A Republican lawmaker has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether former presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns were leaked by the Internal Revenue Service.
“Do you know if the IRS leaked tax information related to Mitt Romney during the Republican presidential primary general campaign?” Idaho Rep. Raúl Labrador asked Holder when he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee this week.
When Holder responded that he didn’t know, the website Talking Points Memo reported, Labrador asked him to investigate the topic. But the attorney general replied that he isn’t sure if he has a “predicate for it.”
The Daily Caller reported Thursday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s old accusations during the 2012 campaign that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years are popping back up now that it’s been revealed that the IRS has been targeting conservative groups and in some cases, reportedly leaking their tax information.
With that news, Republicans have asked this week whether it’s possible that the IRS could have leaked Romney’s tax information to Reid. At the time, Reid claimed he learned of Romney’s tax background from someone who had once been an investor in Romney’s firm, though he wouldn’t say who.
“We all wondered how Harry Reid had Mitt Romney’s taxes,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told TheDC. “The question is, will he call for a full investigation into the IRS?”
On Thursday, Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson told TheDC: “The answer to your question is no, the IRS did not leak Romney’s tax returns to Senator Reid.”
But on the House floor on Thursday, California Rep. Tom McClintock said there’s “reason to believe” the IRS leaked Romney’s tax information, The Hill reported.
“There’s now reason to believe that IRS officials leaked confidential tax information to top officials in the Obama campaign, and to liberal groups such as ProPublica and the Huffington Post, which may then have illegally published that information,” McClintock said.