A former official at the heart of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting scandal has had to endure an “inquisition” from “Republican tormenters,” a popular Virginia-based political blog claimed this week.
Lois Lerner was reportedly upset when Republican lawmakers tried in 2014 to get her to open up about the agency’s targeting of conservative groups applying to non-profit status, a cache of recently released emails revealed this week.
“They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them,” Lerner, who used to head agency’s Exempt Organizations unit, wrote in one email.
This week, a Politico report seemed to sympathize with Lerner, and said that when Republicans mobilized to investigate the scandal, it was nothing short of an all-out inquisition.
“Lerner slammed ‘evil and dishonest’ GOP inquisitors,” the article’s headline reads, adding, “Emails give a revealing look behind the scenes at the IRS leading up to the nonprofit targeting scandal.”
In that sentence, not only are Republican investigators characterized as “inquisitors,” but the scandal is also dressed up to obscure that conservative groups, not just random nonprofits, were targeted specifically, as Lerner admitted in her staged apology.
Politico’s Katy O’Donnell wrote, “At the height of the scandal over the IRS’ handling of political nonprofits, Lois Lerner privately let loose at her Republican tormentors, saying she invoked the Fifth Amendment because they had been ‘evil and dishonest’ and accusing them of ‘hate mongering.'”
The rest of the report is careful to characterize the scandal as one where “nonprofits” were targeted, rather than one where conservative groups were specifically in the crosshairs.
To the article’s credit, however, it does note that, “more conservative than liberal groups ended up in the IRS’ crosshairs.”
Whether the lopsided application of IRS scrutiny has anything to do with Lerner’s left-leaning politics is unclear, Politico argues.
Details of Lerner’s personal emails, including her referring to Abraham Lincoln as a terrible president for keeping the Union intact, avoiding the separation of the South from the North, are “trivial” and tell us nothing about the scandal, the article continues.
Republicans, for their part, argue that the personal emails show a clear connection between the targeting scandal and Lerner’s political beliefs.
Politico and Democrats see it differently.
“The lack of ironclad proof that agents deliberately targeted groups because of political bias — or that they didn’t — means neither party can separate itself from the narrative it has held to for two years,” the report notes.
Politico’s soft-pedaling of the IRS scandal this week is reminiscent of its puffy 2014 Lerner profile.
The profile, which omitted on-the-record claims that Lerner’s history of alleged political intimidation dates back as far as 1996, focused mostly on her softer side, including that she spends most of time now gardening and walking her dogs.
But a former Illinois lawmaker told the Washington Examiner’s media desk that Politico actually contacted him prior to the profile’s publication with questions about whether Lerner had really targeted his 1996 senate campaign.
“I spent something like an hour and a half talking to Politico about this,” Al Salvi told the Examiner. “And I’m nowhere in the story. They had no intention of using anything I said.”
