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WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service boss in charge of the office that targeted conservative groups will take the Fifth today when she faces a House panel, her lawyer warned.
Lois Lerner, who runs the IRS tax-exempt division at the heart of the scandal, plans to invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to testify when asked about the agency’s misconduct or why she concealed it from Congress.
“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation, but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” her DC lawyer, William Taylor III, said in a letter to the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.
Taylor asked the committee chairman, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), to cancel Lerner’s testimony.
“Requiring her to appear at the hearing merely to assert her Fifth Amendment privilege would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her,” wrote Taylor.
Issa responded by issuing a subpoena to Lerner.
Lerner learned in June 2011 that IRS agents were targeting applications that mentioned “Tea Party,” “patriots” or “government debt” for extra scrutiny of their tax- exempt status.
But Lerner never informed Congress, despite lawmakers’ repeated inquires about alleged targeting of politically conservative groups.
Tea Party groups have been complaining about IRS harassment for at least two years.
Lerner’s move comes amid an FBI criminal investigation and other probes.
She also played a key role in the IRS’s effort to stage-manage the release of a Treasury inspector-general report May 13 that confirmed the abuses.
Attempting to preempt the IG report, Lerner admitted the wrongdoing and apologized on May 10 in response to a question planted at a press conference.
IRS officials eventually admitted that seemingly spontaneous apology was actually staged.
Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who is resigning over the scandal, yesterday took the blame for the botched p.r. stunt.
“I will take responsibility for that,” Miller told the Senate Finance Committee, one of several congressional committees probing the IRS affair.
President Obama’s top aides also helped plot damage-control strategies with Treasury and IRS officials — including Lerner — before the IG report came out, White House spokesman Jay Carney revealed yesterday.
“There were discussions . . . just part of trying to find out when and under what circumstances this information would be released, made public, and what those findings would be,” Carney said at the daily White House briefing.
The discussions included plans for a possible speech by Lerner and for “what [Miller] would say” if asked about it, said Carney.
The revelation came a day after Carney disclosed that Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, and other top White House officials got early warning of the IG report — about three weeks before Obama claims to have learned of it from news reports.
The White House still insisted Obama didn’t know about it until the public did.