Tea Party Attorney: IRS Questions Are 'Far Left Wish List'...Scandal Is 'Ongoing

Getty Images.

David French, an attorney representing more than 40 tea party groups suing the IRS, said Monday that the problems with the IRS are still very much ongoing.

“The abuse is still ongoing,” says French, an attorney with the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group. “There are multiple clients who have waited over two years to receive the tax exemptions that they are entitled to."

“The IRS persists in asking unconstitutional questions of these clients, their exemptions haven’t been granted, and the IRS has not withdrawn the questions,” he added. “It’s not a past scandal; it’s ongoing."

French said the questions on the forms “need to be closely examined” as they “echo the rhetoric of the far left in the run up to the 2010 midterm elections.”

The highly intrusive questions on the forms represent a “far left wish list of discovery of the Tea Party,” he added.

French continued:

[The IRS forms] ask for members and donors lists and all privileged communications both indirect and direct—whatever that means. The questions are so voluminous that they would cause any organization to have trouble complying.

Unless these groups have pro bono representation, most of them would abandon the entire enterprise or accidentally fork over constitutionally protected documents.

French worries about the targeting of these small tea party groups because of some of the recent leaks from the IRS, which he says are “particularly sinister in light of the IRS scandal being revealed.”

“This [IRS effort] wasn’t just going after the big fish," he explained, "but the small citizen-led tea party groups who wanted to host a seminar at their local high school or rent out a church to teach a class on the Constitution.”

“The malice from the IRs is particularly acute in light of the fact that they didn’t pick on someone their own size, as if anyone is the size of the IRS,” French. Instead, they went after groups that were “very, very grassroots and asked them questions that a major corporation would find hard to answer," he added.

--

Featured image Getty Images.