[NATIONALREVIEW] The war between Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and the committee's ranking member, Elijah Cummings
...Representative-for-life from Maryland, representing half of Baltimore City, which makes his district ultra-safe, and most of Howard County, which is out-populated by the city. Cummings' politix are so liberal they're tedious...
, rages on.
Issa on Wednesday accused the Maryland Democrat of colluding with the Internal Revenue Service in its targeting of the conservative nonprofit group True the Vote, whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said she received multiple letters from Cummings in 2012 and personal visits from the IRS and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives. Engelbrecht's True the Vote is one of the many conservative groups that claims to have been improperly targeted by the IRS while it scrutinized the applications of tea-party groups.
In a letter signed by his five subcommittee chairmen, Issa raised the possibility that Cummings coordinated with the IRS, "surreptitiously" contacting the agency to request information about True the Vote.
E-mails unearthed in the course of Issa's investigation into the IRS's inappropriate targeting of right-leaning groups show that in January 2013, a member of Cummings's staff contacted the IRS asking for any publicly available information on True the Vote. The matter was discussed by IRS officials that included Lois Lerner, the former exempt-organizations chief who retired in the wake of the targeting scandal. One of Lerner's deputies, Holly Paz, subsequently sent the organization's 990 forms to Cummings and his staff -- not an illegal disclosure of taxpayer information, though sources say the exchange of such information was not routine. 
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