Remember that lawsuit against the IRS for targeting small conservative nonprofit applicants? You probably haven’t heard much lately about it. That’s because this case about egregious misconduct by the governments’ tax collectors has been going on forever at a snail’s pace, and that’s mostly because of egregious misconduct by the government lawyers involved.
Already, the DOJ lawyers defending the IRS in this matter have been lectured by more than one judge for their dilatory tactics and unprofessional behavior, which has repeatedly prevented evidence in the case from being produced in a timely fashion. This lawsuit, recall, began in 2013, so at least they can console themselves with the fact that they ran out the clock on the Obama administration.
For a long time during the Obama era, the IRS tried to avoid disclosing which of its employees made decisions in these cases by hiding behind laws that are intended to protect taxpayers‘ privacy (not IRS employees’ privacy, at least in theory). After losing that argument, the government lawyers tried again, arguing that for the sake of taxpayer privacy (of course), the government’s own lawyers are not even allowed to review the files in question and determine which IRS employees were involved. When a judge patiently explained that this was not actually the case, they then argued that it would be “unduly burdensome” to find and provide this information.
This chain of disingenuous legal excuses led federal Circuit Court Judge Raymond Ketheledge to accuse the government’s counsel of “studied obstruction.” To add insult to injury, the IRS persisted right up until November 2016 in delaying the processing of the nonprofit status of at least one group involved in the lawsuit, citing the lawsuit itself as the reason it could not be processed.
Now the two IRS employees (one current, one former) at the center of the scandal are trying to keep still more information about potential government wrongdoing out of the public sphere. Lois Lerner, who formerly headed the IRS division in question, and Holly Paz, still an IRS employee, are trying to get the Cincinnati federal court hearing the case to keep their deposition testimony under seal. The reason? The threats and harassment they have received after their involvement in the case became known demonstrates that their safety will be in great danger if the testimony becomes public.
As terrible as it is that these two witnesses received threats, there’s something even worse than harassment from anonymous yahoos on the Internet. That would be harassment by the government, which has the resources and power to follow through on every threat. And that’s exactly what the victims in these cases — mostly the leaders of tiny grassroots groups with small budgets — experienced after the IRS decided to target them.
As the attorney for the plaintiffs put it, “this is a matter of great public interest and there is no legal basis for sealing the depositions or the arguments about whether the depositions should be sealed.” Everyone who pays taxes (or even just files legally required documents with the IRS) has an interest in this case, as does every citizen in whose name the government acted when its agents allegedly abused their authority.
