If you thought the story of how the IRS spent years persecuting conservatives was over, you were wrong. We’ve now known for years that the IRS was involved in some shady and likely illegal dealings in the years leading up to the 2012 presidential election. We even knew that the wrongdoing was likely initiated from near the top-of-the-heap, with IRS leaders who were directly connected to the White House. What we weren’t “sure” about was just how far these officials went to harass their political opponents and if they explicitly broke any federal laws.
Now it seems that we have the answer.
What we know now, thanks to additional documents unearthed in years-long litigation by the good-government group Cause of Action, is that Lerner almost certainly broke the law when she transferred the documents…
“It took an organization over 50 months of investigation and multiple lawsuits to get clarity on the IRS’s own compliance with the rules it enforces against others,” says Dan Epstein, the executive director of the Cause of Action Institute and a former attorney for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The IRS, in the midst of its political targeting of groups engaged in policy advocacy, was engaging in the disclosure of millions of records aimed at ginning up prosecutions of these groups without going through the legally required channels.”
Read more: BREAKING: New Evidence Suggests the IRS Broke Federal Law