IRS Pays Out $50K To National Organization for Marriage Over Donor Info Scandal
The IRS will pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) for illegally leaking donor information to a pro-gay marriage group, it was announced Tuesday.
The Human Rights Campaign posted NOM’s 2008 tax return, along with the names and contact information of major donors, on their website during the 2012 presidential campaign. The unauthorized dissemination of such information is a felony.
TheDC broke the story, obtaining NOM’s official demand for a federal investigation. Now, an investigation that is part of the civil suit NOM filed against the IRS has found that someone at the IRS did give NOM’s confidential tax and donor information to a gay rights activist in Boston....
IRS Chief Koskinen Has Donated Big to Democrats Over the Years
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen looks like he got the job atop the taxman agency the old fashioned way: He bought it.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Koskinen has donated about $100,000 to Democrat candidates and committees since his first donation in 1979. His donor recipients include Gary Hart, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic nominee in each presidential campaign since 1980 (which would even include Walter Mondale, who stood no chance of beating President Ronald Reagan in 1984), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns. He most recently donated $2,500 to Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) in 2013.
He has given no money to Republicans. The taxman is a partisan Democrat....
Deunionize the IRS
...The government’s tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.
The union in question is the National Treasury Employees Union. According to the web site of the NTEU, the mission of the union is “to organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect.” That’s a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEU’s web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.
And what political party do you suppose they support? In the 2012 election cycle, 94% of its PAC contributions went to Democrats, 4% to Republicans. That’s only one year, of course. How about 2010? That year 98% of its contributions went to Democrats, 2% went to Republicans. 2008 was a bit more balanced: that year only 96% went to Democrats. As Andrew Stiles pointed out at National Review, the NTEU is a “powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.”...
Report: Lois Lerner Tried to Get a Sitting GOP Senator in IRS Trouble (Update: Email Added)
...Ways and Means has provided the email in question. In the exchange, Lerner mistakenly receives an invitation to an event that includes Grassley. She leaps to the conclusion that travel expenses were “inappropriately” offered for Mrs. Grassley. So she suggests referring the senator for an audit....
