ve done is an all-out attack on MyPillow to silence me,” he said on Bannon’s War Room. “They wanna silence my voice. They know the only way that they could win now is to not have Donald Trump become our next president.”
The IRS has long had a testy relationship with conservatives.
During the first Trump administration, the tax agency issued an apology to some 40 conservative groups—and reached financial settlements with over 400 others—after it admitted to wrongly using “heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays” in reviewing their applications for tax-exempt status.
In the case that ended in a substantial settlement, an IRS official admitted that the agency had been aggressively scrutinizing groups whose names include words like “Tea Party” and “Patriots.”
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