ACLJ Chief Counsel Jay Sekulow Testifying Before Congressional Roundtable on Biden IRS Targeting of Christians

By 

Jay Sekulow

|
September 24, 2021

President Biden is once again weaponizing the IRS to target YOU.

This time I am personally fighting back in Congress.

On Wednesday, September 29, I will be testifying at a congressional roundtable before Members of the House Ways and Means Committee regarding the IRS targeting of Christians and conservatives. The meeting, hosted by Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member  Kevin Brady of Texas and Oversight Subcommittee Ranking Member Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, , is entitled “Weaponization of the IRS: A Sordid History and the Need for Taxpayer Protections.

As stated on the House Ways and Means Committee website:

The meeting will highlight the efforts of congressional Democrats to nearly double the size of the IRS with a massive funding increase while doing nothing to address the weaponization of the IRS, including the massive, criminal leak of taxpayer information to ProPublica in June of this year.

Republicans will discuss their alternative approach to improving the IRS while protecting taxpayers in the process.

As we recently told you, the IRS Deep State initially rejected a Christian group’s tax-exempt status because, “The bible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates. This disqualifies you from exemption.”

It’s actually mind-boggling that someone at the IRS would put that in writing. And it wasn’t simply some low-level employee who didn’t know any better. The rejection letter came directly from the person who took former Director Lois Lerner’s old job as the head of the tax-exempt division of the IRS.

Thankfully, this time the IRS got caught and was forced to reverse their decision by our good friends at First Liberty Institute, who will be testifying along with me. As we previously explained, while President Biden’s IRS got caught red-handed this time, the fact of the matter is:

[T]hey still did it. We’ve seen how this plays out. When we took on a four-year legal battle on behalf of 41 conservative organizations that were targeted by the IRS, it started with one group too. If the IRS does it once, they will do it again. We are prepared for this and are working on a FOIA request to find out who came up with this legend and what other groups have been targeted? We are not going to let them get away with this.

In response, we immediately filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Biden IRS demanding all records pertaining to the decision to deny the request; but as is becoming typical of the Biden Administration, our FOIA request has been ignored.

As we recently told you, we were left with no other choice but to file a major lawsuit against the Biden Administration – our EIGHTH suit against this Administration to date – over the Biden IRS’s blatant targeting of Christians. If the Biden team is unwilling to cooperate with us, comply with the law, and explain their indefensible decision, we will rely on a federal court to hold them accountable.

What’s truly incomprehensible is that we’ve been down this road before, battling deliberate discrimination against conservatives and Christians by the IRS. We told you years ago how under the Obama-Biden Administration, the IRS was willfully targeting conservative groups such as the Tea Party. It was unquestionable that the IRS acted unjustly and unconstitutionally; Lois Lerner even issued her so-called apology over it. Yet it’s happening again.

We not only exposed this intentional targeting of conservatives in federal court and won the case, but we forced the IRS to issue a formal apology to the groups it discriminated against. In fact, we have a consent decree from the IRS that it would never do this again, and it’s still enforceable to this day. Now it appears whatever lesson they should have learned that time has been forgotten, or disregarded, under the Biden Administration. Someone is giving the order to discriminate against conservatives and Christians. Between our FOIA and our lawsuit, we hope to find out just who it is.

But now we have the opportunity to take this egregious discrimination directly to Congress and hopefully nip it in the bud now before it spirals out of control yet again. Rest assured, we will be implementing the same successful strategy we used the last time we exposed and defeated the IRS in court.

As always, the ACLJ will continue to keep you updated on this case. We are hopeful that shining a light on this renewed targeting in Congress will force the Biden IRS to change course on its current strategy of targeting Christians.

Right now, as I prepare to testify before Congress at this roundtable in JUST DAYS, we urgently need your voice. Sign our petition.

Watch the congressional roundtable live below LIVE at 11:00 am ET September 29th.