IRS Harassment Alleged By Election Integrity Activist

The IRS and other agencies allegedly began targeting a Texas businesswoman after she became politically active particularly in the area of exposing vote fraud.

Catherine Engelbrecht, who operates a small manufacturing plant in the Houston area with her husband, never had any issues with the government until July 2010 when she applied for tax-exempt status for True the Vote. This is a grass-roots organization that seeks to root out vote fraud and train volunteer election monitors for polling places. She also sought the same status for another organization, the King Street Patriots.

Following the filing, the FBI apparently showed up several times, the IRS audited her personal and business returns and asked hundreds of intrusive questions about True the Vote, plus the ATF made a surprise inspection of her business as did OSHA. The Texas equivalent of the EPA also inspected the premises.

None of these investigations amounted to much of anything, but True the Vote still has not received its IRS tax exemption nearly three years later.

Like many Tea Party and related groups following the revelations of improper IRS conduct that emerged this month, she is suing the agency in federal court to get to the bottom of this in the discovery process.

Apparently at least two Democrat lawmakers also complained publicly about True the Vote. “Catherine now says that she ‘absolutely’ thinks that because she worked against voter fraud, the Left was irked and decided to target her.”

When asked by FNC’s Megyn Kelly (see embed below) about whether this was an attempt at intimidation, Engelbrecht said that “I don’t want to believe that but when you look at the time line of events, it’s almost impossible to make any other assumption … it’s statistically inconceivable that all that would happen in such short a time and that never happened before.”

Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who is representing True the Vote and other Tea Party and politically conservative organizations in their legal actions against the Internal Revenue Service, said this is “just the tip of the iceberg. . . . I think there’s definitely a Chicago-politics-style enemies list in this administration, and I think it permeates this branch of the federal government.”

Added Mitchell: “These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers.”

Watch Catherine Engelbrecht talk about her ordeal involving government harassment in an interview with Megyn Kelly:

Liberals and others who bitterly oppose photo ID to vote and other measures often toss around the term about voter suppression, but some observers have raised the implication of another form of voter suppression in the IRS misconduct scandal: “In the end, the IRS managed to put its thumb on the political scale by squelching political activity on the right — some groups report curtailing get-out-the-vote efforts, spending piles of money on legal fees or disbanding altogether in the face of IRS inquisitions. And all of it happened during a close and hotly contested presidential election where such mischievousness could make a real difference.”