With just hours until the polls close in the very tight New Hampshire U.S. Senate race, newly revealed memos indicate incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen was in direct communication with one of President Obama’s most trusted IRS officials about increasing the agency’s scrutiny  of conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status, and the chairwoman of New Hampshire’s Republican Party says the news is reverberating across the Granite State.

“People are talking about it all over the state, of course. It is shocking to see that our own United States Senator Jeanne Shaheen engaged in this sort of behavior, using a federal agency, the IRS, to target American citizens for their political beliefs,” said New Hampshire GOP chairwoman Jennifer Horn. “We haven’t seen anything like this, as you know, since the Nixon era. It’s shocking and disappointing to all of us in New Hampshire.”

The memos obtained by the Daily Caller show that Shaheen was in direct contact with IRS Chief Counsel William J. Wilkins, who has previously been labeled “the president’s man at the IRS.” It appears the contact started in March 2012, when Shaheen wrote to Wilkins on behalf of a small group of Democrat senators, including Chuck Schumer of New York and Al Franken of Minnesota.

In the letter, Shaheen aggressively urged Wilkins and others at the IRS to change the standards by which groups self-identifying as “social welfare organizations” would be judged for tax-exempt status. According to the Daily Caller, the senator called for setting limits on political spending for the groups and mandating that a majority of total spending must be on non-political matters. She also wanted the IRS to get much more detailed information about how the groups were financed and place restrictions on how much donations to the organizations could be written off.

In April 2012, Shaheen got a response from Wilkins:

“We will consider proposed changes in this area as we work with Tax-Exempt and Government Entities and the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy to identify tax issues that should be addressed,” he wrote

Horn said Shaheen already had baggage on this issue, but this memo proves her involvement even further.

“We’ve been talking about this issue throughout this race. The senator signed the letter. She was one of just a handful of senators who thought it was appropriate to send the letter to the IRS, asking them to target these conservative organizations. So our voters are well aware of it. Obviously this brings it a step further, which is why it is reverberating the way that it is here,” Horn said.

“What this new memo exposes to us is the level of coordination that appeared to be taking place between the IRS and Sen. Shaheen on these issues. This is something that is very serious and will continue to grow and be a problem long after this election is over. All we can hope is that folks in New Hampshire get out and make sure that when she’s investigated for this, it’s not as a sitting U.S. senator from New Hampshire.”

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with New Hampshire GOP chairwoman Jennifer Horn:

However, Chairwoman Horn is also a an issue herself in the final days of the campaign for comments Democrats allege amount to advocating violence. On Sunday, at a rally attended by GOP Senate nominee Scott Brown, gubernatorial nominee Walt Havenstein and congressional candidates Frank Guinta and Marilinda Garcia, Horn implored Republican supporters to make this as big of a wave election as possible and continued to push the metaphor.

“This is our time. We need to crush it. We need to grab it, run with it, push their heads under over and over again until they cannot breathe anymore, until the elections are over on Tuesday night and we’ve won it all,” said Horn on Sunday.

New Hampshire Democrats immediately pounced.

“This type of inflammatory language tells you everything that you need to know about the status of the New Hampshire Republican Party,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Communications Director Julie McClain said in an emailed statement to MSNBC. “There’s no excuse for this kind of violent rhetoric.”

Horn said she was never advocating violence, and Democrats are simply trying to distract voters any way they can.

“It was a get-out-the-vote rally with hundreds and hundreds of our best activists,” she said. “In the larger context, we were talking about a wave and how you make waves happen. There’s clearly no intention there and no suggestion for harm to anybody. The likely reason that the Democrats would like to chat about that is, honestly, a desperate attempt on the eve of an election that’s just not going the way they hoped it would go.”

Horn said the GOP ground game is better than ever, and she’s cautiously optimistic about Brown pulling off the upset of Shaheen tonight. However, she said it’s simply too close to call.

At the time of this report, Shaheen had a 0.8 lead (48.8 percent) in the polls over Brown (48 percent) in the “Granite State.” FiveThirtyEight has given Shaheen a 79 percent chance of winning the race.

The New Hampshire race is expected to be so competitive, Judicial Watch sent a team of lawyers and volunteers to the state as part of its Election Integrity Project.

Article printed from WND: http://www.wnd.com

SEE VIDEO: http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/explosive-election-day-scandal-in-toss-up-state/