Corruption from the IRS to the DoJ

The pro-Israel group Z Street had its application for tax-exempt status held up at the IRS. When founder Lori Lowenthal Marcus asked why, she was told that IRS auditors had been instructed to give pro-Israel groups special attention and that Z Street’s application had been forwarded to a special IRS unit for additional review. Not to put too fine a point on the legal issues, this isn’t kosher. It’s illegal.

Z Street filed a lawsuit against the IRS in the rosy dawn of the Age of Obama; the lawsuit has yet to get beyond the IRS’s motion for dismissal. The Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman wrote about the lawsuit here last year when the DC District Court denied the IRS motion to dismiss the case. Z Street’s Lori Marcus wrote about it here. John wrote about it in 2013 in the post “The other IRS scandal.”

The legal positions asserted by the IRS are ludicrous. Indeed, they are a pretext to preclude discovery until the chief malefactors serving at the pleasure of President Obama have moved on. It is a sidebar to the political corruption of the IRS that remains one of the great untold stories of the Age of Obama. (Sharyl Attkisson doesn’t cover the IRS scandal, but to understand the Obama playbook for handling it, see “The Attkisson file.”)

The IRS appealed the denial of its motion to dismiss to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week a panel of three DC Circuit judges heard the IRS appeal. The hearing did not go well for the IRS. Indeed, it was an exercise in righteous humiliation of the Department of Justice. The DoJ has asserted ludicrous defenses to gum up the lawsuit and preclude discovery.