IRS Pleads Guilty To Giving Donor List. This Agency Is Out Of Control And Should Be Terminated.

IRS Admits Wrongdoing In Settlement With Traditional Marriage Group Over Leaked Donor List

June 24, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

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The IRS has admitted wrongdoing in the illegal release of names on a confidential list on conservative donors to a rival political group and has agreed to pay $50,000 to the conservative group whose members’ names were wrongly leaked.

A U.S. District Court judge accepted a settlement today in the case, which pitted the IRS as a defendant against the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a conservative group whose membership was leaked by an internal IRS source, using information meant only for IRS documentation purposes, to a liaison for a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

A reading of this case’s history quickly disabuses the observer of any impression of an impersonal, run-of-the-mill bureaucratic screw-up and replaces it with something far more human and mendacious. This wasn’t a case of someone inadvertently hitting the wrong button on a computer or mistakenly lumping in one stack of information with another; it was instead an attempt to wilfully present legally-protected donor information to an adversarial political group to influence the relative power one wielded against the other.

Here’s how The Daily Signal, which first reported today’s decision, summarizes it:

In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.

HRC’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Eastman said an investigation in the civil lawsuit determined that someone gave NOM’s tax return and list of major donors to Boston-based gay rights activist Matthew Meisel. Email correspondence from Meisel revealed that he told a colleague of “a conduit” to obtain the marriage group’s confidential information.

Testifying under oath in a deposition as part of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Meisel invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself and declined to disclose the identity of his “conduit.”

To get at that fact, Eastman said, the National Organization for Marriage has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to grant immunity from prosecution to Meisel.

So a “conduit” at the IRS fished out the names of all the donors who expressed their support for the state’s present legal definition of marriage through a political movement, and handed that confidential information over to an activist who wants that definition to change. Then that activist revealed that illegally-obtained information to a competing political group, which got its cause some instant press from media outlets invested in advancing the issue. The Obama campaign then swooped in and recruited the president of the group that had shared the illegally-gotten info away from his position and made him the President’s campaign manager. Oh, and the President’s opponent in that election cycle just happened to be one of the guys on the victim group’s donor list.

Regardless of which side of the marriage issue you stand on, that’s just messed up.

It’s also not just a civil matter – it’s a crime. “Unauthorized disclosure of confidential tax information is a felony offense that can result in five years in prison, but the Department of Justice did not bring criminal charges,” the Daily Signal observed. So far, and until the “conduit” (presumably an IRS employee) is revealed, the IRS itself is the only named culprit – and that’s merely for this now-settled civil action.

The $50,000 the IRS must pay will necessary come from public coffers, whether by means of a standing liability protection plan or direct payment. “The $50,000 to be paid by the IRS represents actual damages NOM incurred responding to the illegal disclosure, not punitive damages,” notes the Signal, because “the marriage group was unable to prove disclosure of the confidential records was deliberate after Meisel took the Fifth.”