Leaked IRS Files Were Used to Attack Romney

Politics

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has accused the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of illegally leaking information to the conservative group’s “political enemies,” and the confidential information about NOM’s donors was used as a weapon to attack Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. NOM’s donor information was first published at Huffington Post, as Matthew Boyle reports at Breitbart.com:

At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Solmonese was also a 2012 Obama campaign co-chairman.
Both the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and HRC described the leak as coming from a “whistleblower.” The Huffington Post used the document to write a story questioning former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s support for traditional marriage. The document showed Romney donated $10,000 to NOM. HRC went a step further than the Huffington Post in its criticism of Romney and accused him of using “racially divisive tactics” in a press release.
Solmonese, then still the HRC’s president, said in the release he felt Romney’s “funding of a hate-filled campaign designed to drive a wedge between Americans is beyond despicable.”
“Not only has Romney signed NOM’s radical marriage pledge, now we know he’s one of the donors that NOM has been so desperate to keep secret all these years,” Solmonese added.
Solmonese resigned his position at HRC the next day and took up a position as an Obama campaign co-chair. He had announced the then-pending resignation from HRC the previous autumn.
NOM announced Tuesday that it will sue the IRS for this alleged leak. Under immense political pressure, Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation into the IRS’s actions. Congress will conduct ts own investigation.
In early April 2012, NOM published documents which it said showed this leaked confidential information did not come from a “whistleblower” but “came directly from the Internal Revenue Service and was provided to NOM’s political opponents, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).”

The IRS scandal erupted last week after an agency official admitted that Tea Party groups had been targeted for intrusive reviews of applications for non-profit status. An inspector general’s report said “inappropriate criteria” were used to target the groups, which experienced unreasonable delays in processing their applications, and were wrongly asked to identify their donors.

During a 27-month period beginning in March 2010, not a single Tea Party group’s 501(c) application was approved by the IRS, while dozens of liberal groups had their applications approved. President Obama has denounced the IRS abuses as “intolerable and inexcusable.”

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