Today, Judicial Watch reported that a federal judge has ordered the release of testimony from Lois Lerner, the former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Exempt Organizations Unit, and Holly Paz, her senior aide and the previous head of the IRS’ Office of Rulings and Agreements.
The targeting of conservative nonprofit organisations and people who opposed Obama’s policies in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election involved both IRS employees in a significant way.
The action is NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341), and the court’s decision to unseal the case records is in the Southern District of Ohio Western Division.
In April 2017, after Lerner and Paz’s attorneys alleged the two officials were receiving threats, Judge Barrett ordered that the depositions of Lerner and Paz be kept confidential. Four years after the plaintiffs requested that the depositions be unsealed, the court only approved their request when they applied for a writ of mandamus to compel the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to take action.
Judicial Watch offered an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in support of the plaintiffs’ demand that the depositions be made public in December 2017.
Because withholding internal government debates in this situation would be against the public’s interest in an honest, functioning government, Judicial Watch claimed that the publication of the deposition transcripts “may throw light on government malfeasance.” The brief went on:
A “strong presumption in favour of transparency as to court records” is something that courts have always acknowledged. The party seeking to seal them bears the burden of rebutting that assumption.
‘Only the most compelling reasons can justify non-disclosure of judicial records,’ states the burden of proof. Additionally, stronger evidence is required to disprove the presumption of access the higher the public interest in the litigation’s subject matter.
In the original NorCal Tea Party Patriots complaint, which was a class-action lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of the Treasury, and certain named individuals, Lerner and Paz testified. The argument was that:
Elements of the Executive Branch of the federal government, including the Defendants, applied the tremendous authority, overwhelming complexity, and crushing bureaucracy of the IRS to groups of Americans whose only fault was their alleged disagreement with the Administration’s policies or philosophy. To put it another way, these folks were chosen because of their political beliefs.
The case was resolved in 2017 when the plaintiffs received nearly $3.5 million from the Justice Department for “attorneys’ fees, charges and expenses, and incentive awards.”
The DOJ acknowledged the IRS had abused its authority and that the standards it used to evaluate requests for 501(c) designation were improper as part of the settlement. Jeff Sessions, who was attorney general at the time, said.
It was improper and improper for the IRS to utilise these standards as a justification for increased inspection. It is wrong for the IRS to give special treatment to some groups based on their names or ideologies.
Any claim to tax exemption ought to be evaluated according to the organization’s operations and compliance with the law, not according to the members’ adopted stances on issues of policy or the name they gave the group to express their opinions.
Despite these admissions of wrongdoing, there were no criminal charges brought about by the Obama IRS incident.
Obama and his congressional allies utilised Lois Lerner’s IRS to repress the Tea Party movement and other opponents in the run-up to his reelection. According to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, this is how an election may be stolen openly.
“The Obama IRS affair was a practice run for the exploitation of Trump by Obama agencies and appointees in 2016 and beyond. Americans will better grasp the IRS’s ongoing, obvious, and present risk to their civil liberties thanks to these IRS officials’ depositions.
The Obama IRS scandal was the subject of troves of papers that Judicial Watch found. The IRS scandal was the subject of at least nine Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by Judicial Watch, and most of what is known about the scandal are thanks to their litigation and investigations.
Here is a brief summary of the disclosures made by Judicial Watch:
The IRS sought, received, and maintained the names of donors to the Tea Party and other conservative organisations, according to records that were made public in September 2014 as a result of a Judicial Watch FOIA case.
These documents contain an admission by IRS officials that “such information was not needed.” Additionally, the documents reveal that the donors’ names were utilised for a “secret research project.”
In April 2015, Judicial Watch made court-ordered IRS records available to the public, including an email from Lerner requesting the creation of a programme to “put together some training points to help them [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of disclosing too much information to Congress.
A 2013 email from Lerner is also included in the papers, in which she expresses her willingness to accept responsibility for some scandal-related elements. She adds that she “understands why the IRS criteria” that led to the targeting of Tea Party supporters and other Obama opponents “may raise questions.”
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Judicial Watch discovered that the IRS issue also involved the Justice Department and FBI in July 2015.
According to records obtained by Judicial Watch through a court order, Lerner, FBI agents, and representatives of the Justice Department discussed the possibility of prosecuting specific nonprofit organisations for alleged illegal political activities at an October 2010 meeting.
In support of that effort, the Obama IRS provided the FBI with 21 computer CDs holding 1.25 million pages of private IRS returns from 113,000 501(c)(4) social welfare organisations.
The IRS, perhaps involving Lois Lerner, broke the law by sending this information to the Justice Department, according to a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
Additionally, in July 2015, Judicial Watch made Obama IRS records available, which proved that the agency had targeted donors on donor lists of tax-exempt organisations for audits. In the documents, IRS officials expressly note how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be subject to “strong scrutiny” by the IRS.
