President Trump’s decision to withdraw the nomination of Donald Korb as Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service after I exposed Korb’s long history of donating to Democrats, his praise for Chuck Schumer, and his ties to anti-Trump figures, was an important step forward in cleaning up the IRS. But there’s a lot more work to be done to wipe away years of partisan interference and make the IRS an agency that truly serves the interests of the American people.
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Kevin Salinger, Korb’s longtime protégé, continues to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy, one of the most powerful unelected positions in the entire federal government. As I’ve shared on X, Salinger’s political background stands in direct opposition to everything the Trump administration is trying to accomplish.
Most Americans don’t know his name, but inside the IRS, Salinger essentially acts as the gatekeeper for federal tax policy. Salinger oversees all day-to-day operations in tax policy, supervises more than 100 full-time attorneys, and holds veto power over every IRS and Treasury regulation. The IRS’s 1,500 attorneys cannot issue a single rule without the approval of Salinger or his superior. In practice, that gives Salinger enormous influence over how, and whether, Trump’s tax agenda is implemented.
Making all of this problematic is the fact that Kevin Salinger is a radical Obama donor with a long record of left-wing activism, making clear he never should have been anywhere near Trump’s tax apparatus.
Salinger worked under Korb at Sullivan & Cromwell for over a decade. Korb personally recommended him for the Treasury job, according to several sources familiar with the process. From there, the red flags are self-evident. Federal Election Commission records show Salinger donated multiple times to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and donated nothing to Trump or any Republican candidate. That alone should have disqualified him.
But his activism goes even deeper. Salinger performed extensive pro bono work for Immigration Equality, a nonprofit that aggressively advocates for asylum for LGBTQ and HIV-positive immigrants. Their own filings call for pathways to citizenship, expanded legal protections, and sweeping immigration reforms that contradict Trump’s stated goals of reducing both legal and illegal immigration. Salinger also served on the board of El Barrio Angels, which provides free immigration legal services in Los Angeles, and donated to Equality California’s PAC to oppose California’s Proposition 8, as well as to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which works to elect progressive candidates who support abortion rights and expanded nondiscrimination laws.
None of this was hidden. None of it required special intelligence or investigative tools. It was all public, yet the Treasury Department, and specifically Michael Friedman, Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, failed to catch it. Friedman, who previously oversaw Treasury nominations within the Presidential Personnel Office, never flagged Korb or Salinger. His resume focuses on private-sector work in supply-chain technology, not vetting federal personnel for ideological alignment or national security risk. And that failure has now left a committed Obama-aligned activist in charge of determining which Trump policies at the IRS live and which die.
The Treasury Department declined to answer my questions about how such an obvious vetting failure occurred.
But we already know the consequences. Nearly a year into Trump’s administration, the IRS remains infested with Obama-era holdovers, the same institutional network that protected Lois Lerner while conservatives were being targeted. President Trump explicitly ordered Secretary Bessent back in July to fire the Lerner holdovers. I was in the room when he said it. “Fire all of them.” That was the order.
Not one has been fired.
And now we see why. The people in charge of implementing Trump’s directives, the same people empowered to approve or block tax policy, are not loyal to him, his agenda, or the voters who put him in office. They are loyal to the same political ideology that spent eight years weaponizing the IRS against conservatives.
This is not incompetence. It’s sabotage, and the consequences have been profound. Remember, the Tea Party movement in 2010? How many nonprofit organizations promoting that cause remain today? I can’t think of a single one. The Tea Party movement had no institutional support to sustain it, and as a result, the movement died. Have you ever wondered why Reagan-era conservatism persisted for so long? It’s due, in part, to the institutions that were started, such as tax organizations and think tanks that remain influential to this day. The same thing can happen to the America First movement if we let it.
If Donald Korb was unfit to serve as Chief Counsel, and President Trump was absolutely right to withdraw him, then it is only logical and necessary to remove Kevin Salinger immediately. Leaving an Obama-donor activist in control of tax policy inside a Trump administration makes no sense unless the intent is to obstruct the President’s agenda from within.
The question now isn’t whether the IRS has been infiltrated. It’s why decisive action still hasn’t been taken to clean it out.
Until these people are removed completely, the sabotage will continue, threatening the very future of the America First movement.
The post How Did An Obama-Donor Activist End Up Controlling Trump’s Tax Policy? appeared first on Loomered.
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