Former IRS executive Lois Lerner met with officials from the Department of Justice election crimes staff as early as September 2010 to discuss prosecution of conservative and Tea Party nonprofit applicants, according to new emails obtained by a watchdog group.
In a Sept. 29, 2010, email from an unnamed DOJ official, arrangements were made for a meeting the following month between attorneys from the election crimes unit of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and the IRS to “discuss 501(c)(4) issues.”
The 501(c)(4) reference is to a provision of the tax code that allows limited political activity by nonprofits.
Lerner attended the Oct. 8, 2010, meeting in place of Sarah Hall Ingram, the tax agency’s commissioner for the tax-exempt and government entities office. Lerner was the senior career executive in charge of the IRS staff that managed reviews of applicants for tax exemption by nonprofit groups.
The 2010 meetings are significant because Lerner told journalists in 2013 that the targeting of the conservative and Tea Party nonprofit applicants began between the 2010 and 2012 elections.
The email was obtained by Judicial Watch, the nonprofit government watchdog group that sued the IRS under the Freedom of Information Act for copies of correspondence between IRS and DOJ officials.
The government provided only two emails while withholding more than 800 under a variety of FOIA exemptions.
Earlier this year, Judicial Watch won a federal court order that resulted in the IRS releasing documents concerning meetings between Lerner and other tax agency officials in 2013 with DOJ prosecutors.
“These new documents dramatically show how the Justice Department is up to its neck in the IRS scandal and can’t be trusted to investigate crimes associated with the IRS abuses that targeted Obama’s critics,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“And it is of particular concern that the DOJ’s public integrity section, which would ordinarily investigate the IRS abuses, is now implicated in the IRS crimes,” he said.
An IRS spokesman has been asked for comment.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
