The IRS Loses a Big Procedural Battle in Its War With the Tea Party
The Daily Signal ^ | 4/6/15 | Hans von Spakovsky
At almost the same time last week that the outgoing U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald Machen, gave Lois Lerner a get-out-of-jail free card over her contempt of Congress citation, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service suffered a huge procedural loss in a court fight in Ohio.
In litigation filed in 2013 by conservative organizations targeted by Lerner and her colleagues at the IRS, a federal judge granted a motion to compel and ordered the IRS to produce the names of the 298 targeted organizations identified by the IRS for the Treasury Inspector General.
In 2013, NorCal Tea Party Patriots, the Faith and Freedom Coalition of Ohio, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a number of other conservative organizations (ten in all), sued the IRS, the Treasury Department, Lois Lerner and other individual IRS employees.
They described themselves as organizations “comprised of individual citizens who have joined together to exercise their rights to freedom of speech and expression” and who “dissent from the policies or ideology of the” current administration. They claimed that, on the basis of their beliefs, they had been subjected “to delays and intrusive scrutiny during the tax-exempt status application process.” According to the ten plaintiffs, this violated the Privacy Act, the First and Fifth Amendments, and 26 U.S.C. §6103, a federal statute that protects the confidentiality of tax return information.
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