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IRS Caught Breaking Law To Target Conservatives
‘Beyond horrifying – this is not 1930′s Germany or 1950′s Soviet Russia’
WND
Oversight Comittee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio
WASHINGTON — The IRS appears to have been caught red-handed breaking federal law in its zeal to criminally prosecute conservatives for their political activities.
The House Oversight Committee has revealed the IRS sent the FBI a database containing more than a million pages of confidential taxpayer information that is protected by federal law.
Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, or DOJ, is now admitting the FBI should never have had that data in the first place.
The information was delivered just weeks before the 210 elections to the FBI, after a conversation between Richard Pilger, an official with the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch and former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner, a central figure in the scandal.
Richard Pilger, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division
“At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials,” wrote Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
The lawmakers are demanding more information from the IRS chief after their discovery that the agency transmitted 21 disks, constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the FBI in October 2010.
“The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information,” wrote Issa and Jordan.
Reaction was swift and scathing on Capitol Hill and among the grassroots.
“This is absolutely shocking and appalling,” high-powered Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell told WND.
Reposted with permission
