Christine O’Donnell Claims IRS Illegally Breached Tax Records

Christine O’Donnell, former Delaware Tea Party candidate, has claimed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) illegally breached her tax records in 2010.

The revelation came to O’Donnell by way of Dennis Martel, a US Treasury Department agent, who passed along the warning in January, O’Donnell said in comments to the Washington Times.

O’Donnell said that she and the Senate investigators, who have tried to help, have run in to “a wall of silence, leaving more questions than answers about whether abuses of the IRS system extend to private individuals and not just the tax-exempt groups already identified as victims,” the Washington Times report noted.

“I don’t know. And I’d like to know,” O’Donnell said. “Because whether it’s one, eight or 80 [cases], it’s an abuse of power at the IRS. It’s using the IRS as a political weapon, and that shouldn’t be done.”

Christine O’Donnell shocked Republican Michael Castle in a primary before losing to Democrat Chris Coons in a 2010 bid for Vice President Joe Biden’s former US Senate seat.

Newsmax noted that the data breach allegedly occurred on March 9, 2010, the same day that O’Donnell announced her candidacy for the Republican primary.

The site also stated that on the same day, “a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers, an issue made public in the media, even though she no longer owned it. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.”

Now it’s here that we should probably tell you that The Washington Times and Newsmax both have reputations as conservative leaning web news outlets.

We would have brought you some counterpoint on this, except that at the moment, no other national news sites are reporting on it.

Do a search for “Christine O’Donnell” on Google News, and the last mention of her from CNN comes from an August 2011 incident in which she marched off the set of Piers Morgan Tonight over questions about gay marriage.

Yes, the media was very much willing to ride with that one:

Whatever happened, the IRS is reportedly staying silent.

US Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and member of the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees, claims to have been “stonewalled” in his attempt to investigate. Grassley said the IRS told him “it had a duty to protect the privacy of its officials.”

“A taxpayer should be able to know whether someone breached his or her confidentiality, whether any investigation resulted, and the outcome of that investigation,” Grassley said. “I look forward to whether the Justice Department sheds any light on its decision not to prosecute what the inspector general called inappropriate and, in one case, willfully inappropriate access to taxpayer records.”

Given the recent IRS tax scandal in which Tea Party groups were unfairly targeted, we’ve got to admit: the agency’s showing a lot of nerve playing mum with another potential data breach.

But then, they’ve had a good teacher.

Do you think the IRS unfairly targeted the tax records of Christine O’Donnell, or are these just wild Tea Party accusations?

[Image via Gage Skidmore / Flickr Creative Commons]