Lois Lerner: ‘Lincoln was our worst president not our best’

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS targeting controversy, called Abraham Lincoln the country’s worst president in an email disclosed in a bipartisan Senate report, according to USA Today.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in an email dated March 6, 2014.

{mosads}Lerner, the former IRS director of Exempted Organizations, joked in one email that the 16th president should have just let the South secede, rather than fighting the Civil War.

“He should [have] let the south go,” Lerner wrote in response to a friend who disparaged Texas as a “pathetic” state. “We really do seem to have [two] different mind sets.”

The report also highlighted emails written by Lerner calling conservatives “crazies” and “a–holes.”

The bipartisan report, which was released Wednesday, found that the IRS mistreated the applications of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status. But Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Finance differed sharply on whether the mistreatment was a broader IRS effort motivated by politics.

“The report clearly shows that conservative groups were singled out because of their political beliefs, and gross mismanagement at the IRS allowed this practice to continue for years,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah), the Finance Committee chairman, said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

Democrats contend that Lerner’s political beliefs did not affect her ability to process tax-exempt applications impartially.

“So, Ms. Lerner’s husband voted for a socialist, she is a Democrat, she supports same-sex marriage, and she apparently doesn’t have a lot of Republican supporters among her family or friends,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. “What is all of this supposed to prove?”