All of the witnesses who testified at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing, this morning, were impressive and compelling, but perhaps the most impressive, passionate and articulate was the National Organization For Marriage’s John Eastman who is a professor of law.

In his response to Congressman Price’s query about the publishing of names of his organization’s donors, he took the opportunity to lash out at a couple of the Democrat hacks on the Committee – publicly humiliating them to great applause.

Eastman also charged that he had proof that the list of NOM’s donors was given to the gay rights group by the IRS:…

Eastman testified Tuesday alongside several Tea Party activists who all claim they were targeted by the IRS. The Tea Party groups offered a first-hand account of how the IRS singled them out when they applied for tax-exempt status, asking them onerous questions and dragging out their application process. But Eastman shed light on another potential controversy involving the IRS — the unauthorized disclosure of tax document information. He recalled how information on their donors was leaked last year and published on the website of the Human Rights Campaign, which Eastman described as their “principal political opponent” on the marriage issue. The documents showed Mitt Romney’s political committee as a donor. Asked by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., if he had “proof” that the IRS leaked that material, Eastman said that he did. Eastman explained that while some information was redacted in the posted version, his group’s “forensic” specialists were able to strip layers from the document and found “the original document that was posted there had originated from within the IRS.” He said the version had “internal IRS stamps,” which “only exist within the IRS.” Eastman added: “You can imagine our shock and disgust over this. … We jealously guard our donors.” He later alleged the information was “deliberately” provided to their opponents. “If that’s inadvertent, the word no longer means anything,” he said, claiming his group has been “stonewalled” in its request for an investigation.

MORE:

Professor John Eastman Talks to Dennis Prager About the Felonious Actions Taken by the IRS:

Eastman’s interview starts at 6:50.

A couple of bombshells, here…..

Eastman said while it was possible that the HRC got their hands on the donor list and tax info through less nefarious means, the most likely scenario is that someone within the IRS who is against the cause of traditional marriage leaked the info to their political opponent so that they could in punish, harass and intimidate those people in order to silence their opposition.

“A couple of other pieces to this that I think is extremely important. The Human Rights Campaign has been trying for a long time to get our donor list so they could do just that to our donors. And the president of the HRC, Joe Solmonese had just recently become a National Co-Chair of the Obama Re-election Campaign.”

That story was broken a couple of weeks ago by Matthew Boyle at Big Government.

Both the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and HRC described the leak as coming from a “whistleblower.” The Huffington Post used the document to write a story questioning former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s support for traditional marriage. The document showed Romney donated $10,000 to NOM. HRC went a step further than the Huffington Post in its criticism of Romney and accused him of using “racially divisive tactics” in a press release. Solmonese, then still the HRC’s president, said in the release he felt Romney’s “funding of a hate-filled campaign designed to drive a wedge between Americans is beyond despicable.” “Not only has Romney signed NOM’s radical marriage pledge, now we know he’s one of the donors that NOM has been so desperate to keep secret all these years,” Solmonese added. Solmonese resigned his position at HRC the next day and took up a position as an Obama campaign co-chair. He had announced the then-pending resignation from HRC the previous autumn. NOM announced Tuesday that it will sue the IRS for this alleged leak. Under immense political pressure, Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation into the IRS’s actions. Congress will conduct ts own investigation. In early April 2012, NOM published documents which it said showed this leaked confidential information did not come from a “whistleblower” but “came directly from the Internal Revenue Service and was provided to NOM’s political opponents, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).”

Eastman said in the interview with Prager that NOM had asked for an investigation from the Treasury Dept and the DOJ and the initial investigation actually focused on NOM itself to see if someone internally had leaked the donor list to HRC, (the so-called whistle-blower theory) and when that was not fruitful, it was the last they heard about it for a year. They’ve filed a series of FOIA requests to find out what was going on with the investigation, and they were stonewalled. In the he latest stonewall, the IRS said that “the very statutes that prohibits IRS officials from disclosing your tax returns prohibits us from telling you whether we’ve identified the culprit because that’s a taxpayer, too so we can’t identify him.”

Unbelievable.

NOM president Brian Brown argued in that April 2012 release that the leak was made to benefit President Obama’s re-election campaign against Romney, his GOP challenger. “The American people are entitled to know how a confidential tax return containing private donor information filed exclusively with the Internal Revenue Service has been given to our political opponents whose leader also happens to be co-chairing President Obama’s reelection committee,” Brown said. “It is shocking that a political ally of President Obama’s would come to possess and then publicly release a confidential tax return that came directly from the Internal Revenue Service,” he declared. “We demand to know who is responsible for this criminal act and what the Administration is going to do to get to the bottom of it.”

Joe Solmonese needs to be subpoenaed.

Linked by Gay Patriot and Powerline, thanks!