Last night, True the Vote Attorney Cleta Mitchell appeared on The Kelly File to discuss recent revelations that Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings was in contact with the IRS about the organization. True the Vote and its founder Catherine Engelbrecht were targeted after applying for tax exempt status and received nearly identical questions about the organization from Cummings and the IRS on separate occasions. You can read the back story on that here.
New IRS emails released by the House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote. True the Vote was targeted by the IRS after applying for tax exempt status more than two years ago. Further, information shows the IRS and Cummings' staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht about her organization, indicating coordination and improper sharing of confidential taxpayer information.
During her appearance, Mitchell reminded viewers that it isn't just Elijah Cummings who put conservative groups on the radar screen for IRS targeting, but a handful of Democrats who didn't like what these groups were doing in opposition to big government policies.
"Lois Lerner and the top brass at the IRS came to see its role as somehow the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party and Democratic members of Congress and the White House and they began to carry out these activities to pursue conservative groups because these politicians were demanding it," Mitchell said. "All of these people, Lois Lerner, all of them, they have civil service protection and the only difference between what happened in Watergate when Richard Nixon asked the IRS to go after his political enemies was when Richard Nixon asked, they refused. When these Democratic politicians said, 'Go do something about these conservative groups because they're challenging us and we don't like what they're saying about us,' the IRS took it upon itself to do their bidding to try and silence these groups."
As Mitchell mentioned above, True the Vote filed an ethics complaint in February against Cummings and has since bolstered that request with new revelations he was in contact with Lois Lerner about the organization.
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