Recently released documents show the US Department of Justice was well aware of the Internal Revenue Service’s railroading of advocacy groups as they applied for nonprofit status, specifically those with Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street affiliations. Not only did law-enforcement officials know about the ideological targeting, which began in 2010, they had two years to address the problem before it became known to the public.

The two rounds of documents obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 294 and 105 pages, are the product of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Judicial Watch. The self-described conservative organization “promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law,” and its president, Tom Fitton, had choice words for federal officials.

“These new smoking-gun documents show [the] Obama FBI and Justice Department had plenty of evidence suggesting illegal targeting, perjury, and obstruction of justice… [They] collaborated with … Lois Lerner and the IRS to try to prosecute and jail Barack Obama’s political opponents.… [Then] the resulting compromised investigation looked the other way when it came to Obama’s IRS criminality.”

Lois Lerner, a former director with the IRS, did resign over her leadership of the Exempt Organizations Unit in Cincinnati, where the wrongdoing took place. However, there has not been a single criminal charge in response to the delayed or rejected approvals of at least 466 organizations.

In 2015, Justice Department officials stated that they had uncovered “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment, and institutional inertia.” However, in their words, “poor management is not a crime.”

That explanation has not squared well with many people, including elected representatives, who saw these acts as methodical and far beyond mere negligence. The “be on the lookout” (BOLO) lists, which acted as a filter, singled out groups with the words “patriot” and “liberty” in their names, along with “9-12,” which meant groups under an umbrella led by paleoconservative media-personality Glenn Beck.

A small minority of the groups did have “occupy” in their names. However, the attorney representing the NorCal Tea Party and leading a class-action lawsuit against the IRS, believes the targeting of progressives most likely came later, to make their actions appear non-political.

Further, attempts to find out who instigated the strategy — presumably high-level officials — have bumped into roadblocks, and thus provoked a second round of allegations directed at the IRS. That includes “lost” emails, lying to Congress, and deliberate efforts to evade public scrutiny.

The latest revelations, released on July 27 and August 1, now add a third layer: targeting, a cover up, and law enforcement turning a blind eye. That begs the question, does anyone still believe the targeting was mere negligence, an unintentional slip-up?

That story line of no ulterior motives can no longer hold water. Judicial Watch’s latter of the two releases details FBI interviews with IRS employees working in the Exempt Organizations Unit. These individuals, Judicial Watch explains, reveal a deliberate and orchestrated policy of “burying conservative groups’ tax exemption applications in bureaucratic delays.”

Any applications with Tea Party in the name, for example, went straight to “Group 7822” for an extended inventory — a de facto purgatory. Two group managers working in Cincinnati decried a lack of precedent in such handling, and they laid the blame for delays squarely on the directions of the IRS’s Washington, DC, headquarters. In fact, they described the DC office as a “black hole” and explained that the applications of organizations caught by the BOLO list could not be closed by the local screeners/classifiers.

The kicker is the timing of all this, and it is not lost on Fitton in the Judicial Watch press release: “These new [FBI interviews] reveal for the first time just how carefully orchestrated the IRS program for silencing opposition to Obama’s reelection actually was.” Yes, the targeting led right into President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection.

Whether these new revelations will garner sufficient momentum to bring criminal charges remains to be seen. In terms of the harm to the organizations and their opportunities to engage in activism, the damage is already done.

One clear outcome should be a hit to whatever good faith the IRS might have as an institution that flies above politics. Further, the lack of swift response and willingness to bring charges against IRS officials demonstrates the problem of who will police the police — in this case, interconnected federal agencies.

That suggests the need for vastly greater transparency, clarity of approval criteria, and established wait times for processing. Ideally, a restructuring of the Exempt Organizations Unit could make it more accountable to congressional oversight.

Let us know what you think in the comments below.