Politics

Conservative Calls Grow For IRS To Stop Auditing Breitbart News

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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Americans For Tax Reform president Grover Norquist has joined Sen. Ted Cruz in questioning the Internal Revenue Service’s  audit of the conservative Breitbart News website.

“It has come to my attention this week that the Internal Revenue Service is subjecting Breitbart News Network, LLC to a tax audit.  This is deeply disturbing to me,” Norquist wrote in a letter Friday to IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

Koskinen, who recently told Congress that his agency follows the law “wherever we can,” is battling a scandal centered on the IRS’ political targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and destruction of numerous employees’ email records. (RELATED: How To Destroy A Hard Drive: IRS Edition).

The IRS audited Breitbart’s financial information from 2012, when the IRS was actively targeting conservatives.

“First, I served as a member of the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service,” Norquist wrote. “We saw at the time an agency that was out of control.  Our report helped lead to the first ‘Taxpayer Bill of Rights’ in the late 1990s.  Unfortunately, history has shown that the problems we saw then have only gotten worse over time.  This political targeting of Breitbart is further evidence of this.”

Sen. Cruz wrote his own letter to Koskinen this week “to express deep concern” over the audit.

“This media audit, coupled with the recent proposal of 49 Senate Democrats to amend the Constitution to give Congress plenary power to regulate political speech, paints a disturbing picture of a coordinated assault on the First Amendment,” Cruz wrote.

Cruz also laid out a series of questions for Koskinen, asking how many other news organizations are being audited and whether the IRS’ actions could “silence the press.”

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