Lois Lerner: Living Embodiment of Why We Should Stay the Hell Away From the IRS

Lois LernerWho was it who said, “everybody is guilty of
something”? My high school principal, I think. Anyway, it’s also a
paraphrase of the warning contained in Harvey Silverglate’s

Three Felonies a Day
, which points out that we go through
our lives breaking a tangled jungle of laws, often
unintentionally.

That makes us all vulnerable to prosecution on a whim—perhaps by
the fine folks at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcing the
country’s vast and incomprehensible
tax code
.

That’s why
Judicial Watch’s data dump
of internal IRS documents suggesting
that embattled former tax official Lois Lerner contacted
counterparts at the Department of Justice about finding
something prosecutable in the activities of conservative
tax-exempt organizations is not surprising. Pick a spot in our
society and dig deep enough, and eventually you’ll find a crime.
That’s handy, if it suits your needs.

Then again, dig through bureaucrats’ email trails long enough,
and eventually you’ll find something distasteful and nefarious.

Judicial Watch points, understandably, to the following
exchange between Lerner and Nikole C. Flax, then-chief of staff to
then-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller
as particularly
damning.

Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2013 5:30 PM
To: Flax Nikole C
Cc: Grant Joseph H; Marks Nancy J
Subject: DOJ Call
Importance: High

I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes
Branch at DOJ. I know him
from contacts from my days there. He wanted to know who at IRS the
DOJ folks could talk to
about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece
together false statement
cases about applicants who “lied” on their 1024s–saying they
weren’t planning on doing
political activity, and then turning around and making large
visible political expenditures. DOJ
is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right
folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and
what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs.

I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from
IRS. I am out of town all next
week, so wanted to reach out and see who you think would be right
for such a meeting and
also hand this off to Nan as contact person if things need to
happen while I am gone —

Thanks

Lois G. Lerner
Director of Exempt Organizations

***

From: Flax Nikole C
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2013 8:04 AM
To: Lerner Lois G
Cc: Grant Joseph H; Marks Nancy J; Vozne Jennifer L
Subject: RE: DOJ Call

I think we should do it – also need to include CI, which we can
help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does
it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it
separate?

Ultimately, as the scandal unfolded and ensnared much more than
the “low level workers” originally blamed for the mess, no
prosecutions materialized. But it’s easy to see how focused
interest by tax officials and federal prosecutors could have found
arguable mismatches between organizations’ conduct and some
interpretation of a tax code that, notoriously, has no consistent
meaning
across the IRS. (Legal scholars debate whether the IRS

should be required to adopt one interpretation of the rules and
stick with it
. That would be nice.)

The IRS scandal regarding tax-exempt groups actually poses a
worse hazard the the thicket of unknowable laws that Silverglate
warns about, since the tax code is essentially a moving target,
applied in novel ways as it suits IRS officials.

Which means that everybody really is guilty of
something, if you put in a little effort to find just that. And
that’s especially true if it’s the IRS looking. That’s all the more
reason to stay as far away as possible from potentially hostile
government officials wielding amorphous rulebooks.

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