Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill are pressing U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to pursue criminal charges against former IRS nonprofits chief Lois Lerner.
Lerner, whose title was IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director, orchestrated an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation.
Reps. Peter J. Roskam, chairman of the Ways & Means Tax Policy Subcommittee, and Kevin Brady, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, wrote to Sessions this week urging him to have the Department of Justice review the evidence that Lerner violated federal law by targeting Americans based on their political beliefs. The Obama administration had the evidence but chose to do nothing, letting Lerner get away clean.
President Obama lied about these Third World banana republic-style tax abuses and infamously claimed in a TV interview that there was not even “a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS affair. Only useful idiots ever believed that.
Democrats correctly viewed Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These nonprofits tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they had experienced some success in halting Obama’s transmogrification of America. Many left-wingers don’t believe such groups are legitimate and don’t want them granted official recognition and tax-exempt status by the IRS.
“Taxpayers deserve to know that the DOJ’s previous evaluation was not tainted by politics … We respectfully request the Department of Justice to take a fresh look at the evidence presented in the attached referral in order to restore taxpayers’ trust in the IRS,” the two lawmakers wrote. (The letter is available here.)
They reminded Sessions that their committee previously found that “Ms. Lerner used her position to improperly influence IRS action against conservative organizations, denying these groups due process and equal protection rights under the law.” It also determined “she impeded official investigations by providing misleading statements in response to questions from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration,” and “risked exposing, and may actually have disclosed, confidential taxpayer information, in apparent violation of Internal Revenue Code section 6103 by using her personal email to conduct official business.” (The April 9, 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder detailing the findings is available here.)
Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill are pressing U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to pursue criminal charges against former IRS nonprofits chief Lois Lerner.
Lerner, whose title was IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director, orchestrated an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation.
Reps. Peter J. Roskam, chairman of the Ways & Means Tax Policy Subcommittee, and Kevin Brady, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, wrote to Sessions this week urging him to have the Department of Justice review the evidence that Lerner violated federal law by targeting Americans based on their political beliefs. The Obama administration had the evidence but chose to do nothing, letting Lerner get away clean.
