Obama’s IRS Admits It Persecuted Tea Party Groups

Obama’s IRS Admits It Persecuted Tea Party Groups

When Bill Clinton was in office, Craig Livingstone requested and received hundreds of FBI files on the conservative political enemies of the Clinton Administration. What did we hear then? Oh, it’s a low level bureaucratic snafu. Hardly even worth talking about.

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It’s funny how those little snafus keep happening in Democrat administrations.

We now know that under Obama, the IRS has been persecuting Tea Party groups.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice.

Agency officials found out about the practice last year and moved to correct it, the IRS said in a statement. The statement did not specify when officials found out.

About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

…Many conservative groups complained during the election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.

Sure, the IRS was specifically targeting conservative groups under Barack Obama, but there was nothing political about it and it was all done by low level employees. Now they’ve said, “Whoops, we apologize,” so can we forget about all of this and move on?

Hell no, we can’t. First of all, have all of these employees been fired? If not, why not? Did any of them break the law? If so, can they be CRIMINALLY PROSECUTED. The IRS doesn’t hesitate to put people in jail who cross them, so if they broke the law, they should face the full penalty for that.

Moreover, we OBVIOUSLY need a full investigation into this by Congress or maybe even by a special prosecutor. The political enemies of the Obama administration were targeted by the IRS during an election year. That’s illegal, immoral and un-American and, “It was just a few low level employees coincidentally engaged in non-political persecution of the President’s enemies” isn’t going to cut it.

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