The House Oversight and Government Reform voted to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress Thursday, but Lerner’s alleged collusion with the top Democrat on the committee to harass conservative grassroots organizations appears to be an even bigger revelation of possible illegal activity.
The majority staff of the committee released emails indicating that Lerner shared confidential tax information of of at least one right-leaning organization with the staff of Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the panel.
The group in question is True the Vote, an organization dedicated to ensuring fair elections through updating voter rolls, mandatory photo identification at the polls and other measures. True the Vote attorney Cleta Mitchell says the committee discovered through Lerner’s emails that she was not only targeting conservative groups but violating the law in sharing information with Cummings staffers.
“What they found was that she was indeed actively involved in targeting and directing targeting toward specific organizations. The one yesterday that the Ways & Means Committee revealed specific information about was the American Crossroads organization founded by Karl Rove. Whether you agree or disagree with what Karl Rove’s organization has done, I certainly don’t think that any body thinks it’s a good idea for the head of the IRS exempt organizations unit to be conspiring to figure out how to deprive the organization of its right to fair consideration and not be pulled out of the pack and subjected to specialized scrutiny from people who disagree with what the organization is doing,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell then detailed how True the Vote was mistreated by Lerner and Cummings.
“The House Oversight Committee found that Elijah Cummings and his staff were communicating with Lois Lerner and her subordinates to target my client. This is after Elijah Cummings said he had absolutely done nothing of the sort. Well, yes he did do that,” said Mitchell.
“Elijah Cummings’ staff told Lois Lerner and her staff that (Cummings staffers) had opened an investigation into True the Vote. Well, let’s think about that for a minute. They have no authority to investigate True the Vote. The jurisdiction of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is federal agencies. It isn’t private organizations that have really had no interaction with the federal government other than to file for exempt status,” said Mitchell.
“Representative Cummings then proceeded to send three separate exhaustive, burdensome, intrusive, oppressive letters to True the Vote demanding all kinds of information which, curiously enough, mirrored the questions that the IRS had propounded to True the Vote a few months earlier,” said Mitchell. “The only problem with that is that set of questions and True the Vote’s responses are not public documents. They should have had no access to those documents. We don’t know if the IRS turned those over to the Cummings staff or not but it does seem sort of odd that they would be asking the identical questions.”
On February 6, Mitchell filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics (ICE) on behalf of True the Vote over the improper sharing of confidential tax information. Mitchell says the latest revelations are triggering a supplemental request for ICE to question Cummings and his staff members about their actions with respect to the recently uncovered emails.
Mitchell says there is no paper trail at this point that takes this investigation into the White House, but Mitchell says President Obama clearly inspired the mistreatment of conservative groups with his public comments.
“Let’s not forget where this IRS scandal began. People say, ‘Oh, you’re looking for a smoking gun and there’s no smoking gun.’ Yeah, there’s a smoking gun. There are about a dozen smoking guns. They’re just laying all over the streets of Washington, D.C. You had the President of the United States going around the country giving speeches attacking private citizens groups and demanding that something be done about them. And why should something be dome about them? Because they disagree with him,” said Mitchell.
“Then you had 31 House members and nine senators, all Democrats, writing to the IRS and demanding the IRS ‘do something’ to crack down on these conservative groups,” she said.
Mitchell believes Democrats put a lot of pressure on the IRS to treat grassroots organizations unfairly, but she said IRS officials had the chance to follow the law but instead went along with a political agenda.
“They should have said, ‘We are not allowed by law to play partisan and party politics. We can’t take sides. We’re not political appointees. We’re career employees. We are prohibited from engaging in political activity. We’re going to do our jobs and follow our procedures and we’re not going to do the bidding of the Democratic Party.’ But that isn’t what they did. They did just the opposite. And I think that’s the thing that should take everybody’s breath away,” said Mitchell.
In addition to the contempt citation issued by the House Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday urged the Justice Department to launch a full investigation and prosecution of Lerner. Mitchell says it will be interesting to see if the DOJ takes any of this seriously.
“They handed it to the investigators on a silver platter. Presumably, the DOJ investigators had access to Lois Lerner’s emails since day one. Have they done anything with any of this?” said Mitchell. “So far Eric Holder has been the most political attorney general, probably in the history of the United States and sees his job not a the chief law enforcement officer but as the chief consigliere for the Obama administration’s philosophical agenda,” said Mitchell.
