Posted on 06/30/2014 7:12:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Agency gave gay-rights group names and addresses of political opponents.
In all of this past weeks flurry IRS news: Lois Lerner and other IRS officials hard drives crashing, emails showing Lerner targeted Sen. Chuck Grassley, and the IRS Commissioner telling Congress theyve done nothing wrong some news got lost in the shuffle.
The IRS did do something very wrong, admitted it and paid a significant fine to resolve it.
Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.
The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOMs chief political rival.
Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason, NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. Were delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.
This admission by the IRS goes back to the vicious fight over the Prop 8 vote in California where HRC and its allies resorted to releasing donation information of individuals and harassing those traditional marriage supporters at their homes and businesses.
In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOMs 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage groups major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.
HRCs president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obamas re-election campaign.
Eastman said an investigation in the civil lawsuit determined that someone gave NOMs tax return and list of major donors to Boston-based gay rights activist Matthew Meisel. Email correspondence from Meisel revealed that he told a colleague of a conduit to obtain the marriage groups confidential information.
No matter what ones stance is on same-sex marriage, everyone should be appalled at the blatant disregard of privacy protection and free speech rights shown in this case by the IRS and gay rights groups.
As a long-time vocal critic of the radical left-wing politics the Human Rights Campaign endorses in the name of gay and lesbian Americans, I am not surprised that HRC is knee-deep in Nixonian tactics of the Obama IRS. It is a shame that those who claim to have the high ground in the new civil rights movement dont respect the basic privacy and free speech freedoms of all Americans.
Bump
Hey! They’re the IRS. They can do anything they want to do. Like Barry, they’re above the law.
The perps should have gotten 10-year terms and a lifetime ban from government jobs.
Equal opportunity bumbling — they did it to leftists too.
Except the leftists got a lot madder.
They got a wrist slap and we paid the fine. They will continue to get wrist slaps and we will continue to pay fines because they have no motivation to stop.
At a mere $50K in fines per incident, about 0.00001% of their budget, the IRS will just continue.
You have a link to the IRS doing anything negative to a left-wing group?
The Culture of Corruption.
$50,000? I’d say the IRS got off cheap.
Judge Dredd with a ledger book.
Unfortunately, there are five votes on the Supreme Court right now for gay marriage. They’re just waiting for a case to get to them.
Yup!
Oh wait. Thought this was an email-list leak that would have affected everybody equally. (Where the agency should have used Bcc and didn’t.)
I’d like to see how it was that someone just dished this info out upon request. If so, it should be that person’s job at risk, at the least. If not also a crime. Much is not being said here.
The beauty of it is that we taxpayers get to pay it... and the IRS will jail us if we don't.
We don want no steekin fine. We want perp walks and orange jump suits and lengthy prison sentences.
THAT’S how this gets stopped.
Fine? No big deal, the taxpayers are covering it. Wait, put me in jail? Uh, can we talk about this?
At the least you’d hear about somebody getting canned. This is too quiet to be credible.
Obama Campaign co-chair Joe Solomese and Barack Obama
Also, I’d think there would be some kind of rings of computer security that would make it difficult to just cut and paste something like that into an email. Some sort of security policy would have had to be violated.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.