Court filing shows GAB’s Kennedy asking Lois Lerner if IRS ‘would be interested’

Staff at Wisconsin’s nearly extinct speech regulator misled their board about the agency’s deep involvement in a politically driven John Doe investigation months before the board authorized the probe, according to a new filing by plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board.

More so, the latest court documents show GAB director and general counsel Kevin Kennedy approaching Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service agent also accused of targeting conservative groups.

Kennedy asked Lerner, then-director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division about the initial findings of the a secret investigation into 29 conservative groups and the campaign of Gov. Scott Walker. Kennedy, who has refused to tell the Legislature about his communications with the IRS, asked his close professional friend Lerner whether the information would be “something the IRS would be interested in looking at.”

Thursday’s brief in opposition of the GAB’s motion for summary judgment in the 1 ½-year-old lawsuit asserts the accountability board has woven “misleading and incomplete factual narrative into an unsupported interpretation of its Enabling Statute.”

It is that statute that the GAB has tried to hold up in defending its conduct in an unconstitutional investigation, asserting that the law gives it the authority to do what it did. It does not, charge the plaintiffs in the case, long-time conservative activist Eric O’Keefe and his Wisconsin Club for Growth, among scores of conservatives targeted in the dragnet.

The lawsuit alleges the GAB exceeded its authority, helping to lead a secret investigation alongside its abusive partners, the Democrat-led Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.

All along, the accountability board has asserted it ran a “parallel” investigation with the Milwaukee County DA and four other district attorneys who signed off on the five-county probe. It is the “fiction” of “assistance,” that the plaintiffs take devastating aim at.

The GAB’s defense unravels when considering the agency brought in and paid for the special prosecutor, former federal prosecutor Francis Schmitz, who at the time was a GAB-contracted special investigator on the probe.