As former IRS official Lois Lerner was in the midst of a national scandal and congressional investigation over the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits, she was privately railing against the Republicans who were out to get her, writing in an email to a friend that Republicans were being "evil and dishonest," reports Politico.
In one of the emails Politico reviewed, Lerner, former director of the IRS's Exempt Organizations unit, recalled when a congressional House Oversight Committee called her back to testify for a second time on the IRS's targeting of right-leaning groups applying for tax-exempt status.
"They called me back to testify on the IRS 'scandal,'" Lerner wrote in a March 6, 2014, email. "I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer's dealings with them."
The email was among the 5,000 pages of documents released last week by the bipartisan Senate Finance Committee regarding its investigation into the IRS targeting scandal.
Lerner, who retired after the scandal broke, told the same friend in a June 2014 email that an unflattering picture of her that had appeared before Congress kept showing up because "it serves their purpose of hate mongering to continue to use those images."
"I was never a political person - this whole fiasco has only made me lose all respect [for] politics and politicians. I am merely a pawn in their game to take over the Senate."
The committee's report mostly confirmed what has already been revealed about the scandal, firmly establishing that Lerner held and discussed left-wing views that pushed her to target more conservative groups than liberal groups, Politico said.
"I mean it's sort of like, just when you think you've heard it all, you get a thing like this," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Politico.
"She lied right from the start, trying to say it was front-line agents in the Cincinnati office" Jordan added. Lerner "blamed good civil servants. So now for her to come out and say, 'Oh they're dishonest and they're evil,' when in fact she tried to blame someone else for what she did and what she orchestrated, is, I guess, the height of hypocrisy."
The Senate report also revealed that Lerner once inquired about opening an audit into the compensation Bristol Palin, daughter of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, was receiving from a pro-abstinence charity, as HNGN previously reported.
