IRS Released Christine O'Donnell's Tax Records to Foes in State Government

Who promptly used them to attack her in the Senatorial election. Oh, and they also "erroneously" put a lien on her house the day she announced her candidacy.

Former GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell told her tax records were breached 

“Ms. O'Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.

For Ms. O'Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

Pretty shocking, when the IRS data is compromised by state employees who use it in a political vendetta against someone who threatens them with potentially smaller government.  You would think the Justice Department would take that kind of behavior seriously, and prosecute the IRS personnel who released the data to the state employee(s), and the state employee's who released it for political reasons.

Nope.

The Treasury Department’s tax watchdog has informed Mr. Grassley that at least four politicians or political donors have had their personal tax records improperly accessed through that system since 2006, including one case in which a willful violation of federal law was identified.

But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the offenders. Treasury officials have refused to give Mr. Grassley any specifics on the cases or to describe the disposition of Ms. O'Donnell’s case, claiming even people who improperly access tax records have an assumption of privacy under federal tax laws.

No doubt the Justice Department would claim that it's efforts to foment trouble in the Zimmerman trial left it without adequate resources to fight political corruption in the Justice Treasury Dept. well nearly everywhere that it was favoring the administration.