Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner nearly four years ago settled a lawsuit that accused her of sabotaging a group of organizations' tax-exempt status due to their political views.
Now, the same group is taking Lerner back to court seeking an order to release her testimony, which has been kept secret by the court since the settlement. The petitioners argued that the public is entitled to know the full breadth of Lerner's improprieties while at the IRS.
"By failing to rule on pending motions regarding the sealing of certain court records for over three years, the District Court has shielded records of significant public interest from the public eye without issuing an order containing the required findings to do so," the organizations said in a court filing with the Sixth District Court of Appeals. "The court’s failure or refusal to render the required findings prevents petitioners from obtaining the relief they seek and warrants the exercise of this court’s mandamus authority."
The organizations asked the court to issue a writ of mandamus, unsealing the records at issue by vacating the District Court’s temporary protective order and denying the defendants’ motion to seal the documents.
"The public is entitled to know how Lerner and [Holly] Paz, acting in their official capacity as IRS employees, carried out their duties and to judge for itself the propriety of their actions," the court filing said. "Actual or alleged misconduct by a government official is typically going to be embarrassing for that official, especially when the allegations are substantiated, but that embarrassment does not justify shielding the official from public scrutiny."
Lerner, then-director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, in 2013 emerged as the public face of a scandal that became known as the IRS targeting controversy, NPR reported. A group of organizations, headlined by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, sued Lerner and the IRS after an IRS official admitted that the agency had been improperly holding up the group's tax-exempt status and subjecting them to undue scrutiny based on their political views.
The Washington Post in fall 2017 reported that the Department of Justice had reached settlement terms in two separate lawsuits with the organizations, accusing Lerner and the IRS of improper scrutiny. Included in the settlement was an apology from the IRS and a judge's declaration that "it was illegal to unevenly apply tax laws based on an organization’s name or particular political viewpoint."
As part of the settlement agreement, Lerner was subjected to a deposition. She pushed for U.S. District Judge Michael Barrett to keep her testimony under seal, according to Forbes. The plaintiffs, including the NorCal Tea Party Patriots and their attorney, Edward Greim, opposed keeping Lerner's deposition secret.
A new court filing by Greim and NorCal renewed the push to unseal Lerner's testimony, nearly four years after the previous settlement and almost a decade after the IRS scandal became public.
