New Bombshell Documents Explode in Obama's IRS Scandal

By Elizabeth Nelson

New IRS Documents show they didn't need a Conservative Donor List to attack Conservatives.  

We're finding out from Judicial Watch why Lois Lerner felt the need to plead the 5th.  You see, the 5th Amendment is for witnesses of a crime, or the accomplice of said crime, and they understand that they have information pertaining to the crime that that they either committed or helped to perpetrate and by divulging said information will "incriminate" themselves. Now we're learning that the IRS had a "Secret Research Project," by Top IRS Officials.

Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups.

According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests for donor names was “not appropriate, not usual.” The new documents obtained by Judicial Watch also reveal that 75% of the groups from whom the lists were solicited were apparently conservative, with only 5% being liberal.

The documents came in response to an October 2013 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)) filed against the IRS after the agency refused to respond to four FOIA requests dating back to May, 2013. The emails are contained in the sixth batch of documents the IRS has been forced to produce in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit.

Contained in the newly released IRS documents is an email from Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Margo L. Stevens that was sent in response to a question from Lerner concerning attempts to return donor lists the IRS had controversially obtained.  In Stevens’ May 21, 2012, email to Lerner, she wrote:

Key parts of this email and other documents the IRS produced to Judicial Watch have been blacked out.  (Many of the documents are completely blacked out (or partially redacted) seemingly because they are allegedly “pre-decisional” or “deliberative,” information that might be exempt from disclosure under FOIA.  The Obama administration’s decision to withhold this information is completely discretionary and is not required by law.)

A subsequent IRS email thread on June 27, 2012, revealed that inappropriately obtained donor lists were being used for a “secret research project” and that a top official wanted then-Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller to decide how to handle the issue.  The email exchange, with the Subject line “donor names,” included the following:

•  June 27, 2012: 8:59 AM — David L. Fish, IRS acting director of Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements, to Holly Paz:

Joseph Urban [IRS Technical Advisor, Tax Exempt and Government Entities] had actually started a secret research project on whether we could, consistent with 6104, argue that [REDACTED] Joe was quite agitated yesterday when I told him what we were doing. (He was involved when the initial question was raised, but we didn’t continue reading him in). At one point he started saying that this was a decision for Steve Miller–I told him we were already doing it, and that I didn’t know whether Lois had already talked to Nikole [former IRS Chief of Staff to IRS Commissioner Steve Miller] about this. Would not be surprised if he already started working on Lois.

•  June 27, 2012 9:02 AM — Holly Paz to David L. Fish:

Thanks for the heads up. The decision was made by Steve, based on advice from P and A. [Procedure and Administration]

Lerner’s and other IRS officials’ concerns about how to handle these donor lists came on the heels of an advisory from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to her and other IRS officials in late March 2012 of “an audit we plan to conduct of the IRS’s process for reviewing applications for tax exemption by potential section 501(c)(4), 501(c)(5), and 501(c)(6) organizations.”  The documents produced do not detail the “secret research project” nor disclose how the IRS used the donor names the agency improperly obtained.  Read more Judicial Watch

 

While the IRS' "not even a smidgen of Corruption" is continuing to unravel, we are all being skillfully distracted by ISIS, Russia, the Border Crisis, Israel, Hamas and whatever this Administration wants us to look at.
"Look the other way, this is not the scandal you're looking for." 

"It's just a bunch of bone-headed decisions"

"Not a smidgen of Corruption." 

And yet, Nixon was publicly persecuted and resigned for far less, Mr. president.

But wait, "smidgen of corruption" is not what you said when the IRS scandal first occurred and you learned about the IRS from Fox News, "like the rest of us," right?

"If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous. And there's no place for it,"

"And they have to be held fully accountable. Because the IRS as an independent agency requires absolute integrity, and people have to have confidence that they're ... applying the laws in a nonpartisan way."

"I have no patience for it, I have no tolerance for it..."

But you also said the same thing about Benghazi, and we're still waiting to see your "outrage" and "accountability" play out, aren't we, paper tiger?