President Nixon Was Impeached For IRS Abuse

Source

In “A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting” author James Bovard tells story about four US Presidents who were actively using the IRS to go after their opponents. This article appeared on 5/15/2013 in the Wall Street Journal.

Following are quotes from this article regarding President Nixon:

“After Richard Nixon took office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called "all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations." More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.

The IRS was also given Nixon's enemies list to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean, "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."”

Articles Of Impeachment

When you search for the articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon on the Internet using Bing or Google you will not find any first rate, primary sources for this document (as of 6/23/13). E.g. there is no link to any law school, Library of Congress or US Congress webpage. One can argue Nixon’s impeachment happened long before the Internet, but I think, this is not quite convincing.

I visited the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee website at http://judiciary.house.gov/. A site search for “nixon articles of impeachment” fails.

This is disturbing now that we are in the 40^th year after Watergate and new abuses by the IRS have been discovered.

The 2^nd Article Of Impeachment

Relying on a secondary source, following are the relevant parts of the 2^nd Article of Impeachment:

“Article 2: Abuse of Power.

…

(1) He [President Nixon] has, acting personally and through his subordinated and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

What is surprising is that at least 10 members of the House Judiciary Committee voted against each of the three Articles of Impeachment.