This detail about unauthorized sharing by US attorney Dunnica Lampton, of the income tax returns belonging to a prosecution target, is intriguing:
Justice Department investigating two US Attorneys for political prosecution, June 5, 2008,
Raw Story .....
Leura Canary, the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Dunnica Lampton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi , are under investigation. Their offices are also being probed.
.....
Additional information about Dunnica Lampton’s case, however, was provided by two attorneys close to the OPR investigation. According to both sources, Lampton is alleged have shared the confidential income tax returns of a target of one of his prosecutions with “non-authorized” individuals. Neither source would provide the name of the person whose income tax returns were shared or with whom Lampton shared the private information of his target and in what context.
The alleged misuse of private tax information would make the probe into Lampton a criminal investigation and likely under the purview of the DOJ Inspector General's office, with OPR as part of a joint investigation.
.....
I remembered back to
this, from 2004:
From the
NY Times, November 22, 2004:
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 - Democratic leaders and senators from both parties expressed outrage on Sunday about an obscure provision in the huge end-of-session spending bill that would allow the chairmen of the Appropriations Committees and their staff assistants to examine Americans' income tax returns.
Republican leaders said that their motives had been misread and that there was never any intention to invade the privacy of taxpayers. They promised that the provision would be deleted from the bill in a special session on Wednesday before the spending measure, which cleared Congress on Saturday night, was sent to President Bush for his signature.
Representative Ernest Istook, Republican of Oklahoma, who was responsible for the insertion of the tax provision in the 3,000-page, $388 billion legislation that provides financing for most of the government, issued a statement on Sunday saying that the language had actually been drafted by the Internal Revenue Service and that "nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized." Mr. Istook is chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that has authority over the I.R.S. budget.
John D. Scofield, the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said that the purpose of the provision was to allow investigators for the top lawmakers responsible for financing the I.R.S. to have access to that agency's offices around the country and tax records so they could examine how the money was being spent. There was never any desire to look at anyone's tax returns, he said.
.....
Interestingly, on February 28, 2006, Sam Seder reported that this incendiary provision was quietly slipped back into the budget bill.Back-door provisions slipped into budget bills to open up taxpayer records under the innocent guise of *examining how IRS money was spent.*
I DON'T THINK SO.
It appears that this stealth provision occurred in the same relative time period as the alleged unauthorized sharing by Dunnica Lampton of the tax returns of one of his *targets* of prosecution.
Is anyone working on this angle?
More abuse of power by Republicans during that time period:
IRS abuse by vicious and vindictive Republicans is a long-standing
pattern:
Nonprofit: IRS audit spurred by DeLay ally was abuse, February 28, 2006
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