Tea party groups win in court as federal judge demands IRS’s list of all 298 conservative nonprofits it targeted

04 Apr, 2015 by John Brodgian

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Score one for the good guys! In the ongoing case of the IRS targeting conservative non-profits, a federal judge has ruled in favor of conservative non-profits…

A federal judge has ordered the Internal Revenue Service to hand over a list of the 298 tea party organizations that it targeted with broad and often intrusive questions when they applied for nonprofit tax-exempt status.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott means right-wing groups are a step closer to being allowed to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the IRS.

The agency has admitted playing political favorites with the tax code beginning in 2010, when it began applying extra scrutiny to groups with red-flag words like ‘patriots’ or ‘tea party’ in their names.

The list they want is the one that the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General demanded and received while he was investigating the IRS. While the actual documents are confidential, the judge ruled they could still turn over the spreadsheet the names were on.