ACLJ: More plaintiffs added to IRS lawsuit

The American Center for Law and Justice has amended its lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, adding more plaintiffs.

The conservative law firm has added 16 additional tea party and conservative organizations to its complaint, bringing to 41 the total number of plaintiffs represented in the court challenge.

Sekulow, Jordan (ACLJ)”After the original lawsuit was filed, we were inundated,” says Jay Sekulow, executive director of ACLJ. “And we are still receiving a lot of information from potential clients and those who feel they were also wronged.”

The ACLJ’s suit contends the IRS violated the constitutional rights of these groups by secretly targeting them because of their political beliefs.

Sekulow says 19 of their 41 clients did finally get their tax-exempt requests approved.

“But they only got that after lengthy delays,” he tells OneNewsNow. “We’re talking two and a half (to) three years, basically rendering their organizations in this chilling speech ineffective.”

Sekulow says the IRS scheme had a dramatic impact on the targeted groups, causing many to curtail lawful activities, expend considerable unnecessary funds, lose donor support, and devote countless hours of time responding to onerous and targeted IRS information requests that went outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.

SOURCE http://www.onenewsnow.com/politics-govt/2013/06/27/aclj-more-plaintiffs-added-to-irs-lawsuit

Activists Saw Vindication As Controversy Erupted

Tom Zawistowski, a conservative activist from northeastern Ohio, drew shrugs in early 2012 when he accused the Internal Revenue Service of targeting tea-party groups.

Last week, after the IRS controversy broke, Mr. Zawistowski was at the center of the action. He helped bring activists to the capital, where he also briefed Republican House staff ahead of a hearing and helped fetch documents for lawmakers. He appeared at a news conference with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

Mr. Zawistowski didn’t get back to his home in Kent, Ohio, until late Friday night. On a layover in Atlanta, he answered calls from reporters.

The founder of TRZ Communications, a small communications firm, has emerged as the ringleader of a small band of conservative activists who started making a case in February 2012 that the IRS was selectively scrutinizing tea-party groups. When the story erupted, these activists were quickly able to put a face on the groups at the heart of these inquiries.

In addition to creating difficulties for the Obama administration, the controversy has reanimated the tea-party movement at a time when many Republicans in Washington were looking to turn their back on their activist base.

In early 2012, Mr. Zawistowski, 57 years old, refused to comply with an IRS request for additional information and publicized his response.

Shortly afterward, he got a call from Toby Marie Walker, president of the Waco (Texas) Tea Party, saying her group received a similar request. The pair reached out to Eric Wilson, of the Kentucky 9/12 Project, and Stephani Scruggs, of Unite in Action, who were running into the same issue.

The quartet traded notes. “We realized there was definitely a pattern,” Mr. Wilson said.

The group decided to organize a much larger conference call, using email, Twitter and other social media to alert activists across the country.

The first call drew 60 to 80 people, the organizers said. Participants shared their tales, and a Texas attorney who specialized in tax-exempt organizations told people on the call he had never seen anything like this.

“The same thing that brought the individual tea parties together around the country is the same thing that brought this group together,” Mr. Wilson said.

On a second call, Jay Sekulow, an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative advocacy group, told participants he would defend any group facing these questions without charge.

Even before Mr. Zawistowski told the media, he alerted Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), an outspoken conservative on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At the end of February, Mr. Jordan’s staff and aides from the Oversight panel had a meeting with Lois Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt unit at the IRS, and her staff to raise their concerns. As a result of that back-and-forth, Mr. Jordan and Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) asked the Treasury inspector general for tax administration to investigate the allegations.

There the group’s efforts stalled. In mid-April of 2012, Mr. Wilson flew to New York for interviews on the cable networks. He was bumped for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who had officially bowed out of the White House race that afternoon.

Mr. Zawistowski met with advisers to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, but he said they expressed little interest in the IRS story. These days, many Republicans who once expressed indifference are showering him in attention.

Mr. Zawistowski was in his office in Kent earlier this month when Ms. Lerner acknowledged the agency targeted conservative groups. Mr. Wilson called that morning to alert him.

Before they hung up, Mr. Zawistowski got his first call from a reporter. The calls never stopped. He didn’t leave the office until 10 p.m. that day. In the interim, he said he did 25 interviews, including evening news spots on NBC and CBS.

He has no plans to let up, even now that the story is shifting to officials in Washington and the IRS office in Cincinnati, where the applications were reviewed. He issued a memo Monday warning conservatives protesting IRS offices in Cincinnati to remain civil.

“This is no time to retreat,” he said. “This is a defining moment in our nation.”

Write to Patrick O’Connor at patrick.oconnor@wsj.com

SOURCE http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323463704578497522364208026.html

Tennessee activist: IRS told me ‘superiors’ gave guidance on screening conservative groups

The founder of a conservative group in Tennessee said Tuesday that an IRS agent in Cincinnati told him in late 2011 that their “superiors” were providing guidance on how to screen Tea Party and other organizations — an account that appears to contradict claims that the practice was limited to low-level staffers in Ohio.

Kevin Kookogey, who launched Linchpins of Liberty in early 2011 and is still awaiting IRS approval for tax-exempt status, told FoxNews.com he doesn’t buy the explanation that the program was limited to a few “rogue agents.”

Based on his conversation with the Ohio employee, Kookogey said the Cincinnati office was clearly awaiting instructions “from outside.”

His account is among several that challenge the agency’s initial narrative that this was the ill-advised work of low-level staffers. Documents obtained by FoxNews.com show that conservative groups were receiving IRS questionnaires from offices in California as well as Washington, D.C. A timeline released by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, also claimed that Washington officials were apprised of the program as early as 2010.

Amid the new revelations, Republicans were calling for additional scrutiny.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker reportedly called for a special prosecutor. Sen. Dean Heller announced Tuesday he would oppose funding additional agents who would be used to implement ObamaCare. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others called for any agents who acted inappropriately to be fired.

Separately, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department would investigate.

Kookogey told FoxNews.com he is looking at possibly testifying before Congress about his experience.

He claimed that he was never able to convene his board of directors and even lost a $30,000 grant because of the delay from the IRS. He did not provide the name of the group that apparently offered the grant, though the organization currently representing Kookogey supported his story. Kookogey recalled that he finally reached an IRS agent working his case in the Cincinnati office, on Dec. 30, 2011.

“I had been calling and calling and calling. … I said, ‘why in the world is this taking so long?'” he said.

Kookogey said he was told: “We have been waiting on guidance from our superiors as to your and similar organizations.”

Kookogey pointed out that his organization is not a Tea Party group and does not have Tea Party in its name, but was singled out anyway.

“That suggests to me only one thing. I’m being targeted because of the content of the speech,” he said. “This is a direct attack against the content of the speech.”

Kookogey is an entertainment lawyer living near Nashville who teaches on the side voluntarily — he mentors high school and college students, and teaches civics and economic subjects to homeschoolers. He was hoping to turn the Linchpins of Liberty group into a more full-time teaching effort, backed up by funding from donors. He said he would be teaching political philosophy and other subjects that trend conservative — like the principles of economists Milton Friedman and Adam Smith.

Kookogey is represented by the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing 26 other groups who petitioned the IRS and received additional scrutiny.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel with the ACLJ, told FoxNews.com that the claim this was limited to an Ohio office was “incorrect as a matter of fact.”

“These are not low-level agents,” he said, adding that his clients may consider taking the IRS to court and suing for damages. He said his clients had to provide “tens of thousands of pages of documents” to the IRS as they petitioned for tax-exempt status.

Though the IRS insists this was not a partisan effort, Sekulow disputed that.

“They didn’t go after the progressive organizations,” he said.

He suggested the swift formation of Tea Party groups several years ago “was getting somebody very nervous.”

IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller defended the agency on Tuesday, writing in USA Today that “mistakes were made, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan motivation.”

He explained that the program was started after agents saw a “sharp increase” in applications.

“There was a shortcut taken in our processes to determine which groups needed additional review. The mistakes we made were due to the absence of a sufficient process for working the increase in cases and a lack of sensitivity to the implications of some of the decisions that were made,” he wrote. “We fixed the situation last year, and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system.”

SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/05/14/tennessee-activist-irs-told-me-superiors-gave-guidance-on-screening