Jesse Eisinger
speaker
287 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 29 May
Jesse Eisinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We wrote about, in the end, pretty outrageous things like Paul figured out that you were more likely to be audited if you were a member of the working poor, if you were making $20,000 or $30,000 a year than if you were making $500,000 a year. And why was that the case?
The shorthand way to think about it is that over a decade, Republicans, mainly with the kind of passive acceptance of Democrats, gutted the IRS to the point where the tax collection system of the United States was... almost completely incapacitated. So we had no ability to either oversee or audit or police the wealthy and corporations when they were trying to avoid or evade taxes.
And we wrote that series of stories. It was read by a few important people in Washington and then one person who was really stirred to act, and they gave us all the taxes of the wealthy.
A signal message pops up and asks if this is Jesse Isinger from ProPublica, and the person says they want to give me something. And, you know, I always answer those things.
I get it a lot. And 90% of it is that when I walk down the street, I'm being monitored by the FBI. Oh, people who are just like not well. Yeah. Yeah. So most people are unwell. And then... Nine out of 10 who are not on Whale have something that is of some importance in a local or modest setting, but doesn't rise to the level of a ProPublica project or of national importance.
But I'll get two, three tips like that a week. What was the first sign with this message that this was actually substantial? It took a while. So the person said that they wanted to send me something. And I said, sure, hoping it wasn't going to be anthrax. And then an envelope arrived, which is always kind of exciting. That doesn't happen very frequently. Again, it's never happened to me.
I feel jealous. And I put the envelope aside and forgot about it. And then a couple of months later, a few months later, the Signal message pops up again, and there's a lot of cloak and dagger stuff about how the plan is going to be activated now.
Yeah, like, I'm going forward. I've decided to go forward. I'm now ready to move to phase two or something, you know, something like that. And are you kind of thinking, like... Oh, I'm thinking cranked.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I... In addition to being angry, I'm sort of hopelessly optimistic, you know? And so I'll always think, like, there's a possibility that, you know? But the first problem was that I had no idea where the goddamn envelope was. So I spent hours and hours going there.
You know, I don't know if you've never been to my apartment, but that's not an enjoyable thing to try to sift through the mountains of paper desperately looking for this thing. I did find it, you know, deep within the bowels of our filing system, quote-unquote, and then got the password to this encrypted thumb drive, and I was looking at...
Clearly something that smelled like something that come from the IRS. And what made it that way? Like, what did it... You know, it had jargon. It had fields and fields of numbers out to the single digits. Things that wouldn't be... You always think... The great fear is something that's fraudulent that you're going to be tricked into.
Yeah, you know, James O'Keefe is trying to trick you into publishing something that would be catastrophically embarrassing. Yeah. But this just had verisimilitude to it.
Well, that took months and months and months. But at that point, I sort of, I called up Paul and I said, this is either the biggest hoax of your career or the best day of your career.
We were looking at something that no one had ever seen before. Something that had been one of the most guarded secrets in all of the federal government. And we were privy to this extraordinary secret. And when you say that this is one of the most guarded secrets, like, how guarded was it? Well, you can go to prison for leaking any amount of private tax information.
So it was clearly a violation of the law just to leak one person's tax information. This was thousands of people. So you were like seeing how much they make in a given year. You're seeing what kind of deductions they had. You could see their gambling winnings. You could see their stock sales. I mean, it was an entree into a completely different world.
Yeah, yeah. Every person you can think of, the Waltons, was like, oh yeah, there are a lot of Waltons here. All the top hedge fund managers that you could think of. George Soros was in there. And you would be hard-pressed to name a billionaire who we don't have.
Yeah. Well, good. I was worried for a moment that we were going to be too hard on them. I just don't want to get all those emails from Jeff Bezos. Yeah. I... Well, first of all, I have been one of the people who's been naked at ProPublica because I've been lucky enough, fortunate enough to be in the 990 where they disclose some of the top salaried people.
And I'm sure that in my unproductive years, many people at ProPublica have felt that. resentful toward me. Maybe they feel resentful toward me in any year. But, you know, in fact, I go on. I'm able to work hard and work with colleagues. So you get over it and people aren't very conscious of it. Anyway, I think billionaires are special or let's say the ultra wealthy are special because they are
are often quasi-public figures. I think it essentially makes you a public figure once you reach a certain threshold of wealth, especially because of the power and influence that the wealth accords you. They donate to major institutions and fund political campaigns. And I think in turn, they should sacrifice a little bit of their privacy.
This is not written in the Hammurabi Code. You know, this was not handed down on Mount Sinai. These are just policy decisions that generations relatively recently made with some expertise and other blind spots. One of the struggles was to understand how income tax got to be the way it is in this country. And it's still a process. We're still learning about it.
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