WASHINGTON – Tea Party groups are taking the IRS to court.
The American Center for Law and Justice has announced a federal lawsuit today against the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of 25 conservative groups who were targeted and harassed by the tax agency.
Jay Sekulow, the center’s chief counsel, said the lawsuit will show the IRS abuses went far above a couple “rogue agents,” as the Obama administration claims.
He has 15 IRS letters harassing conservative groups that were stamped with the signature of Lois Lerner, the IRS boss in charge of the tax-exempt office at the center of the scandal.
Lerner, who last week invoked the Fifth Amendment right not to testify when she faced the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been place on paid administrative leave.
Sekulow vowed to use the lawsuit to obtain sworn depositions from IRS officials and follow the scandal up the chain of command.
“Two rogue agents could not have initiated what was initiated here,” he said on MSNBC. “I suspect it goes higher than Lois Lerner.”
He has said that the documents that he has obtained so far do not link President Obama directly in the IRS abuses.
Top officials in the White House and Treasury Department had early warning about a Treasury inspector general report this month that blew the lid off the scandal, an Obama spokesman revealed last week.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler even plotted with Lerner for a P.R. response to the bombshell report.
The White House insists that Obama was never involved.