What a shock. Judicial Watch discovered that top IRS officials, including Lois Lerner and Holly Paz, knew that the agency targeted conservative groups before they told Congress. Judicial Watch reported:
The FBI documents also reveal that IRS officials stated that the agency was targeting conservative groups because of their ideology and political affiliation in the summer of 2011. According to one senior tax law specialist, “The case seemed to be pulled because of the applicant’s political affiliation and screening is not supposed to occur that way … [Redacted] said he thought the cases were being pulled based upon political affiliations.” And IRS senior official Nancy Marks, appointed by [then-acting Commissioner Steven] Miller to conduct an internal investigation stated, “Cincinnati was categorizing cases based on name and ideology, not just activity.”
The FBI documents show the agents used a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) guides to look at “cases using the Tea Party term.” The agents interviewed an IRS Technical Advisor that reported to Lerner:
[Redacted] attended a meeting in the summer of 2011. She was not invited, but she was talking to LERNER about something else in the office when LERNER mentioned that it would be interesting for her to attend … Only people from Washington, D.C. were in the room, to include HOLLY PAZ … At the meeting, it was disclosed that one of the ways Cincinnati was looking for cases was using the “Tea Party” term. They were calling the body of cases involving political activity “Tea Party” cases. The concern was that the IRS had put a label on the cases that would be problematic.
In the spring of 2012, Miller asked iRS Senior Technical Advisor Nancy Marks to ““look into how these 501 (c)(4) cases were being handled and find out what the problems were.” Marks told Miller:
It was not until much later that MARKS saw information that [Redacted] was only looking for Tea Party cases…. The BOLO [Be on the Lookout] showed that at various points the criteria called for “Tea Party” name, and then later the ideology…. She told him [Miller, on May 3, 2012] that Cincinnati was categorizing cases based on name and ideology, not just activity. When MARKS told MILLER this, he threw his pencil across the room and said, “Oh shit.”
Last October, the Department of Justice decided not to press charges against Lerner despite the evidence against her. They claimed their probe discovered “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime.”
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