President Obama will be joining Hillary Clinton on her campaign trek soon, after sitting by her side in April and explaining away the FBI’s investigation into her private email server. “There’s classified and there’s classified,” the president explained to Fox News’ Chris Wallace, adding that he as president handles “classified” information all the time.
It’s no surprise, then, that Lois Lerner fit right in at the Obama administration’s IRS, where new documents show that she herself used her personal discretion in determining which tax returns were confidential and which were confidential.
New Documents Suggest IRS’s Lerner Likely Broke the Law https://t.co/viMFpAhpmv
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) June 29, 2016
National Review reported Wednesday that Lerner, accused of targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election, passed along 1.25 million pages of confidential tax returns to the Justice Department. That same Justice Department decided last year not to prosecute Lerner.
Damning new information on #IRS scandal shows #LoisLerner is likely a criminal: https://t.co/h9BfxO8Oww pic.twitter.com/kk1WBRN6wJ
— National Review (@NRO) June 29, 2016
"likely"? She "is" a criminal
— respect the ?? (@afdglock45) June 29, 2016
Likely ? ??? Is there anyone in this administration who isn't likely a criminal? I think not.
— Hopeful Citizen (@fedup_citizen) June 29, 2016
The documents, unearthed courtesy of government watchdog group Cause of Action, strongly suggest that Lerner broke the law by sharing the confidential information with no legal justification for doing so. Eliana Johnson reports:
Recommended
A lawful transfer of the documents would have required a formal request from the DOJ to the IRS, but DOJ trial attorney Stephanie Sasarak told Cause of Action in a March 9, 2016, letter that the department did not make any requests to the IRS for the documents it received. Alternatively, the secretary of the Treasury could have turned the documents over to the DOJ. In either case, section 6103 requires the Treasury secretary to disclose the transfer to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which releases publicly a list of disclosures each year. But the Joint Committee on Taxation’s 2010 disclosure report does not show a transfer to the Department of Justice that matches the one Lerner sent in October of that year.
Lerner’s apparent justification for sending millions of pages of confidential documents to the Justice Department was her suspicion that groups with trigger words like “patriot” and “tea party” in their names were actually political committees criminally “posing” as non-profits.
Lerner, as always, declined to comment.
— Luke Gofannon (@LukeGofannon) June 29, 2016
https://twitter.com/MforestB/status/748126584087797761
"At this point what difference does it make." Which will be the democrats talking point. And we have all heard that statement before.
— Phillip Covill (@CENOBITE2112) June 29, 2016
Even worse, Democrats will blame the Republicans for wasting so much time and taxpayer money on another partisan witch hunt; that is, if anyone pressures them to respond at all.
https://twitter.com/rcbvt/status/748116492105834496
https://twitter.com/parsonbrown1/status/748175213129523200
Join the conversation as a VIP Member