The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) filed suit against the federal government and the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, claiming it had “irrefutable proof” someone within the agency illegally leaked the conservative organization’s confidential tax returns to its ideological opponents last year.
NOM is seeking damages from the disclosure, as well as to overturn a statute shielding the IRS from disclosing any information about the incident, according to a complaintfiled by the Act Right Legal Foundation on behalf of NOM in the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) obtained the NOM’s 2008 tax returns in February 2012, which contained an unredacted list of donors, including presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
The president of the HRC became a national co-chair for the Obama reelection campaign in 2012 a day later.
NOM Chairman John Eastman said the group was able to remove redaction layers from the PDF documents that were leaked, showing that they came from within the IRS. The unauthorized disclosure of tax information is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
No criminal charges have been filed after 18 months. An internal investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was conducted, but the results were never released.
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