The IRS under President Obama targeted and bullied conservative groups when they set higher standards and instituted greater scrutiny when it came to those groups’ applications for nonprofit status, a decidedly partisan and surprisingly blatant effort to silence conservative speech.
Our bad, they say.
The apology came on the heels of Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that Justice Department had entered into settlements with Tea Party groups that had their tax-exempt status delayed because of their ideology.
“The IRS’s use of these criteria as a basis for heightened scrutiny was wrong and should never have occurred,” Sessions said in a statement Thursday. “It is improper for the IRS to single out groups for different treatment based on their names or ideological positions.”
These settlements included payments to the Tea Party groups, as well as an apology from the IRS.
Here is the mea culpa, via Fox News.
“The IRS admits that its treatment of Plaintiffs during the tax-exempt determination process, including screening their applications based on their names or policy positions, subjecting those applications to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays, and demanding some Plaintiffs’ information that TIGTA determined was unnecessary to the agency’s determination of their tax-exempt status, was wrong,” the IRS said in court documents. “For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology.”
It’s not a very robust apology, and lead counsel for the conservative groups Eddie Greim said so today.
“The Government’s generous settlement with the Class Plaintiffs fully vindicates their claims that the IRS targeted Tea Party and conservative groups based on their viewpoint,” lead counsel for the conservative groups, Eddie Greim, told Fox News in an email. “However, like Lois Lerner’s stated apology back in 2013, any recent so-called ‘apology’ by the IRS has little value. That is because the Service continues to suggest that its targeting was really just ‘mismanagement.’”
Better than nothing doesn’t mean good enough, necessarily. In any case, what’s more important is assurances that such abuse can’t and won’t take place in the future. I guess we’ll see on that front.