AZKC wrote:
The media have ignored the IRS targeting of conservative groups, but the courts haven’t. On Tuesday the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals tore into the agency’s obstructionist conduct and ruled that the IRS must turn over the spreadsheets it created on the targeted groups.

In 2013 the NorCal Tea Party Patriots filed a class-action suit on behalf of groups whose applications were slow-rolled by the agency. To get the names of IRS workers involved in the targeting, plaintiffs sought access to files the IRS kept on the targeted groups. The Justice Department argued the files are protected by Section 6103 of the U.S. code, which was intended to protect taxpayers by assuring confidential returns.

Nice try. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Raymond Kethledge dismantled that argument and excoriated the IRS for stonewalling during discovery. Charges that an executive agency targeted citizens for their political views are “among the most serious allegations a federal court can address,” he writes. In this case, he added, they are “substantial” and based on a report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Equally appalling is the agency’s effort to obstruct the legal process. “[I]n this lawsuit the IRS has only compounded the conduct that gave rise to it,” Judge Kethledge wrote, calling the IRS response “one of continuous resistance.” He added: “The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has not complied with the court’s orders.”

Readers may remember that last autumn District Court Judge Susan Dlott said her “impression is the government probably did something wrong in this case.” Determining liability is a legal question, she continued, but “the government is doing everything it possibly can to make this as complicated as it possibly can, to last as long as it possibly can, so that by the time there is a result, nobody is going to care except the plaintiffs.”

The IRS claimed Section 6103 protects “names and other identifying information” of applicants for tax-exempt status, but none of that protection applies to groups whose applications are approved, the court noted. Nor does it comply with the statute’s definition of protected taxpayer identity, so “as a matter of elementary statutory interpretation, the IRS’s assertion that applicant names are return information is meritless.” Ouch.

Section 6103, the court wrote, “does not entitle the IRS to keep secret (in the name of ‘taxpayer privacy,’ no less) every internal IRS document that reveals IRS mistreatment of a taxpayer or applicant organization—in this case or future ones. Section 6103 was enacted to protect taxpayers from the IRS, not the IRS from taxpayers.”

Unless it appeals to the Supreme Court, the IRS now has seven days to turn over the lists to the law firm representing the tax-exempt groups, Graves Garrett in Kansas City. Perhaps we’ll now see what the IRS and Justice Department have worked so hard to hide.

Source: WSJ

Yet another article that fails to back up the original headline or your claims.

Where does it say that conservative groups were singled out for this wrongdoing?