Remember all of those “Tea Party Crazies,” as Senator Roger Bedford calls them, who were deemed conspiracy theorists for expressing concerns that the IRS was harassing them during the 2012 election cycle?
Well, apparently they were right.
The IRS today admitted to inappropriately flagging conservative groups for review during the 2012 election cycle.
According to Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that overseas tax-exempt groups, organizations were selectively targeted because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status.
The Associated Press also said that groups were in some cases asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy.
“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said today. “The IRS would like to apologize for that.”
Flash back to March of 2012, after conservative groups around the country had claimed they were being singled out, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in no uncertain terms that the IRS does not target groups based on their political views.
“There’s absolutely no targeting,” Shulman told a House committee. “This is the kind of back and forth that happens” to people applying for tax-exempt status, he said.
But in reality, more than 300 groups were targeted by what the IRS has called “low-level workers” in Cincinnati, Ohio. Lerner says that no high level IRS officials knew it was going on. The IRS said in a statement that the practice was discovered at some unspecified time last year and that they moved to correct it.
It is unclear at this point why they waited until now to fess up.
“Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale,” the IRS also said in their statement.
I haven’t yet figured out how you can simultaneously admit to targeting conservative groups while maintaining that your intentions weren’t “due to any political or partisan rationale.”
Back in Alabama, the Wetumpka Tea Party says they were one of the groups that was targeted. “We have a hard time believing this was an ‘accident’ by low level IRS people,” they posted on Facebook.
Let’s not forget, the IRS has been tasked with enforcing ObamaCare.
That should be a real hoot.
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