Lois Lerner caught on tape admitting the IRS was under political pressure to “do something” about the Citizens United ruling before targeting conservative groups

 We all remember when Lois Lerner sat in front of the Congress to address the IRS targeting scandal and we all remember her pleading the fifth while stating she did nothing wrong. While pleading the fifth was her right, and I do not deny her of her Constitutional rights, this left us believing there was much more to this story that she was hiding.

  Now we just might know what she was hiding: She has been caught on tape from 2010 talking about the “political pressure” the IRS was facing about doing something about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case.

Lerner spoke to a small group at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010, just two weeks before the wave election that brought the Tea Party and Republicans significant gains in Congress. During her appearance Lerner was asked about the flow of money from corporations to 501(c)(4) groups. “Everyone is up in arms because they don’t like it” Lerner replied, adding “Federal Election Commission can’t do anything about it; they want the IRS to fix the problem.”

Lerner goes on to outline the fact that 501(c)(4) organizations have the right to do “an ad that says vote for Joe Blow” so long as their primary activity is social welfare. However Lerner again emphasizes the political pressure the IRS was under at the time saying, “So everybody is screaming at us right now ‘Fix it now before the election. Can’t you see how much these people are spending?'” Lerner concludes by saying she won’t know if organizations have gone too far in campaigning until she looks at their “990s next year.”

It is also noteworthy that Lois Lerner paraphrases President Obama’s framing of the issue when she says, “the Supreme Court dealt it a huge blow, overturning a hundred year old precedent that said basically corporations can give directly in political campaigns.” 

  It is clear that the problem she is talking about was all the money flowing into organizations which opposed the president in 2010 and she lamented the fact that she could not do anything in time to save the 2010 election but promised to take a look at what could be done after the election.

  We all know what she decided to do because we know the IRS began targeting these groups for additional scrutiny after the 2010 election and we know that many of them have been silenced and remain in limbo to this day. It does not take a genius to figure out what was going on here.

  In response to a Supreme Court decision with which Barack Obama and some in the Congress disagreed, the proper way to “do something” would have been to pass a law in compliance with the Constitution but instead the Obama regime tried to work around the decision by targeting the opposition and preventing them from participating in the 2012 election, and that is precisely what the IRS did. This is not the action of a free republic, it is the action of a man hellbent on keeping power by any means necessary–even if it means silencing and intimidating the opposition.