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Carr: Targeted by feds? Join the club
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 By: Howie Carr

These so-called “journalists” in D.C. must have led very sheltered lives if they’ve never had the feds looking for their sources and/or auditing them.

Or maybe because 98 percent of them drink the Obama Kool-Aid, they’ve always figured they were safe. You can’t really blame the AP for feeling like a battered spouse. Five years of kneepad reporting, 24/7 obsequious fawning to Dear Leader, and now Eric Holder kicks them down the stairs like they’re Michael Savage or somebody.

The FBI opened a jacket on me when I was 23 — they wanted to know where I was getting Army files that I was using in stories about the Black Panther Party. It was a pro forma call. They knew I wouldn’t tell them. No hard feelings on either side.

But the audits … those are something else.

The first time the feds came after me, I was a reporter for Ch. 7. My local state rep had been indicted for attempted extortion, and I was covering the trial. One evening I was in an editing suite, putting together a piece based on what the feds believed was sealed grand jury testimony about my solon. The phone rang and it was an assistant U.S. attorney.

“You run that story and you’re in big trouble,” he said.

I thanked him for his concern and hung up. The next morning the prosecutor stormed up to me in the courtroom and snarled: “You still live in Somerville, don’t you?”

A week later, I got a letter from the IRS saying that I was being audited. I took the letter to court the next day and showed it to my state rep’s defense lawyer. He didn’t seem surprised. He took a letter out of his pocket — it was from the IRS, too.

“Let me handle this,” he said. He wrote a scorching letter to the IRS, demanding to know how he’d been singled out. Then he wrote the same letter on my behalf. And that was the last either of us ever heard from the IRS. My accountant kept calling the pencil-pusher who had signed the letter, but he would never even return the call.

A few years later, the obnoxious prosecutor was nominated for a judgeship. I called up the lawyer and asked him what we were going to do.

“We’re going to own a judge!” he said happily.

The next time it happened, it was a state beef. The state revenue department started sniffing around the Southern Registry in East Cambridge, trying to find out if I was putting three-deckers in Somerville in the names of straws — namely, one of my daughters.

Apparently they thought my last name was Winter, not Carr. Then I ran into a couple of DOR guys in a barroom in Harvard Square. They told me it was an ex-state rep who was targeting me, and that his two minions, the ones who’d been skulking around the courthouse, had already been suspended.

I called my friend the lawyer, and he phoned the DOR and told them he knew everything. They were embarrassed. Everything went away. But I’m still waiting for my apology, for both my apologies.

Welcome to the real world, moonbats.