When the Feds Forge the Facts and Steal Your House: The Kafkaesque Case of Ebenezer Howe

Somewhere between Orwell and Kafka lies the American taxpayer’s new reality—where the government fabricates evidence, the courts rubber-stamp the con, and the Department of Justice lounges in silent complicity. If this sounds hyperbolic, meet Ebenezer K. Howe IV, a man whose home is now up for government auction not because he broke the law, but because the IRS pretended he did—and no one in power seems remotely interested in correcting the lie.

This isn’t a policy debate. This isn’t a matter of interpretation. This is fraud—documented, demonstrable, and deliberately ignored.

Let’s start with the basics. Over eight consecutive tax years, the IRS conjured fake filings into its Individual Master File (IMF)—an Orwellian digital brain that undergirds the agency’s entire enforcement regime. It fabricated dates when Mr. Howe supposedly filed 1040A returns. It inserted imaginary referrals to its Examination Division. It plugged in phantom Substitute for Return entries—all with timestamped precision, as if the lie could gain legitimacy through bureaucratic bravado.

Then, the DOJ’s Tax Division took those false records, dressed them up in official certificates, and marched them into federal court in Idaho like holy relics. For five and a half years, two district court judges refused to address the falsification at all—sidestepping the pesky question of whether the government even had standing to sue. Instead, they buried Mr. Howe’s actual defense under a cartoonish misrepresentation that he was whining about “falsified returns,” not falsified records. Clever wordplay from the bench—if you’re into state-sanctioned gaslighting.

But it gets worse.

When Howe appealed to the Ninth Circuit, he asked a simple question: can the government legally seize a citizen’s home when every digital record justifying that seizure is fake? The DOJ responded with bureaucratic shoulder-shrugging, arguing there was “no serious legal question.” No serious legal question about courts relying on forged evidence?

You’d think that argument would insult the intelligence of a circuit clerk. You’d be wrong.

Clerk Susan Dwyer—acting more like an East German border guard than a neutral gatekeeper—struck Howe’s brief by issuing an order to herself, unsigned by any Article III judge. Let that sink in: a federal appellate clerk made herself judge, jury, and executioner. And when Howe asked the court to at least pause the sale of his home while they sorted through this banana republic charade, Dwyer denied the emergency motion without a single word of reasoning.

That’s not appellate procedure. That’s a cover-up in heels.

No judge has reviewed the IRS’s falsified records. No judge has addressed the standing of the government to file the case. No judge has ruled on whether the DOJ’s knowing submission of fake evidence constitutes prosecutorial misconduct. And unless someone at Main Justice wakes up from their Ambien haze, no judge ever will. Because that’s the game: procedural assassination. Starve the record. Mischaracterize the defense. Lock the courthouse doors from the inside.

But here’s the punchline: the DOJ knows.

They know no 1040A returns were ever filed. They know no Substitute for Return forms were ever created. They know the IRS’s own digital audit trail—command codes, entries, and overrides—was manipulated to simulate lawful process. And yet, with full knowledge of the scheme, DOJ Tax Division attorneys like David Hubbert still filed the fake records in court. They were never withdrawn. Never corrected. Because in modern America, the lie is not a problem; the problem is when the citizen dares to object.

And now they’re about to take Mr. Howe’s house.

American Made Action has filed a formal demand with DOJ Appellate Staff Director Mark Freeman, calling for immediate intervention. Not to grant a pardon. Not to ask for mercy. But to stop this grotesque abuse of power before it becomes legal precedent. We’ve also copied every oversight office with a functioning email address: Pardon Attorney, OPR, Inspector General, Solicitor General, Tax Division, and the Office of the Attorney General.

Because if you let this happen to one man, you’ve let it happen to us all.

If the courts will no longer require real evidence, if DOJ attorneys can traffic in fraud with impunity, and if federal clerks can usurp the role of judges, then we’re no longer a nation of laws. We’re a nation of fictions—where the house always wins, because the house owns the rulebook, the dice, and the referee.

So here’s the question: will the Department of Justice do its job? Or will it prove once again that justice isn’t blind—it’s just too busy falsifying the records to see anything at all?

We’ll be waiting.

And watching.