The Obama administration is making a shambles of people’s constitutional rights. The non-partisan group Judicial Watch, through a series of lawsuits citing the Freedom of Information Act, has received numerous emails and other correspondence between Lois Lerner, formerly an Internal Revenue Service official, and high level Justice Department officials.

These communications, heavily redacted (censored, with the names of individuals blacked out), and with gaps in coverage, reveal that Lerner provided voluminous lists of individuals, conservative groups and other political enemies of the Obama White House, to Justice Department officials. This was at a time when Lerner had cited her Fifth Amendment right not to testify before a congressional committee investigating that very practice.

This was also at a time when the Justice Department was supposedly investigating the IRS to see whether any laws were broken in their efforts to deny tax exempt status to conservatives and other groups. Justice has provided no evidence that an investigation of the IRS was ever actually conducted.

Judicial Watch states that the Justice Department has denied, delayed or otherwise refused to provide much of the information requested under the FOIA.

Why should  the public be worried?

Is there any more insidious practice than for an administration of either party to be using the power of the IRS and the Justice Department to intimidate or punish persons or groups who oppose the administration?

The practice smacks of the tactics of a dictatorship.

It is a terrible precedent to set for following administrations.

Richard Grover, Mason Township