Judicial Watch
4/10/2015
IRS: Mistakes Were Made
Judicial Watch has just released a new batch of documents forced out of the Obama IRS that show the Obama administration’s scandalous misuse of the IRS to target Tea Party and other conservatives is not going away.
Included in the new batch of documents is a February 2012 email from Lois Lerner, who was then head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations Branch, asking that a special program be set up to “put together some training points to help [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of revealing too much information to Congress. We also found a remarkable Lerner email from 2013 in which she says she is willing to take the blame for not having provided sufficient direction to her underlings on how best to investigate the targeted groups, and then conceded that she “understands why the IRS criteria” leading to targeting of Tea Party groups and other opponents of the President Obama “might raise questions.”
In May 2013, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released an audit, however, the IRS had used “inappropriate criteria” to identify potential political cases. “Early in Calendar Year 2010,” the TIGTA wrote, “the IRS began using inappropriate criteria to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status to (e.g., lists of past and future donors).” The illegal IRS reviews continued for over 18 months and, the TIGTA reported, “delayed processing of targeted groups’ applications” preparing for the 2012 presidential election.
Not so coincidentally, during this period of time, Lerner emailed former Director of the Office of Rulings and Agreements Holly Paz, attempting to limit information provided by the IRS to Congress about non-profit classifications. Here is the exchange…
The article continues at Judicial Watch.
