The following article appeared in the
American Thinker on December 19th
The weaponization of the IRS to
suppress the organization of conservative nonprofits when the tea party
movement was in full bloom, remains an open sore on our democratic political
system. The weight of the most feared agency of the federal government was used
to suppress a political movement. Despite the payment of millions of
taxpayer dollars to groups that were prevented from getting their status
approved because their politics were disagreeable to the incumbent president
and his supporters in the federal bureaucracy, the damage cannot be undone, and
the perpetrators have suffered no judicial consequences. Lois Lerner, the point
woman who invoked the Fifth Amendment in her testimony before Congress, was
able to retire with a fat pension and no jail time.
Even worse, the testimony she gave in
deposition in a key lawsuit remains sealed by the order of a judge who heard
claims of Lerner and her deputy Holly Paz that they had received threats.
Judicial
Watch (donate
here, please!) thinks that we the people have a right to know what
testimony she gave under oath.
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Lois Lerner should be dressing in ORANGE every day! |
Judicial Watch last week asked a
federal court to unseal the depositions of Lois Lerner, the former director of
the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Holly
Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements.
Both played key roles in the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups opposed
to Obama policies in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.
The request came in an amicus curiae brief filed with the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division
supporting NorCal Tea Party Patriots’ class action lawsuit seeking the
unsealing of the depositions (NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The
Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341)). The
depositions were sealed by a federal judge after Lerner’s and Paz’s lawyers
claimed the two were receiving threats. Judicial Watch’s brief argues that the
documents sought may shed light on government misconduct, and the shielding of
internal government deliberations does not serve the public’s interest. (snip)
In addition to the revelation of IRS
employees’ conduct in the emails uncovered, the records obtained by Judicial
Watch [in the course of its FOIA investigation] also sparked investigations
into Lois Lerner’s emails and IRS’ failure to preserve thousands of emails that
were potentially relevant to the various investigations about the IRS’
treatment of conservative groups. While the federal government has now admitted
that the targeting “was wrong” and “for such treatment, the IRS expresses its
sincere apology” the IRS continues to this day to withhold from the public in
Judicial Watch’s main IRS case … email communications with Lois Lerner and/or
Holly Paz ….
The IRS does not have clean hands in
the matter of revealing critical information:
In response to Judicial Watch’s
litigation, the IRS initially claimed that emails belonging to Lerner were
supposedly missing. Later, IRS officials conceded that the “missing” emails
were on IRS back-up systems. Throughout its litigation, Judicial Watch
repeatedly exposed a variety of IRS record keeping inconsistencies, erroneous
claims, and failures to produce court-ordered records:
Preventing the public – and the
Judicial Watch litigants – from access to all information about this major
abuse of government power is ridiculous. I hope that rthe ruling is reversed,
and we get to hear what Lerner had to say.
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