'Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was looped in on a plan with Lois Lerner and President Barack Obama's political appointee at the IRS to lead a program of harassment against conservative nonprofit groups during the 2012 election, according to letters exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) did not want to publicly release 2012 correspondences exchanged between the IRS and Jeanne Shaheen at her personal Washington office: the agency delayed releasing the information to a major conservative super PAC multiple times, even threatening to see the super PAC in court, according to emails.
But the letter in question comes out now, on the eve of Jeanne Shaheen's bid for re-election to the United States Senate.
"The IRS is aware of the current public interest in this issue," IRS chief counsel William J. Wilkins, a White House visitor described by insiders as "The President's Man at the IRS," personally wrote in a hand-stamped memo to "Senator Shaheen" on official Department of the Treasury letterhead on April 25, 2012.
The memo, obtained by TheDC, briefed the Democratic senator about a coordinated IRS-Treasury Department plot to target political activity by nonprofit 501(c)(4) groups. The plot was operating out of Lois Lerner's Tax Exempt Government Entities Division…
Shaheen got the inside info from the IRS, making it clear she was the point person in a group composed of six close Democratic colleagues including Chuck Schumer and Al Franken, who joined with Shaheen in quietly writing a letter to then-IRS commissioner Doug Shulman expressing their concern about new nonprofit groups engaging in political activity in 2012.
The Democratic senators' publicly available March 9, 2012 letter asked the IRS to "immediately change the administrative framework for enforcement of the tax code as it applies to groups designated as 'social welfare' organizations" by introducing a new "bright line test" for how much a tax-exempt group can invest in political activity and by setting a new rule that at least 51 percent of a group's activity must non-political. The senators called for more elaborate disclosures about finances and "undertakings" in groups' form 990 submissions and sought new rules about how much donors could write off as business expenses'
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