Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS
division that singled out conservative groups, is expected to invoke the
Fifth Amendment Wednesday when she appears before the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee, Fox News has learned.
That means Lerner, head of the exempt organizations division,
probably won’t answer any questions on what she knew about IRS agents
going after Tea Party-related groups. That also means she probably won’t
say why she sat on the information for so long before it became public.
Lerner’s attorney William Taylor III asked committee Chairman Darrell
Issa, R-Calif., in a letter if she could skip Wednesday’s hearing since
she would be pleading the Fifth.
Taylor argued in the letter that forcing Lerner to appear “would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.”
Late Tuesday, the House oversight committee released a statement
saying Lerner was still under subpoena and would be required to appear
in the morning.
“Chairman Issa remains hopeful that she will ultimately decide to
testify tomorrow about her knowledge of outrageous IRS targeting of
Americans for the political beliefs,” committee spokesman Ali Ahmad said
in a statement.
Other former or outgoing IRS officials have already testified, and
will continue to give their testimony on Wednesday. But Lerner, who is
the official who first acknowledged the IRS program, has faced
significant scrutiny.
Since the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation
into the IRS scandal and the House committee indicated it would
question Lerner about why she provided incomplete information to the
committee at least four times last year, Taylor wrote that his client
would be invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The House committee is also scheduled to hear from Deputy Secretary
of the Treasury Neal Wolin, among others, as the search for someone who
will claim responsibility continues.
On Tuesday, outgoing IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, was back in the
hot seat as he testified for the second time in two weeks on Capitol
Hill.
Miller expressed regret for the agency’s decision to use a planted
question to go public with the IRS’s practice of singling out
conservative groups.
It was one in a series of missteps that have not only publicly marred
the reputation of the IRS but also called into question what the White
House knew about the scandal and when they knew it.
“We’re not looking for people to be evasive but we want people
forthright and straightforward with us,” Rep. Joseph Crowley, a Democrat
from New York, told Fox News.
While Crowley did not go so far as to say Lerner should be let go, he
did say, “the bottom line is that you cannot lie to Congress, be
evasive or mislead. You must answer the question and not mislead
Congress.”
Separately, two Tea Party-related groups filed lawsuits against the IRS this week.
On Tuesday, Texas-based True the Vote claimed it was unfairly
targeted by the IRS and demanded in court documents the government admit
its mistake, grant the group tax-exempt status and pay for damages
totaling more than $85,000.
On Monday, the NorCal Tea Party Patriots filed the first federal suit
against the national tax agency. Like True the Vote, the northern
California group says the IRS violated its constitutional rights when it
held up its applications for tax-exempt status.
The NorCal lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Cincinnati,
seeks group status for “all conservative and libertarian groups
targeted for additional scrutiny” between March 2010 and May 2013. It’s
also seeking unspecified monetary damages for the alleged violation of
its constitutional rights and the costs associated with trying to comply
with IRS demands.
The lawsuit is being backed by Citizens for Self-Governance, a group launched by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler.
Meckler claims that IRS agents also demanded massive amounts of
disclosure of information not authorized by the Internal Revenue Code or
any other federal law. The suit alleges that the tactic was used to
delay or dissuade conservative groups from going through with their
applications.
The IRS acknowledged that employees at its Cincinnati office had
targeted conservative groups, creating massive amounts of paperwork or
rejecting applications altogether.
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