New Trump Special Counsel Met with IRS' Lois Lerner on Targeting Tea Party Groups

The special counsel Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Friday to investigate former President Donald Trump, Jack Smith, formerly ran the Justice Department unit that worked with the IRS to target conservative non-profits during the 2010 Tea Party movement.

Jack Smith, the new special counsel, is tasked with investigating Trump's role in the Jan. 6 protests as well as classified documents that were stored at Mar-a-Lago. But his connections to a well-known case of government actors targeting conservatives and suppressing conservative political activism raises questions about his neutrality.

In 2014, the House Oversight Committee found that Smith was responsible for setting up a meeting with infamous IRS employee Lois Lerner, ringleader of the effort to intentionally delay the non-profit status applications for any groups with conservative sounding names.

"The Oversight Committee obtained testimony from a DOJ official named Richard Pilger in 2014 that showed Smith set up a meeting with Lerner to discuss more aggressive enforcement of regulations prohibiting tax-exempt groups from engaging in politics in the aftermath of the landmark Citizens United free speech Supreme Court case," reports JustTheNews.com, which was the first outlet to report on Smith's connection to the tea party targeting scandal.