Obama's IRS spent years targeting Tea Party groups and conservative nonprofits – and nobody went to prison.
Now there's a fund to compensate the victims, and the Left is calling it a slush fund.
That reaction is all the proof you need that it's working.
The People Who Will Get Paid
Before Charlamagne called this "blatant corruption" Tuesday morning, he might have considered who actually receives the money.
Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote – a voter integrity organization – in Houston in 2010.
Within months of filing for tax-exempt status, she was hit with six FBI domestic terrorism inquiries, two IRS personal audits, two IRS business audits, and inspections by the ATF and OSHA.
The IRS requested additional information from her organization five times, demanding thousands of pages of documentation.
She spent more than $100,000 in attorney and accountant fees just to process the requests.
True the Vote had to return a $35,000 grant because its tax-exempt status was still in limbo.
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Three years after filing, Engelbrecht went to federal court to force a decision.
A federal judge later ruled the IRS had acted in bad faith and awarded True the Vote attorneys' fees.
She is not an edge case.
The NorCal Tea Party Patriots filed a class-action lawsuit that eventually forced the IRS to issue a formal apology and a financial settlement.
The IRS signed a consent decree admitting its treatment of conservative groups – including "heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays" and demands for unnecessary information – was wrong.
The $1.776 billion figure – the deliberate nod to 1776 – is not going to Trump personally.
It is not going to his campaign.
It is going to people the government documented harming.
What Charlamagne's Argument Actually Proved
His rant had one honest moment in it.
He compared the IRS fund to student loan forgiveness – and that comparison is more useful than he intended.
Student loan forgiveness transfers money from Americans who didn't attend college, or paid off their own debt, to borrowers who voluntarily took on loans.
The IRS compensation fund transfers money to Americans whose organizations were deliberately targeted and destroyed by agents of the federal government.
One compensates a choice.
The other compensates a crime.
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Beyond that, Charlamagne named no fraudulent recipient, identified no payment going to someone the government didn't actually harm, and offered no counter to the underlying documented fact that the targeting happened and nobody faced consequences for it.
Lois Lerner – the IRS official at the center of the scandal – took the Fifth before Congress and retired in September 2013 with her full federal pension intact.
The DOJ under Obama declined to bring criminal charges against a single person.
Calling the compensation fund corrupt requires believing the victims don't deserve to be made whole.
That is the argument Charlamagne was actually making, even if he didn't say it plainly.
Twelve Years of Telling Conservatives They Were Imagining It
The IRS targeting scandal broke in 2013.
Democrats spent years calling it a partisan witch hunt.
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They called it overblown when Lerner took the Fifth.
They called it settled when the DOJ walked away without charges.
A compensation fund – one a federal judge is now overseeing – is the institutional acknowledgment that none of that was true.
The targeting was real.
The victims are documented.
The government owes them something.
Charlamagne's outrage is not about corruption.
It is about accountability arriving for people who spent twelve years certain it never would.
Sources:
- Jonathan Karl and Katherine Faulders, "Trump could drop $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for $1.776 billion victims' fund," ABC News, May 19, 2026.
- Zachary Leeman, "Charlamagne Crowns Trump 'Donkey of the Day' for 'Blatant Slap in the Face'," Mediaite, May 19, 2026.
- Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review," May 2013.
- "True the Vote Wins Big Case After Decade-Long Battle with IRS," CBN News, December 2022.
- Hans von Spakovsky, "Five Years Later, Still No Justice for IRS Targeting of Conservatives," The Daily Signal, May 2018.
