by Ben Shapiro
Meanwhile, as the IRS went after conservative nonprofits, it actually offered campaigning advice to black churches in the hopes that those nonprofits would get out the vote for President Obama. Before the 2012 election, Attorney General Holder and Shulman, as well as senior IRS official Peter Lorenzetti, met with black church leaders, with Lorenzetti stating, “It is important to note . . . that an organization exempt under 501(c)3—in this case the church or a religious organization—can conduct educational election activities.” The event was attended by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, all of whom were Democrats. Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) actually told MSNBC, “We want to let (the pastors) know that there is a theological responsibility to participate in the political process. We’re going to encourage them to encourage their people [to get out the vote].”73
“THEY HAVE TO BE HELD FULLY ACCOUNTABLE”
On May 9, 2013, with the inspector general’s report about to break, Lois Lerner called one Celia Roady, a Washington tax lawyer working across the street from the IRS. She asked Roady to come to an event at the American Bar Association Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting and ask her a question the next day. She then provided Roady with the question: Roady would ask Lerner about the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits.
The next day, Friday, May 10, Roady asked Lerner her prewritten question. Lerner answered that the IRS had used the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot” and “9/12” as red flags for giving conservative groups closer scrutiny. “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. The IRS would like to apologize for that.” She then blamed low-level employees for the targeting, and said that no higher-ups knew about it at all: “It’s the line people that did it without talking to managers. They’re IRS workers, they’re revenue agents.” According to Lerner, some seventy-five groups were targeted inappropriately. The IRS released a statement suggesting that while “mistakes were made initially,” those mistakes “were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.” The situation, the IRS claimed, had been “fixed.”74 When asked why she had chosen that moment to reveal the scandal, Lerner said that someone had asked her a question. “Someone asked me a question today, so I answered it,” she said. It only took a full week for the planted question to become public.75 The incompetence didn’t stop there. When asked about one of the statistics she gave during a May 10 phone call, Lerner answered, “I’m not good at math.”76
Lerner also lied egregiously while talking about the rationale behind the targeting. She blamed the IRS’s political targeting on the supposed “big uptick” in 501(c)(4) applications. But the numbers don’t bear that out. Applicants saw a minor increase after Citizens United, but the real jump didn’t begin until after the targeting started. Lerner further explained that she didn’t know about IRS targeting until after the press made an issue of it, but Lerner was briefed long before the 2012 complaints became public. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, no conservative, gave Lerner’s statements four Pinocchios and wrote, “In some ways, this is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10.”77
As soon as the news broke of the IRS’s admissions, conservative groups emerged from the woodwork to tell their stories—or, more accurately, the media finally began paying attention to the accusations. The Richmond Tea Party showed a letter from IRS specialist Stephen Seok that asked for “the names of donors, contributors and grantors”—all information that the IRS had no right to ask. The extended inquiry, said Richmond Tea Party president Larry Nordvig, had a “very chilling effect” on the group’s fund-raising efforts. Wetumpka Tea Party of Alabama similarly saw a two-year delay in its approval process. Becky Gerritson, president of the group, called it “intimidation.” Catherine Engelbrecht, whose anti–voter fraud group True the Vote became an Obama administration favorite target, felt scrutiny not just from the IRS but from other federal agencies, including the Federal Elections Commission. An IRS agent told her, “I’m just doing what Washington is telling me to do. I’m just asking what they want me to ask.”78 Tea Party groups in Ohio, Hawaii, Texas, and the rest of the country reported similar experiences. Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a nonprofit group the left likes to portray as a front for the Koch brothers, met especially heavy scrutiny—groups that worked with AFP were asked to explain their relationship with it. “At the time we thought it was awfully odd for the IRS to be interested in something like that,” said AFP president Tim Phillips. “Now we know that it was part of a pattern of abuse. This is large-scale and systematic.”79
The conservative Leadership Institute also complained of IRS targeting, stating that over the course of 2012, the IRS forced the institute to hand over 23,400 pages of documents. Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute, said, “The IRS’ indefensible behavior is worse than we first thought, as it targeted both new and existing conservative groups in politically motivated attacks. Fortunately my Leadership Institute had the resources to stand up to the government’s bullying and intimidation. Other groups, including grassroots and tea party groups we’ve helped train, did not.”80 Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots called on President Obama to apologize.81
Those were just the groups that were talking. Multiple groups said they had kept quiet to avoid even more IRS scrutiny.82
The IRS did not limit its discriminatory treatment to conservative groups. Pro-Israel groups, too, became targets as the campaign heated up. The Obama administration saw pro-Israel groups as possible obstacles to Obama’s support base in the Jewish community. And so such groups were systematically silenced. I personally experienced this while attempting to found a nonprofit designed to allow impoverished Jews to travel to Israel for religious holidays; the project, “One Light” was held up by the IRS, with Lois Lerner personally mailing inappropriate questions. I wasn’t the only one. At least five pro-Israel groups were targeted by the IRS based on their hawkish views on Israeli security after the Washington Post’s David Ignatius questioned whether such groups should have tax-exempt status, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee sent complaints to the IRS. The chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority even got involved, asking U.S. consul general Daniel Rubinstein about such nonprofit groups.83
While conservative groups experienced IRS delays and bureaucratic persecution, liberal groups connected with President Obama sailed through the nonprofit process. The Barack H. Obama Foundation, a nonprofit designed to raise cash for charity in Kenya, got the IRS gold stamp in a month, even though it had operated as a charitable organization for longer than allotted under federal law without IRS approval.84 One conservative group experimented with a liberal name to see if the IRS would then clear its application. The group originally applied as “Media Trackers,” a research site billing itself as a “non-partisan investigative watchdog dedicated to promoting accountability in the media and government.” The IRS held up the application for well over a year. After fourteen months, the group reapplied as “Greenhouse Solutions.” The IRS approved the application within three weeks.85
As information broke, the administration, clearly worried about the blowback, prepared its response. By the following Monday, President Obama was ready to talk. He said he had “no patience” with targeting, even though he himself had targeted groups as early as 2010. He then added, “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.”86
Obama’s faux anger entered full swing. “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” he said. He pled ignorance: “I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the (inspector general) report.” He did not comment on whether
he knew about the IRS’s targeting, however. Obama then proceeded to deny the need for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS, instead charging the Eric Holder–led Justice Department with looking into the scandal.87
The same day Obama denied knowledge of the IRS scandal, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that the White House counsel knew as early as April 22 about the upcoming inspector general’s report. Many of the same Democrats who had asked the IRS to target conservative nonprofits similarly claimed outrage. “These actions by the IRS are an outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust,” said Senator Baucus. “The IRS will now be the ones put under additional scrutiny.”88 Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), one of the senators who specifically asked the IRS to target conservative groups, said that there was “no basis for targeting within the IRS,” and added that he hadn’t meant the IRS should hit only conservative institutions. Rather, he said, asking for an investigation into conservative group Crossroads GPS was a way to send a warning shot to all political organizations.89 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the story was “very troubling.” Other Democrats were more honest, complaining that the new focus on the IRS might stop the IRS from going after conservative groups, hampering liberal election efforts.90
On May 15, Miller sent Obama a resignation letter. “It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends in early June. This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation’s tax agency,” Miller wrote. The same day, Obama appeared at an unscheduled press conference and said that he had requested the resignation.91 The IRS’s conduct, Obama added, was both “inexcusable” and an “outrage.” He also said it was “fixable,” and vowed to “do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again.” Obama’s job, he said, was “making sure that the law is applied as it should be in a fair and impartial way.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doubted Obama’s newfound zeal on the issue. If Obama wants to show his good intentions, McConnell said, “he’ll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal—no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses.”92
Obama did not follow through.
THE COVER-UP
On May 17, Miller testified before Congress about the IRS targeting. Miller admitted, “Partisanship or even the perception of partisanship has no place at the IRS. It cannot even appear to be a consideration in determining the tax exemption of an organization.” He then added that he didn’t believe partisanship was the rationale behind the IRS’s activity. He blamed it on “foolish mistakes” by “people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.” Who were these people? What would be their consequences? Miller wouldn’t say. He then noted, laughably, “The agency is moving forward. It has learned its lesson.” After eighty years of IRS intimidation tactics, that seemed unlikely.93
The same day, J. Russell George testified that despite the inspector general’s recommendations about how to fix the IRS, the agency did not want to “clearly document the reason applications are chosen for further review for potential political campaign intervention.” They wanted to keep their standards vague. The IRS also did not want to “develop specific guidance for specialists processing potential political cases and publish the guidance on the Internet.” In other words, no transparency or accountability. As George said, “we do not consider the concerns in this report to be solved.”94
A few days, Lois Lerner, who headed the nonprofit division of the IRS, made her way before Congress. There, she promptly pled the Fifth Amendment, protecting herself against self-incrimination. But in doing so, she made a bizarre statement—she was completely innocent, she said, but was pleading the Fifth anyway. “I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules and regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committees.” She paused. Then she said she would not “answer any questions or testify about the subject matter of this committee’s meeting.” She had arguably waived her right to plead the Fifth Amendment by proclaiming her innocence, but the public relations damage was done. Who, exactly, was Lois Lerner protecting? If she was innocent, who wasn’t?95
The answer, according to the IRS and the Obama administration: low-level officials. As with Benghazi and Fast and Furious, nobody knew anything in the upper echelons. Lerner claimed that the bad guys were “our line people in Cincinnati who handled the applications.” The New York Times promptly echoed Lerner, claiming that rogue, “low-level employees in what many in the IRS consider a backwater” had done the dirty deeds. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) blamed one particular Cincinnati employee who called himself a “conservative Republican.”96 An internal IRS report on the scandal found that there was no “involvement in these matters by anyone outside of the IRS.”97
Some of the “low-level employees” knew where their bread was buttered. When the inspector general quizzed the top IRS officials as to whether the BOLO listing was “influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS,” they demurred. They claimed instead that the Determinations Unit “developed and implemented inappropriate criteria in part due to insufficient oversight provided by management.” But this makes no sense. Where would the low-level employees have gotten the idea to target the Tea Party in the first place? Did it spring, like Athena, full-blown from the head of its Zeus-like creators in the dank cubicles of Cincinnati? Or was it employees reading the prevailing political tea leaves, and hoping for advancement?98
The problem was not relegated to low-level employees. One IRS witness, who worked in the Cincinnati office, said that administration claims that low-level employees were responsible for targeting were simply false. “They were basically throwing us under the bus,” the witness stated.99
Elizabeth Hofacre, an agent in Cincinnati, said, “I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input.” Hull was a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., office.100 Hull testified that he originally told his underlings to quickly approve certain nonprofit applications, but that Lerner held them up. Hull said that he had been at the IRS for forty-eight years, but this marked the first time he had been forced to funnel applications through Lerner’s office. The applications sat there for months. When Lerner’s office finally got around to them, Hull said, they asked for updates on them. Hull said that the request surprised him, and that he was especially surprised when the IRS chief counsel’s office stated that they would need more information about the political activities of the organizations.101
Hofacre blasted Lerner: “It looked like Lois Lerner was putting it on us.” Hofacre expressed rage that the Washington office had involved itself in the first place. “All I remember saying and thinking is, ‘This is ridiculous,’ ” Hofacre averred. “Because at the same time, you are getting calls from irate taxpayers. And I see their point. Even if a decision isn’t favorable, they deserve some kind of treatment and they deserve, you know, timeliness, and . . . these applications and their responses were just being sent up there [to Washington] and I am not sure what was happening.”102 Both Hofacre and Hull, career IRS employees, carefully avoided blaming the political targeting on politics, instead chalking it up to delays from Washington, D.C. They did not explain why the delays occurred.103
Another IRS employee, Cindy Thomas, who headed the Cincinnati office, told the House Oversight Committee that she asked Washington for guidance but received none.104 According to CNN, the IRS informed House investigators that eighty-eight agents were involved in the targeting. Those employees were asked to preserve documentation.105 Letters from multiple offices of the IRS, including Washington, D.C., evidenced involvement in the scandal.106
Holly Paz, the director of rulings and agreements, even told Congress in Jun
e 2013 that she personally supervised the scrutiny for Tea Party groups. She said she went over somewhere between twenty and thirty different applications. She also explained that agents in Cincinnati routinely talked about looking at “Tea Party” cases, but that she somehow thought they were talking about all political cases, regardless of political orientation. She likened Tea Party to using Kleenex as a generic term for tissue—a dubious assertion at best.107 Furthermore, Paz somehow supervised 36 of the 41 interviews conducted by George for his audit.108 Even Representative Cummings was stunned by that admission: “It sounded like Ms. Paz felt like she needed to be in the room because she wanted to be able to defend herself—or the agency, I don’t know—based on what may have been said or the information gathered in that interview. Usually when you are conducting an investigation . . . you want to keep your witnesses separate because you’re in search of the truth and you are trying to make sure there’s no advantage of a person hearing what somebody else said.”109
Nonetheless, allies of the Obama administration came out in force to fight the obvious. Cummings stated, “The Committee has identified no evidence that the IRS discriminated against conservative groups that had been approved for tax exempt status.”110 Cummings launched into a tirade against Inspector General J. Russell George, suggesting that George had purposefully biased his report in order to push the IRS scandal narrative forward.111 In fact, Cummings tried to falsely claim that progressive groups had been targeted, too—a ridiculous claim to which George responded that his audit “did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘Progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012 and said, in total, 30 percent of the organizations we identified with the words ‘progress’ or ‘progressive’ in their names were processed as potential political cases. . . . In comparison, our audit found that 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases during the timeframe of our audit.”112