Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.
The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival.
“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.” […]
Eastman said an investigation in the civil lawsuit determined that someone gave NOM’s tax return and list of major donors to Boston-based gay rights activist Matthew Meisel. Email correspondence from Meisel revealed that he told a colleague of “a conduit” to obtain the marriage group’s confidential information.
Testifying under oath in a deposition as part of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Meisel invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself and declined to disclose the identity of his “conduit.”
To get at that fact, Eastman said, the National Organization for Marriage has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to grant immunity from prosecution to Meisel.
The $50,000 to be paid by the IRS represents actual damages NOM incurred responding to the illegal disclosure, not punitive damages, since the marriage group was unable to prove disclosure of the confidential records was deliberate after Meisel took the Fifth.
Anything and everything you do will be cataloged and used against you as the state and its minions deem appropriate.
Confirmed: There is not a smidgen of corruption. Couldn’t possibly be characterized that way.
Nope.
It’s pervasive.
We need to pass a law that says government employees are not allowed to plead the fifth concerning their official duties.
( I say this as a government employee and member of a union)
The rule of law stands or falls on the concept of duty. A law no one will obey or enforce is no law.
There has been absolutely no deterrent to Bureaucrat-Ahole wrong doing since tar and feathers. Something needs to give.
My mother-in-law just mentioned visiting Washington, D.C. I told her pitchfork rental is reasonable but you have to buy the torches.
No smidgen proved since Lerner’s hard-drive crashed 16 days before she said she first heard of the targeting. Of course that ignores all the activity that occurred starting as far back as March 2010 as far as we know so far.
Greetings:
Still living as I do, in the San Francisco Bay area, several soviets south of what the “locals” (who mostly seem to have been born elsewhere) don’t like you to refer to as “Frisco”, I’ve had a kind of catbird seat on the rise of what I refer to as the “New Jim Crow”. Basically, it refers to my assessment that activists/agitators of a Progressive bent are permitted to violate any number of laws or regualtions due to the hesitancy of ideologically aligned governments to hold them to legal or civil standards of behavior. Demonstrators have been allowed to become disruptors whose ideology and/or feelings are routinely given precedence over the rights of their fellow non-believing/non-feeling citizens.
What has much puzzled me is why those negatively effected by such dispensations don’t pursue civil remedies more often. In the case above, I would hope that the “Human” (short for Homosex ???) Rights Campaign would shortly find itself in civil court along with its otherwise employed but ideologically aligned fellow travelers. I may be guessing, but I’m believing that those “Rights” people/folks/confused may have a pile of bucks sitting around in an endowment somewhere.