“I didn’t do
anything wrong,” retired Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Lois
Lerner
tells Politico in a rare interviews with the
press. Lerner has stayed quiet since she came under fire as part an
ongoing scandal involving the tax agency’s targeting of
conservative non-profits.
Lerner thinks she did nothing wrong, and she won’t apologize.
“Regardless of whatever else happens, I know I did the best I could
under the circumstances and am not sorry for anything I did,” she
said in an interview with the paper.
That’s basically all she says about her role in the scandal.
Lerner, who, after reading a statement, exercised her Fifth
Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination when called to testify
before Congress last year, doesn’t really add anything to her
defense with the statements in her piece. She declares that she
stands by her work—and that’s it.
She says she get a lot of hate mail and grief, and some of it is
genuinely outrageous, including anti-Semitic remarks and death
threats serious enough that federal agents have been called in for
protection.
We do learn about her, um, favorite piece of hate mail:
Among the hate mail, Lerner’s “favorite” is one that says
she’ll “go down in history as the worst person ever in the United
States.”“I just thought, ‘Boy, worse than Jeffrey Dahmer?’” she asks,
her face crinkling up, eyebrows pinching together in disbelief.
She and her husband, a partner at a law firm who sat with her
during the interview, seem fairly upset about the loss of
income that has come as a result of the scandal.
“Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, she got
these amazing ratings and bonuses. … And once she retired, she
would have gone out with bells and whistles, and the IRS
commissioner would have made a speech. … It went from that to:
You’re under criminal investigation, and your career is ruined, in
a week,” her husband Michael Miles said to
Politico.
She may not have gotten all the “bells and whistles” when she
left the agency last year, but she did manage to retire with
benefits and a
pension that has been
valued in the range of $50,000 a year. That’s not bad
considering that when she retired, a review board was about to
recommend that she be fired, citing mismanagement and “neglect of
duties” in her role as head of the IRS tax exempt division,
according to an Associated Press article from last year.
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