"Congressman Cummings took it upon himself—and I think that
I was not representing True the Vote in that particular proceeding,
but there were a series of letters sent to True the Vote from Congressman
Cummings, which purported to be on behalf of the committee,
using the franking privilege, and which sought to delve into
the inner workings of True the Vote and to make allegations about
True the Vote that were not true, demanding materials, demanding
information, demanding that Catherine Engelbrecht and representative's
of True the Vote make themselves available in Washington.
And frankly, we think that is improper, and we will deal with that
in a different proceeding, but we also—because we—but we also
want to know whether there was any effort.
We want to get to the bottom of how these coincidences happened,
and we’re going to try to figure out whether any—if there
was any staff of this committee that might have been involved in
putting True the Vote on the radar screen of some of these Federal
agencies. We don’t know that, but we—we’re going to do everything
we can do to try to get to the bottom of how did this all happen.
Mr. CUMMINGS. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. MEADOWS. Yes.
Mr. CUMMINGS. I want to thank the gentleman for his courtesy.
What she just said is absolutely incorrect and not true. Letters
were sent out as the ranking member. I am the ranking member
of this committee.
I did nothing different than what Mr. Issa has
done when looking into situations, and I donÂ’t want to put out
there that I was trying to act on behalf of the committee or anything
unusual. We were basically looking into voting situations and
whether voters were in any way, in any way, being impeded from
voting.
I want to thank the gentleman. And we have the letters, by the
way, and the only one—and Chairman Issa was sent copies of all
of the letters, so we werenÂ’t hiding anything.
Thank you very much for yielding.
Mr. MEADOWS. Well, and I thank the gentleman and certainly
wanting to make sure that you have the opportunity.
And so, Ms. Engelbrecht, the gentleman from Maryland obviously
is one that—from a targeting standpoint, so I would just let
him follow up on that and make sure—and give him—yield to him
in terms of following up to assure you that neither he nor his staff
or anyone would have contacted the IRS to investigate you and to
do that. And so IÂ’d yield to the gentleman and let him give you
those personal assurances."
Hearing IRS Targeting Investigation Part 1 | Video | C-SPAN.org
Serial No. 113-85 (HOUSE Hearing) - THE IRS TARGETING INVESTIGATION: WHAT IS THE ADMINISTRATION DOING? [PDF 7833 KB] Congressional Hearings. General. Oversight and Government Reform. Thursday, February 6, 2014.