The IRS scandal — which Ross Kamisky covers today — is rapidly metastasizing into a problem much larger than the reported targeting of Tea Party groups. Now a conservative pro-family group has added its own case to the evidence that the agency was targeting Obama’s enemies:
Another conservative organization is demanding an explanation from the Internal Revenue Service (IRC) in the wake of last week’s admission that the federal agency targeted Tea Party groups for selective scrutiny. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a non-profit group that has helped lead national opposition to same-sex marriage, said Monday that its confidential tax information was leaked by the IRS last year to a liberal pro-gay group.
“There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,” NOM president Brian Brown said in a statement on the group’s Web site. “The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.”
NOM officials say the pro-gay group Human Rights Campaign, whose president Joseph Solmonese was co-chair of Obama’s re-election campaign, got the confidential information from someone at the IRS and then handed it over to the Huffington Post, whose founder is a wealthy ally of Democrats.
This raises the question: What did Arianna Huffington know, and when did she know it?