Paul L. Caron
Dean





Sunday, October 18, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 892

IRS Logo 2Media Tracker, GAB Official’s Relationship with IRS’s Lerner Spanned Personal to Professional:

E-mails obtained by a Republican lawmaker and a conservative organization, along with travel records and expense reports portray a wide-ranging relationship between Wisconsin’s controversial top elections official and the disgraced former head of the federal Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt division. The relationship between Kevin Kennedy, head of the Government Accountability Board, and Lois Lerner, the Obama Administration IRS official who used her perch to harass and threaten conservative non-profit groups, was first revealed by the Wall Street Journal and further explained by the MacIver Institute.

But the entire story found in the numerous e-mails – and verified by state travel records – has never been fully told.

Kennedy has been extremely defensive about his interaction with Lerner, accusing a state senator of being like U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who fear-mongered about communists in government in the 1950s, when that senator asked Kennedy this week about the nature of the relationship.

State Rep. Dave Craig, a Republican who is leading the fight to reform Wisconsin’s John Doe investigation process, first obtained e-mails between Kennedy and Lerner in an open records request. Under Kennedy’s leadership, the GAB worked in tandem with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office to use the state’s current John Doe law to harass, investigate and bully conservatives. The e-mails were also obtained by True the Vote, a conservative Texas-based election watchdog that was targeted by Lerner and the IRS. True the Vote also obtained several years’ worth of Kennedy’s travel schedules.

The e-mails show that Kennedy and Lerner, in addition to sending each other a few e-mails about professional work, would share travel details – including hotel addresses – with each other and circulate random photographs and generic poems with a tight circle of acquaintances. ...

Although Kennedy may think his relationship with Lerner is off-limits to questioning, simply dismissing it as McCarthyism doesn’t explain why Wisconsin’s top elections official would work so closely with an IRS official who had to leave her job in the Obama Administration because of her targeting of conservative organizations. Kennedy’s own work targeting conservatives may offer more insight than his manufactured outrage in front of a legislative committee.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/10/the-irs-scandal-day-892.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

Party wide corruption at all levels of government from the people who march in the street and register voters to the President.

Posted by: wodun | Oct 18, 2015 9:40:35 AM

In what way was anything that these two did considered professional?

Posted by: RRP | Oct 18, 2015 8:16:41 AM