Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, says he needs to know who has been ordering the Internal Revenue Service attacks on conservative organizations.
“The main point here is this: Someone is giving out marching orders for these agencies and these employees to do these things. The question is, who is giving out the marching orders?’ Poe said in an interview with WND.
The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, Lois Lerner, appeared before a U.S. House committee Wednesday but refused to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Poe is particularly concerned about IRS targeting of the King Street Patriots, a tea party group founded in Houston by Catherine Engelbrecht. The congressman compared the IRS scandal to the Fast and Furious gun-tracing scandal: “Who is the person who decided to smuggle guns to Mexico? We still don’t know.”
Poe emphasized that the IRS scandal doesn’t amount to “some rogue employee” acting on his own.
“Someone is giving these directives. ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me.’ Everyone denies culpability and blames lower-level employees. But someone issued these orders, and we need to find who that is, and they need to go to jail.”
After it was discovered that state agencies with federal funding were abused to target Engelbrecht, Poe sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. He also challenged Holder in his capacity as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
“When I told Attorney General Holder before committee to appoint a special prosecutor to look into these issues, including the possible misuse of Texas state agencies, he told me that he would ‘mark me down as not a fan of government.’”
Poe refers to the IRS activity as “Soviet-style intimidation” and says that Holder should recuse himself immediately. “Let a special prosecutor come in here and get to the bottom of this Soviet-style intimidation of taxpayers,” said Poe.
When asked why ignorance was seemingly accepted as a legitimate excuse for crimes committed by the federal government, Poe said Holder “should not get a pass.”
“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this. We shouldn’t have a goal except to find out what happened. Find out who did it. Crimes were committed. People who targeted a specific American for their political philosophy – this is not what we are about in America,” he said.
