Judicial Watch (JW) has found documents that show that a McCain staffer had urged Lois Lerner to use litigation and whatever means necessary to bankrupt nonprofits.
There is no proof that McCain knew about the staffer’s actions but McCain’s butt was chaffed over SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling that effectively killed McCain-Feingold. Just ten days after that exchange, Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had discriminated against conservative nonprofits.
Via Judicial Watch:
Judicial Watch today released newly obtained internal IRS documents, including material revealing that Sen. John McCain’s former staff director and chief counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner, urged top IRS officials, including then-director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner, to “audit so many that it becomes financially ruinous.” Kerner was appointed by President Trump as Special Counsel for the United States Office of Special Counsel.
The explosive exchange was contained in notes taken by IRS employees at an April 30, 2013, meeting between Kerner, Lerner, and other high-ranking IRS officials. Just ten days following the meeting, former IRS director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner admitted that the IRS had a policy of improperly and deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from conservative non-profit groups.
Lerner and other IRS officials met with select top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a “marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Senator McCain had been the chief sponsor of the McCain-Feingold Act and called the Citizens United decision, which overturned portions of the Act, one of the “worst decisions I have ever seen.”
It would not surprise me to find out that John Mccain not only knew what Kerner was doing but that it was done at his bidding, although there is no evidence of that at this time.