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Revealed: Read the Letter the IRS Sent to One Local Tea Party and the Detailed Demands It Made

Revealed: Read the Letter the IRS Sent to One Local Tea Party and the Detailed Demands It Made

​​"It got creepy..."

Laurence Nordvig had thought for some time that his Tea Party group was being targeted by the IRS.

"It got creepy, to be honest with you," Nordvig told CBS on Monday. He is the head of the Richmond Tea Party and explained that after two years and an estimated 500 pages of documents, he became suspicious. Especially after recent requests demanded he hand over the names of donors and even communications.

And now some of those demands are being revealed as communications with the IRS and the group are coming to light. The Daily Mail published 11 pages of questions from the IRS to the group, which comes over a year after TheBlaze revealed similar demands.

The Daily Mail describes the contents:

And in addition to the names of board members, officers and employees, the nation's taxing authorities insisted on knowing the names of everyone who helped the Richmond Tea Party without compensation.

'Please identify your volunteers,' the January 9, 2012 letter from the IRS read.

The agency also required the Virginia conservative group to provide copies of sections of its website that only its members can access.

Here's a taste:

You can see it for yourself in full below:

Richmond Tea Party IRS Letter

"We're talking about the intrusion of big government into people's personal lives," Nordvig added.

You can watch his interview with CBS below:

But Nordvig, as has been made clear, isn't the only one. And neither is his group.

"In the documents that were sent to me, if you did not tell the whole truth by not putting all your personal information out there by Facebook, by Twitter, of your personal relationship with candidates and parties ... it could be considered perjury and perjury carried jail time," Jennifer Stefano told ABC News regarding a similar experience.

And there are more:

In letters obtained by ABC News, the Internal Revenue Service asked detailed questions of local tea party groups from 2010 to 2012.

"The reason for this attack by the IRS on the tea party was to make sure we were not as effective in 2012 as we were in 2010, and that's what they did," said Tom Zawistowski, former president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition.

Zawistowski told ABC News that after applying for tax-exempt status in 2010, he heard nothing from the IRS until February 2012, when he received a lengthy questionnaire.

He wrote back to the IRS, refusing to answer the questions and suggesting they were politically motivated. Zawistowski heard from other groups who had received similar questionnaires and worked with the American Center for Law and Justice to coordinate their communication with the IRS.

"There's a name for that - it's called 'opposition research,'" Zawistowski said of the questions IRS was asking, which included information on the groups with which his group associated.

The IRS asked another Ohio tea party organization, the Liberty Township Tea Party, about its political views and relationships with an individual and another group.

"Provide a list of all issues that are important to your organization. Indicate your position regarding each issue," the IRS commanded in a letter with 35 questions, many including between three and six bullet-pointed subquestions.

"Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Bink-Thomas," a Cincinnati-area activist, the letter also instructed. "Provide information regarding the Butler County Teen Age Republicans and your relationship."

In questionnaires sent to other groups in February 2012, most of which are similar, the IRS demanded information on group members who helped set up events, on employees and recipients of money, and for the names of donors and how much they gave to the groups.

"It became very frightening," Stefano concluded, "the IRS has the power to target the political opposition of a sitting president."

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Related:

Is Obama Using The IRS To Silence Opposition Voices?

Another Conservative Group Says It’s Being Bullied by the IRS: ‘Clear’ & ‘Obvious’ Overreach

IRS Released Confidential Info About Conservative Groups to Media Last Year

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