House committee alleges crimes by former IRS official

WASHINGTON — For the first time since Congress released President Nixon's tax returns in 1974, a House committee voted Wednesday to release confidential tax documents as part of a request for a criminal investigation into the Internal Revenue Service.

This time, the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking criminal charges against former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner.

After a two-hour closed-door meeting, the Republican-led Ways and Means Committee voted 23-14, along party lines, to publicly release its evidence against Lerner, culled from more than 700,000 pages of documents turned over to the committee by the IRS.

Lerner, 63, ran the Exempt Organizations office of the IRS before retiring last year in the aftermath of a Treasury investigation. The inspector general's report found that the IRS used inappropriate criteria to hold up tax exemptions for Tea Party-allied groups. Republicans accuse her of "targeting" conservative groups.

In a draft letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the committee alleges:

• Lerner violated the civil rights of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. "The most significant piece to me was that there was a potential intervention in the appeals process," said Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich. "We have some evidence that Lois Lerner intervened in that process." E-mails show Lerner e-mailed the head of IRS appeals in early 2013, describing the cases as "sensitive and visible" and trying to set up a meeting outside the normal appeals process.

• Lerner impeded investigations by the Treasury Department and Congress by giving misleading answers to questions about when the targeting began. Specifically, she said the Cincinnati IRS office was seeing an uptick in applications from political groups when her e-mails suggest she knew there was no hard data to support the statement.

• She may have disclosed confidential taxpayer information by forwarding sensitive IRS e-mails to a personal account she appeared to share with her husband, a Washington attorney.

Lerner's attorney, William W. Taylor III, called the timing for the vote "odd" because he hasn't heard directly from the committee.

"The committee's referral affects nothing. The Department of Justice is already investigating the ‎IRS. This is just another attempt by Republicans to vilify Ms. Lerner for political gain," he said.

The letter to Holder alleges that Lerner singled out Crossroads GPS, a group co-founded by former George W. Bush political aide Karl Rove, for an audit and a denial of tax-exempt status after meeting with campaign finance reform activists in January 2013.

That same month, Lerner spoke of hoping to get a job at Organizing for Action, an Obama-affiliated group that was also seeking tax-exempt status. "Oh -- maybe I can get the DC office job!" she wrote in an e-mail.

Democrats also objected to the closed-door meeting. In a speech delivered in the meeting and distributed to two dozen reporters waiting outside, Rep. Sandy Levin, D-Mich., said releasing the taxpayer information was unnecessary because the Justice Department already has access to it.

Under federal taxpayer privacy laws, confidential tax information can become public by a vote of one of the House or Senate tax committees.

"It now seems clear that Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee have decided they do not want to be left behind in the Republican campaign to declare this a scandal and keep it going until November," Levin said.

On Thursday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will vote to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer that committee's questions about the IRS treatment of political groups. Lerner has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

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