At the height of the scandal over the IRS’ handling of political nonprofits, Lois Lerner privately let loose at her Republican tormentors, saying she invoked the Fifth Amendment because they had been “evil and dishonest” and accusing them of “hate mongering.”

A POLITICO examination of thousands of pages of emails and other material recently released by the Senate Finance Committee found previously unreported comments from Lerner, the central figure in the controversy, on everything from the inability of career IRS agents to handle “the sensitive stuff” to her views on the fiscal cliff.


When she was under investigation by Congress, she offered a blistering critique of her inquisitors. In a March 6, 2014, email, Lerner told a friend: “They called me back to testify on the IRS ‘scandal,’ and I too[k] the 5th again because they had been so evil and dishonest in my lawyer’s dealings with them.”

In June 2014, Lerner told the same friend that an unflattering picture of her appearing before Congress kept surfacing because “it serves their purposes 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 thousands of pages released in the latest congressional probe of the IRS offer a look behind the scenes at the agency leading up to the nonprofit targeting scandal and some of Lerner’s later observations on it, even if the report didn’t do much to move the needle on partisan views of the debacle.

Overall, the Finance Committee’s investigation mostly confirmed what was already known about the scandal, though it added new detail and more supporting evidence than any previous investigation. It firmly established that Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations unit, held and discussed liberal views. And it confirmed that more conservative than liberal groups ended up in the IRS’ cross hairs. Whether the first led to the second is the crux of the difference between Republican and Democratic conclusions over the broader investigation.

Republican lawmakers heaped more scorn on Lerner in response to her unflattering portrait of them.

“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 of Ohio said in an interview with POLITICO. Jordan is a member of the House Oversight Committee, which twice called Lerner up to the Hill to testify.

“She lied right from the start, trying to say it was front-line agents in the Cincinnati office” who targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they sought tax-exempt status, Jordan said. She “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.”

Rep. Peter Roskam of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee, called the emails “a sad attempt by Lois Lerner to deflect blame for her egregious abuse of power. The only victims in this scenario are the Americans who were unfairly targeted by the IRS for their personal religious and political beliefs. … As for Ms. Lerner, she has only herself to blame for her conduct.”

Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor, on Wednesday indicated that his client’s March 2014 email was likely referring to remarks by Rep. Darrell Issa of California, then the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, that lawmakers had reached an agreement for her to testify without immunity. Taylor said at the time that no such agreement had been reached.

The Finance Committee report adds meat to the bones of some issues that had only been cursorily addressed before. For instance, both majority and minority staff took issue with the IRS’ “deficient” response to a 2010 Freedom of Information Act request.

“If this information had been made public in 2010 pursuant to a lawful FOIA request, the IRS’ treatment of applications received from Tea Party organizations may have been exposed to the public in 2010” instead of letting applications “fester for years,” the bipartisan section of the report states.

The roughly 5,000-page appendix includes successive drafts of the much-discussed Be On the Lookout list, a protracted discussion of how to handle successors to the low-income housing group ACORN, and examples of the exhaustive information requests the IRS sent to various groups. It also includes various press reports on the agency; in some cases they were emailed around the IRS.

The documents add more insight into Lerner’s thoughts on sensitive issues before the scandal exploded, including her frustration that Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-backed group, wasn’t being audited despite repeated referrals.

Lois Lerner pauses during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, May 22, 2013. | AP Photo

“I don’t know where we go with this — as I’ve told you before — I don’t think your guys get it and the way they look at these cases is going to bite us some day,” Lerner wrote to Nan Downing, the manager of Exempt Organization Examinations, on Jan. 4, 2013.

The same day, Lerner suggested to an IRS adviser that examinations agents shouldn’t handle political cases.

“I have said from day one that Exam is not capable of dealing with the political stuff — or much of the sensitive stuff — they don’t get the issues,” Lerner wrote. “We always feel safer because Exam decisions are made by ‘career IRS agents.’ I actually think they make poor decisions — if it isn’t a straightforward tax violation — they don’t have a clue and just non-select the referral.”

Some other nuggets are more trivial: emails that reveal glimpses of Lerner’s personal views, for example.

A few of the emails appear to have been included for little reason other than spite, such as an exchange with a friend reminiscing about a college romance, or a thread with her husband where he says he wants to vote for a “socialist-labor candidate.”

But others show that Lerner, who said in one email that she “was never a political person,” was at points seized by passionate fury over politics. On Dec. 24, 2012, she wrote, “We’re in Ohio for the holiday and waiting to go over the fiscal cliff! I truly believe this country is out of its head with ridiculousness! We really need to split in two — we are so polarized that we can’t do anything constructive.”

Because the bipartisan investigation by Senate Finance did not produce a smoking gun, it did little to shift lawmakers’ competing views of what happened.

Republicans see a clear link between Lerner’s comments and the agency’s actions; Democrats don’t. The lack of ironclad proof that agents deliberately targeted groups because of political bias — or that they didn’t — means neither party can separate itself from the narrative it has held to for two years.