H/T AP via Breitbart

What country is this? As a candidate for President, Senator Obama attacked people for “clinging to their guns and religion” and as President, his IRS targeted Tea Party and conservative groups for audits and scrutiny during the 2012 election.

My God, he’s worse than Nixon.

The top brass of the IRS claimed in 2012 they weren’t targeting any Tea Party groups,

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told Congress in March 2012…”There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee.

While the Democrats have dismissed the complaints of these groups were targeted, Mark Levin, radio talk host, author,  Constitutional law expert and attorney, filed a complaint through his Landmark Legal Foundation. From Breitbart,

“The information demanded in many cases goes far beyond the appropriate level of inquiry” for tax-exempt status, Levin wrote in his capacity as President of Landmark Legal. An investigation into the IRS “also must determine whether the relevant IRS employees are acting at the direction of politically motivated superiors.”

And today the IRS apologized for inappropriately going after these groups. From the AP,

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups.

In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.

“That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

The tax exempt status group worked out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Today the IRS Lerner said no one at the top knew about the shenanigans going on. 

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out.

Like the left wing nuts who worked with the State of Ohio and divulged Joe the Plumber’s private information during the 2008 campaign, it looks as if the hyper political government union workers know what their marching orders are. 

Tea Party Patriots aren’t buying the excuse that no one in Washington, D.C. knew what was going on. From Breitbart,

One Tea Party group, Tea Party Patriots, rejected the IRS apology. In a press release Friday afternoon, the group called for a direct apology from President Barack Obama, and for a congressional investigation:

“The IRS has demonstrated the most disturbing, illegal and outrageous abuse of government power,” said Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator for Tea Party Patriots. “This deliberate targeting and harassment of tea party groups reaches a new low in illegal government activity and overreach. It is suspicious that the activity of these ‘low-level workers’ was unknown to IRS leadership at the time it occurred. President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again. We reject a simple apology that does nothing to alleviate the danger of this happening again. Only immediate and public actions on the part of the IRS and the president will suffice.

“We demand the immediate resignation of all complicit in this activity and insist Congress investigate.”

Obama: worse than Nixon.