Sens. McCain and Levin urged IRS to target Tea Party, conservative groups

Sens. McCain and Levin urged IRS to target Tea Party, conservative groups


Government documents obtained by a top “Inside the Beltway” watchdog group and released on Thursday reveal that Internal Revenue Service’s Lois Lerner was strongly urged by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, her assistance in attacking certain non-profit political groups. The organizations they selected for targeting by Lerner were part of the Tea Party and conservative movements.

The group that investigates and exposes government corruption, Judicial Watch, released newly acquired IRS documents, including an email from Ms. Lerner in February 2012 requesting she “put together some training points to help them [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls of revealing too much information to Congress.”

One of the released documents is a Lerner email from 2013 that she was willing to ‘take a bullet” for Obama and his White House for the IRS scandal and that she understood why the targeting of Tea Party organizations and other conservative groups may raise questions regarding what did President Obama know and when did he know it. Obama had told the press that he first read about the IRS targeting of conservatives in the newspaper.

According to a Judicial Watch officials, “A May 1, 2013, email exchange between Lois Lerner and other top IRS staffers revealed that 11 days prior to Lerner’s admission that the IRS had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups, she met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.