“The IRS’s transmittal of this information to the FBI shows that the IRS took affirmative steps to provide sensitive evidentiary material to law-enforcement officials about the political speech of nonprofits,” said Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a letter to the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen demanding more information.
“At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials,” they said. “The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information.”
This information was found after the Justice Department turned over the database to the Oversight Committee in response to a subpoena.
The Justice Department says “it was informed by IRS officials that it contains legally protected taxpayer information that should not have ever been sent to the FBI and it now plans to return the full database to the IRS.”