WASHINGTON - The FBI is investigating potential civil-rights violations at the Internal Revenue Service after the agency acknowledged that it had singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny, Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama on Wednesday announced he had demanded and received the resignation of the top IRS official.
Obama, who has been criticized for appearing passive in his response to the matter, declared, “I am angry about it” and said the American people had a right to be angry as well.
Before announcing the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, Obama met at the White House with top officials from the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS. The White House scheduled the meeting a day after the release of an inspector general report that showed ineffective management at the IRS allowed agents to improperly target Tea Party groups for more than 18 months.
The president said he would answer more questions on the IRS investigations at a news conference today.
Holder said other potential IRS crimes in the case include making false statements to authorities and violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some partisan political activities.
“I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this,” Holder told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing Wednesday. “This will not be about parties, this will not be about ideological persuasions. Anybody who has broken the law will be held accountable.”
But, Holder said, it will take time to determine if there was criminal wrongdoing.
Holder announced a day earlier that the Justice department had opened a criminal investigation, joining three committees in Congress that are looking into the matter. As the investigation widened, House Speaker John Boehner told reporters he had this question: “Who’s going to jail over this scandal?”
“There are laws in place to prevent this type of abuse. Someone made a conscious decision to harass and to hold up these requests for tax-exempt status,” Boehner said. “I think we need to know who they are and whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law.”
Legal experts, however, said it could be difficult to prove that IRS officials or employees knowingly violated the civil rights of conservative groups. If there is a violation, the experts said, investigators can sometimes prove more easily that officials made false statements or obstructed justice in some other way.
“I think it’s doubtful that any of these knuckleheads who engaged in the conduct that gave rise to this controversy knowingly believed that they were violating the law,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department lawyer. “But that remains to be seen. That’s what investigations are for.”
Even if IRS agents broke criminal laws in targeting conservative groups, investigators may have to prove they knowingly did it, a high standard, said Brian Galle, a former Justice Department lawyer who teaches law at Boston College.
“If the reason they were pursuing them was in order to punish them for their political activity, there might be a First Amendment concern there,” Galle said. “On the other hand, if the reason that they were looking for Tea Party groups is because there had been press reports about this new group, the Tea Party, who was aimed primarily at getting more conservative people elected to office, then they were just responding to the evidence. It really depends on what their motives were.”
Wednesday’s hearing was the first of several in Congress that will focus on the issue.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced that it would hold a hearing Wednesday featuring Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, and former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, whose five-year term ended in November.
The House Ways and Means Committee set a hearing for Friday, featuring Miller, who became acting commissioner after Shulman’s term ended, and J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the oversight committee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent the attorney general a nine-page letter accusing Lerner of providing false or misleading information to the committee four times in 2012 as the scope of the targeting effort became clear ahead of the presidential election.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Jordan said Lerner misled him and his staff members when they asked her about complaints from conservative groups that they were being harassed by the IRS.
“I know for a fact, Lois Lerner lied to me, she lied to our personal staff, she lied to committee staff, she lied in correspondence,” Jordan said.
Lerner learned about the targeting on June 29, 2011, according to a report Tuesday by the inspector general.
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which also has opened an investigation and will hold a hearing Tuesday, said he was “purposely misled” by Miller when he and other Republican senators were told that no targeting of conservative groups had taken place.
The inspector general’s report said ineffective management at the IRS allowed agents to improperly target Tea Party and other conservative groups for more than 18 months.
The report said that while their applications for tax-exempt status languished, Tea Party groups were asked a host of inappropriate questions, including: Who are your donors? What are the political affiliations of officers? What issues are important to the organization, and what are your positions on those issues?
The IRS started targeting groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriots” or “9/12 Project” in their applications for tax-exempt status in March 2010, the inspector general’s report said. By August 2010, it was part of the written criteria used to flag groups for additional scrutiny.
Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said Wednesday that no union employees in the Cincinnati field office that handled the applications had been disciplined, as far as she knew. She noted that the inspector general’s report said agents were not motivated by political bias.
So far, according to Issa’s letter, one person from the office has been promoted or given some “career enhancement.”
House and Senate aides investigating the agency’s actions said Wednesday that they were focusing on an Aug. 4, 2011, meeting in which, according to a report by the Treasury inspector general, the IRS’ chief counsel conferred with agency officials to discuss the activities of the Cincinnati office.
Under IRS rules, the agency’s chief counsel, William Wilkins, reports to the Treasury Department’s general counsel, and investigators want to determine if Wilkins took the issue out of the independent IRS to other parts of the Obama administration.
But the IRS statement Wednesday said the notation on which the report relied was referring to the chief counsel’s office, which employs 1,600 lawyers, not Wilkins himself.
“Mr. Wilkins did not learn about specific groups being singled out by name until earlier this year,” the agency said.
Also Wednesday, the IRS released a list of 179 advocacy groups that had been approved for tax-exempt status as of May 9. The list includes both seemingly conservative and progressive groups, including the Nevada County Tea Party Patriots and Progress Texas. A total of 34 included the words “Tea Party” in their names.
“Progress Texas and the tea party strongly disagree on the role of government,” said a statement from Ed Espinoza, executive director of Progress Texas. “Yet, when we applied for tax-exempt status, Progress Texas received the same type of additional scrutiny that Tea Party groups are complaining about.”
Meanwhile, two conservative religious groups said they also were the subject of unusual scrutiny from the IRS. The son of the Rev. Billy Graham as well as leaders of Z Street, a conservative Jewish organization, have said they believe they were pressed by the IRS for more information because they advocated for conservative causes.
“I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence - or justifiable,” the Rev. Franklin Graham wrote in a letter to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. “I am bringing this to your attention because I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us. This is morally wrong and unethical - indeed some would call it ‘un-American.’” Information for this article was contributed by Stephen Ohlemacher, Jim Kuhnhenn, Andrew Miga, Emery Dalesio and Henry C. Jackson of The Associated Press; by Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; and by Richard Rubin, James Rowley, Heidi Przybyla, Phil Mattingly, Hans Nichols, Lisa Lerer, Robin Meszoly and Joe Sobczyk of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/16/2013