Why Liberals Should be Outraged that the IRS Targeted Conservatives
by George Washington
ZeroHedge.com
05/13/2013
The IRS started targeting Tea Party members, “Patriots” and similar conservatives starting in 2010.
But the IRS’ harassment of conservatives expanded way beyond those groups.
As United Press International reports:
U.S. Internal Revenue Service inquiry of conservative groups included those lobbying to “make America a better place to live,” new details emerging about the IRS investigation indicated. That lever goes beyond what the IRS admitted Friday, which was that it targeted groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, several media outlets reported Monday, based on draft findings from disclosures to congressional investigators by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.
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At various points over the past two years, the Cincinnati IRS office, which is in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status, focused on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” the draft report cited by The Washington Post indicated.
By June 2011 some IRS specialists were probing applications of groups focusing on “government spending, government debt or taxes [and] education of the public by advocacy/lobbying to ‘make America a better place to live,‘” the report cited by the Journal indicated.
The inspector general’s investigation also found the head of the IRS tax-exempt-organizations division knew as early as June 2011 conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted — several months before Douglas Shulman, IRS commissioner at the time, denied to a congressional committee the agency was targeting conservative groups, the newspapers said
Liberals should not assume that this is the “other guy’s” fight.
The Rest…HERE
