Lois Lerner Targeted Chuck Grassley After He Blocked Obama’s DOJ Tax Nominee

Ex-Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner tried to audit Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley after Grassley blocked President Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Justice (DOJ) tax division, an executive branch insider told The Daily Caller.

Grassley made it more difficult for the IRS and DOJ to work together to target conservative groups by blocking Obama’s political appointee Mary L. Smith from taking over the DOJ Tax Division, which prosecutes criminal cases for the IRS. Grassley held up the nomination in early 2010, just as Lerner and fellow IRS officials were mapping out their targeting strategy. The White House later withdrew Smith’s nomination.

The source confirmed to The Daily Caller that the White House and IRS officials “were very upset at Senator Grassley and Republicans for blocking a vote on Mary Smith’s nomination.”

The IRS relies on the DOJ Tax Division to prosecute both criminal and civil cases, and has entire legal teams devoted to making DOJ referrals. Placing a political appointee as assistant attorney general for the DOJ Tax Division was a top priority for the Obama White House.

Grassley made sure that no Obama political nominee got confirmed for the post, and kept in a “career,” or non-political, DOJ tax head for another two years.

“The Assistant Attorney General is not the kind of position that you probably would want someone learning on the job,” Grassley said at a Feb. 4, 2010 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, pointing out Smith’s lack of tax experience.

Lerner’s IRS underling Nikole Flax announced the agency’s new scrutiny of nonprofit groups in February 2010, the very same month that Grassley made his concerns known about Smith. Grassley’s opposition to Smith infuriated top officials at the IRS.

Smith was heavily touted by the administration for her Native American background. Smith worked on President Clinton’s re-election campaign and as Clinton’s Associate Counsel to the President and was a partner at the Chicago law firm Schoeman Updike Kaufman & Scharf when Obama nominated her for the position in 2009.

Grassley remained a thorn in the side of the IRS, scrutinizing the activities of Lerner’s Exempt Organizations division more closely than other lawmakers during Obama’s first term.

Lerner finally tried to drum up a criminal case against Grassley after accidentally receiving some of his mail.

“Perhaps we should refer to exam?” Lerner wrote to colleagues in 2012 after she received an invitation from a group asking Grassley to speak at a December 2012 event and offering to pay Grassley’s wife to attend. Lerner and Grassley were both invited to speak at the same event, hosted by an organization that had its name redacted from released congressional documents. Lerner felt that the group’s offer to pay for Grassley’s wife could be a potential criminal violation.

“We would need to wait for: (i) Grassley to accept and attend the speaking arrangement and (ii) then determine whether [redacted] issues him a 1099,” IRS official Matthew Giuliano replied to Lerner, thinking aloud about the circumstances they would need to make a criminal case against Grassley.

“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” said Republican House Ways and Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp upon the publication of Lerner’s email regarding Grassley.

... seems the GOP-e doesn’t want to go there, once again.

FLASHBACK:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/irs-commissioner-shulman-step-down

As commissioner, Shulman was responsible for delivering about $300 billion, or some 40 percent, of the funds made available in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package...

(snip)

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in a statement, said Shulman’s “work at the IRS, from fighting tax evasion to modernizing technology, has helped make the nation’s tax system more fair, efficient, and effective.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/democrats_unleash_the_irs_tyrant.html

In March of 2010, the IRS began to flag Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. By July 2011, President Obama’s approval rating hit a low of 41%, the lowest of his presidency.

That month, Carter Hull, a 48 year veteran at the agency, was told by Lois Lerner’s office that he was no longer authorized to review 501(c)4 applications from conservative groups. They were all to be routed to Counsel Wilkin’s office. Yet Wilkins told Congress under oath that he knew nothing about it.

There are 100,000 employees at the IRS. Two are handpicked by Obama. One is William Wilkins, Chief Counsel of the IRS, the other is IRS Director Doug Shulman.

Wilkins. He’s a longtime Obama crony and Democratic donor who earned his spurs by successfully defending, pro bono, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Yes, that Rev. Wright) from charges that his radical politicization of his pulpit should deny his church tax-exempt status.

When Hull disagreed with the counsel’s office and Lerner about how the Tea Party cases should be handled, the files were taken away from him and transferred to a woman with only several months experience at the IRS.

Hull also described a meeting about the Tea Party applications on Aug. 4, 2011, where the IRS chief counsel’s office had three representatives present.

On April 23, 2012 Wilkins met with President Obama at the White House. On April 24, 2012, the other Obama appointee, IRS Director Douglas Shulman, met with Obama. On April 25, one day later, the IRS revised the criteria by which to harass the Tea Party.

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