Former IRS senior executive Lois Lerner appeared to be pressuring Treasury Department inspector general investigators to back off their conclusion that the federal tax agency had improperly targeted conservative and Tea Party nonprofit tax exemption applicants.
In an email on Jan. 31, 2013, Lerner encouraged Troy Patterson of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to back off of his investigators’ view that the tax agency was targeting political groups for excessive attention.
“We feel your folks are being too narrow in their view and have decided that because of the language on the earlier BOLO list regarding Tea Party, everything that followed was tainted. They seem to believe that if a case was initially sent to the advocacy group, but ultimately determined to be an approval, that our action in putting it into the advocacy group in the first place is incorrect, and illustrates ‘targeting,'” she said.
“BOLO” was the tax agency’s abbreviation for categories of nonprofit applicants to “be on the lookout” for as they were received.
Lerner continued in the email to Patterson, arguing that she was “willing to take the blame for not having provided sufficient direction initially, which may have resulted in front line staff doing things that appeared to be politically motivated, but I am not on board that anything that occurred here shows that the IRS was politically motivated in the actions taken.”
The email was made public Thursday by nonprofit government watchdog Judicial Watch, which obtained it via a Freedom of Information Act request. The email was among multiple documents the tax agency only provided after being ordered to do so by a federal judge.
The IRS had previously claimed all of Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed and the hard drive was subsequently destroyed as a matter of routine practice by the agency’s information technology staff.
That comment prefigured Lerner’s stance a few months later when she answered a planted question during an American Bar Association presentation in which she admitted the IRS had targeted Tea Party applicants but claimed it was done mistakenly by tax agency reviewers in its Cincinnati office.
Lerner subsequently pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer multiple questions posed to her by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
In another email made public Thursday by Judicial Watch, Lerner said she wanted a training program set up to teach underlings reviewing conservative and Tea Party non-profit tax exemption applications to be “sensitive” to “the fact that anything we write can be public — or at least be seen by Congress.”
In a Feb. 16, 2012, email to colleague Holly Paz, Lerner, who was then head of the federal tax agency’s exempt organizations division, said “we are all a bit concerned about the mention of specific Congress people, practitioners and political parties.”
Lerner suggested that Paz’s staff in the IRS Rulings and Agreements department “could put together some training points to help them understand the potential pitfalls, as well as how to think about referrals.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the latest email disclosures “show that the IRS scandal is not over. These documents point to document gaps caused by the refusal of the Obama IRS to search for Lois Lerner’s emails. The incredible email from Lois Lerner admitting (and denying) culpability by her and the IRS in the scandal further undermines President Obama’s lie that the IRS scandal was entirely the fault of ‘bonehead decisions in local offices.'”
Fitton was referring to comments by Obama during an interview during the Super Bowl halftime in 2014 with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
