In a trove of emails recently released by the Senate Finance Committee, former IRS official Lois Lerner reveals her true feelings about Republicans investigating her for alleged misconduct in the IRS targeting scandal.
In a March 6, 2014, email, Lerner wrote to a friend: “They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them.”
She later alleged that a unfavorable photo of her testifying before Congress continued to be used because it “it serves” Republicans’ “purposes of hate mongering to continue to use those images," Politico first reported.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
“I was never a political person — this whole fiasco has only made me lose all respect [for] politics and politicians. I am merely a pawn in their game to take over the Senate,” she said in the June 2014 email.
Lerner also reportedly expressed annoyance that the IRS had yet to audit Karl Rove-backed Crossroads GPS after several referrals. In an email to Nan Downing, the manager of Exempt Organization Examinations, Lerner wrote:
“I don’t know where we go with this — as I’ve told you before — I don’t think your guys get it and the way they look at these cases is going to bite us some day."
Former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner, right, accompanied by her attorney,is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 5, 2014, during the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the the agency's targeting of tea party groups, where she invoked her constitutional right not to incriminate herself. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke)
More from Politico’s review of the thousands of pages of emails:
Some other nuggets are more trivial: emails that reveal glimpses of Lerner’s personal views, for example.
A few of the emails appear to have been included for little reason other than spite, such as an exchange with a friend reminiscing about a college romance, or a thread with her husband where he says he wants to vote for a “socialist-labor candidate.”
But others show that Lerner, who said in one email that she “was never a political person,” was at points seized by passionate fury over politics. On Dec. 24, 2012, she wrote, “We’re in Ohio for the holiday and waiting to go over the fiscal cliff! I truly believe this country is out of its head with ridiculousness! We really need to split in two — we are so polarized that we can’t do anything constructive.”
Read the full report here.
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