So, It Looks Like the FEC Got Involved in the IRS' Abuse of Conservative Groups

Eliana Johnson reports:

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known for aggressive investigation of conservative groups during her tenure there, too.

Much more at the link.

Carol Platt Liebau reports that the IRS didn’t stop at targeting new conservative groups — it audited existing ones.

Additionally, the Democrats’ spin that the IRS was an equal opportunity abuser has been despun, by National Public Radio.

NPR reports that, based on a House Ways and Means staff analysis, when the IRS sent letters seeking more information to groups seeking (c)(3) or (c)(4) status, conservative organizations were asked on average three times more questions than their liberal counterparts.  In other words, in the course of “routine” IRS supervision, righty groups were harassed while liberal ones were not.

That Democrat spin has never made any sense nor has it stood up to even the first fact of the IRS scandal. When IRS enforcer Lois Lerner planted the question that opened the scandal up, the IRS admitted at that point that it had unfairly targeted conservative groups. That’s what she was apologizing for.