Last week we reported on the emerging scandal at the IRS — because there weren’t already enough scandals at the agency — concerning the rehiring of employees (800 of them) who were terminated for ethical infractions.
Little did we know that scandal would be paled in comparison to what may be emerging this week: the smoking gun in just one of the cases of IRS targeting of conservative groups going way back to 2009.
A federal judge ordered the IRS to reveal the names of employees involved in the Lois Lerner targeting operation.
That order came after it was learned via a lawsuit by one conservative group that the IRS had more than 20,000 pages of files on them.
That’s right, 40 reams of paper for a simple non-profit designation application. Can you say ‘conspiracy’?
And yet thus far, Commissioner John Koskinen has responded to questions from Congress with nothing but lies, obstruction, misdirection and convenient amnesia.
It’s time to turn the place upside-down.
Here’s more from PJ Media…
Lost emails, destroyed hard drives, foot dragging, stonewalling, and a smirking, sneering IRS commissioner doing his best to obscure the truth — this has largely been the response by the Internal Revenue Service to investigations by Congress and FOIA requests from conservative groups trying to discover the truth about the IRS targeting scandal.
But one federal judge appears to be just as curious as the rest of us about what exactly the IRS was up to when it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in approving their tax-exempt status.
Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the IRS last week to release the names of employees involved in targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Walton also told the IRS to explain why groups were targeted and search for additional records in agency databases from May 2009 to March 2015.
The IRS has until Oct. 16 to complete its records search.
Walton’s order was a turning point for True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht in her legal battle with the IRS that began in 2013.
“We’ve come so far, and I believe that we are going to bring this thing to a head,” Engelbrecht told the Washington Examiner. “I believe we will see the IRS correct its ways, and as to accountability, I’d love to see some perp walks.”
Wouldn’t we all. But first, the truth. And tantalizing hints emerged last week that whatever the truth is may be recoverable.
Bopp and True the Vote previously requested documents from the IRS pertaining to the organization, but the agency has yet to turn over any documents, Bopp said.
But the tax agency finally admitted to having records on True the Vote.
In a conference call with Bopp several weeks ago, he said Justice Department lawyers representing the IRS said it performed a search of a database of documents compiled in response to congressional inquiries and found nearly 2,000 documents related to True the Vote.
“I was shocked there were 2,000 documents, and then I was doubly shocked when they hadn’t produce them,” he said. “You could’ve picked me up off the floor. They had them. They didn’t produce them, and they weren’t even going to tell us.”
