House Report Links Obama to the IRS Attack on the Tea Party

As more and more information comes out about the IRS scandal, we’re starting to see the once tenuous connection from theIRS’s targeting of conservative groups to the top of the chain of command at the White House become much more solid.

According to a new report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, there is a connection between Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and the subsequent political pressure brought on Lois Lerner, head of the IRS’s tax exemptions division, to target conservative groups.

The report raises some serious questions about whether the President’s severe criticism of the Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC either directly or indirectly led to Lerner’s attempt to “deal” with these conservative groups via the IRS’s tax exemption process.

WND reports:

“It’s not the job of the IRS to overrule the Supreme Court, and it’s not the job of the IRS to crush political movements its leaders dislike,” the report said. “Her deep involvement in this scheme raises even more questions about who else was involved – including at the White House.”

The report said Lerner “led efforts to scrutinize conservative groups while working to maintain a veneer of objective enforcement.”

Was Lerner following Obama’s lead?  The President thought the Citizens United case was so disastrous that he even took time out of his State of the Union speech to criticize the Court’s decision with the justices sitting in the room.

The House report linked statements made by President Obama in political speeches during the 2010 mid-term election attacking the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with emails and speeches Lerner subsequently wrote expressing her intent to administer the IRS tax-exempt division in a partisan manner.

On Jan. 23, 2010, President Obama declared the Citizens United “ruling strikes at our democracy itself” and “opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy.”

Less than a week later, the president publicly criticized the decision during his State of the Union address.

“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” he said. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people.”

Obama’s tirade against conservative “secret money” in elections continued throughout the campaign season:

In a July 2010 White House Rose Garden speech, the president proclaimed: “Because of the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year in the Citizens United case, big corporations … can buy millions of dollars worth of TV ads – and worst of all, they don’t even have to reveal who’s actually paying for the ads.

Obama said “these shadow groups are already forming and building war chests of tens of millions of dollars to influence the fall elections.”

He made a similar statement in an August 2010 campaign event.

“Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country,” Obama said.

“And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance [sic] company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.”

Then, at a September 2010 campaign event, Obama stated: “Right now, all across this country, special interests are running millions of dollars of attack ads against Democratic candidates. And the reason for this is last year’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which basically says that special interests can gather up millions of dollars – they are now allowed to spend as much as they want without limit, and they don’t have to ever reveal who’s paying for these ads.”

Did these comments motivate Lois Lerner to begin targeting groups like Americans for Prosperity in the tax exemptions process to make it more difficult for them to participate in elections?  The House report seems to indicate that they did.

Lerner said publicly that there was quite a bit of pressure on the IRS to “fix” this problem:

The report also noted that on Oct. 19, 2010, Lerner spoke at an event sponsored by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in which she referenced in her speech the political pressure the IRS faced to “fix the problem” of 501(c)(4) groups engaging in political activity.

“What happened last year was the Supreme Court – the law kept getting chipped away, chipped away in the federal election arena. The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year old precedent that basically corporations couldn’t give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it. The Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it,” Lerner said.

“They want the IRS to fix the problem. The IRS laws are not set up to fix the problem: (c)(4)s can do straight political activity. They can go out and pay for an ad that says, “Vote for Joe Blow.” That’s something they can do as long as their primary activity is their (c)(4) activity, which is social welfare.”

Consequently, Lerner said, “everybody is screaming at us right now: ‘Fix it now before the election. Can’t you see how much these people are spending?’”

This desire to “deal” with the problem of conservative “shadow money” is reflected in emails sent privately between Lerner and her IRS colleagues as well:

The House committee report cited emails Lerner wrote subsequent to Obama’s 2010 speeches in which she argued that IRS officials “need to have a plan” to handle the applications from certain tax-exempt groups.

Yet, she couched the aim with language that suggested she wanted to cover her partisan goals, writing for instance, “We need to be cautious so it isn’t a per se political project.”

The report failed to provide documentation of hard evidence of a direct command from the White House that the IRS begin discriminating against conservative groups, it did show that Lerner and others at the IRS did begin a “multi-tiered” review process in early 2011 that was designed to obstruct conservative groups’ path to tax-exempt status, a move intended to hinder conservative involvement in elections as much as possible:

The report stressed Lerner’s goals in implementing procedures to delay or deny tax-exempt applications by conservative groups was to help Democrats to win elections.

“Even without her full testimony, and despite the fact that the IRS has still not turned over many of her e-mails, a political agenda to crack down on tax-exempt organizations comes into focus,” the report concluded. “Lerner believed the political participation of tax-exempt organizations harmed Democratic candidates, she believed something needed to be done, and she directed action from her unit at the IRS.”

Whether Obama knew about the targeting (or even directed it) or Lerner was simply a committed liberal at the IRS who took matters into her own hands is something that remains to be seen.  What is clear, however, is that Obama’s comments about the Citizens United decision did incite a lot of pressure on Lerner to “deal” with this “problem” of conservative “secret money.”

What’s particularly telling is that Obama’s comments were frequently directed only at conservative groups targeting Democratic candidates with attack ads, and even more specifically the group Americans for Prosperity.  He also went so far as to say that these groups were targeting his health care reform law as a major campaign issue.

Obama didn’t seem to mind that left-leaning groups also had the ability to participate in the kind of activity Americans for Prosperity and others participate in.  If he were really concerned about special interest money in politics and the integrity of our elections, his comments would not have been aimed squarely at conservative organizations.  It’s that kind of rhetoric that the House report thinks prompted Lerner to create a discrimination scheme for these groups.

Now a House report that looked at numerous emails to and from Lois Lerner allege that she knew she was doing illegal things and lied to Congress, most likely being guilty of perjury.

According to PJMedia:

A House committee report claims Lois Lerner, who oversaw the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, lied to Congress about her involvement in the targeting scandal.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a reportTuesday concluding that Lerner “created unprecedented roadblocks for Tea Party organizations” and “worked surreptitiously to advance new Obama administration regulations that curtail the activities of existing 501(c)(4) organizations.”

The report states that Lerner made false statements to committee staff on various occasions.

During a February 2012 briefing, Lerner told committee staff that the criteria for evaluating tax-exempt applications had not changed. According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), however, Lerner directed in June 2011 that the criteria used to identify applications be changed.

In another briefing, she told committee staff that the information the IRS was requesting in follow-up letters to conservative groups, including in some cases a complete list of donors and their contributions, was not out of the ordinary. At a later briefing, an IRS official could not identify previous instances in the agency’s history in which the IRS asked groups for this information.

The report also shows that Lois Lerner knew what they were doing was wrong and that she willfully committed crimes.

Lerner also said that she expected these political nonprofit groups to file a court case because they were “itching for a constitutional challenge.” In an email exchange about a Tea Party applicant, Lerner and her colleagues seemed to hope a lawsuit would lead the IRS to release information about this particular organization, despite rules protecting the secrecy of unapproved applications.

The emails paint a picture of IRS officials being aware of the potential political consequences of their actions and the increasing attention on the issue.

The report mentions her use of a personal email address in violation of IRS policy and accuses her of disclosing confidential taxpayer information.

(H/T: RWNews)

The report concludes that Rep. Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is considering whether or not to hold Lerner in contempt for providing false or misleading information to Congress.  He should also strongly consider charging her with perjury for lying under oath.

Lois Lerner knew what she did was wrong.  The emails show that she knew the IRS would get “creamed” when the public found out.  She lied under oath when she told Congress that she was innocent of wrongdoing and had committed no crimes.  Then she misused the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that the American people deserve an answer to.

There is no doubt in our minds that Lois Lerner is guilty of perjury, along with violations of IRS regulations.  Not only should she be held in contempt of Congress, she should be held in contempt by the American people and thrown in jail.

http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/lerner-lied-to-congress-4-times/