This morning, The Colorado Observer broke the story that liberal U.S. Senator Mark Udall has received $13,000 in donations from the National Treasury Employees Union, the union the represents IRS employees.
The IRS is accused of targeting the President’s political opponents in a scandal with far-reaching implications. The latest is that the IRS supposedly “lost” emails between Lois Lerner and, well, everybody due to a “computer crash”. Isn’t that convenient? From TCO:
“This is just another instance of Mark Udall putting his own political career above the well-being of Coloradans. Sen. Udall not only refuses to say whether he will return the contributions from the IRS union, but he refuses to demand additional information from President Obama and the IRS about this deeply concerning scandal,” said [Brook] Hougesen, [NRSC press secretary].
This IRS scandal isn’t just a national, far-removed issue. Beyond Udall’s silence on the issue, Colorado’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Bennet, head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was named in an ethics complaint earlier this month. From our related post:
This is an issue that we have been harping on for at least a year. On May 14th, we published a letter that Bennet wrote to IRS Commissioner Shulman and a press release from his office specifically calling out conservative operative Karl Rove:
“For instance, long-time partisan operative Karl Rove is a senior official behind a 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ charity, yet it’s common knowledge that his organization exists to elect and defeat specific political candidates. Elections operations such as Mr. Rove’s should not be allowed to masquerade as charities to take advantage of their tax exempt status and hide their donors from the public. It’s the IRS’s job to enforce the tax code and make sure that ‘social welfare’ organizations are what they say they are.”
Is this just another instance of “buying” Udall’s support? Radical environmentalist Tom $teyer did it with the Keystone vote, so why shouldn’t the IRS union do it with this huge (potentially presidency-ending) scandal? The real question is who else has Udall in their pockets?