New Testimony: Lois Lerner & Obama Appointee Were Behind Tea Party Targeting

Movement progressives at the till of the IRS. This is what you get.

New testimony from IRS officials claims that Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS's Exempt Organizations division, instructed employees to send Tea Party group applications for tax-exempt status through a multi-layered review that included the IRS chief counsel's office, which is led by Obama appointee William Wilkins.

Lerner "sent me email saying ... when these cases need to go through multi-tier review and they will eventually have to [through her staff] and the chief counsel's office," said Michael Seto, the head of the IRS unit that was handling Tea Party applications.

This new testimony suggests that the decision to target Tea Party organizations came from Lerner herself, and that Wilkins' office was closely involved in some of the applications.

Tax law specialist Carter Hull, who works for Seto, testified that despite his 48 years of experience approving or denying tax-exempt status applications, he was told in the winter of 2010 that, at the direction of Lerner, the applications would need to be sent to the chief counsel's office for further review. Hull said never before in his nearly five-decade career had he been told to send applications up the pipeline.

And don't miss this from @benk84 -- Christine O'Donnell's tax records were leaked the day she announced her candidacy.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

posted by Ace at 10:09 AM

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