IRS Went After 83-Year-Old Tea Party Member, Survived WWII Japanese Internment Camp In MalaysiaCall her in to testify to Congress. Put a face on the people that were targeted.Quote:
Internal Revenue Service officials not only wanted a wide variety of information from the Albuquerque Tea Party’s application for non-profit status, it also wanted to know what contacts it had with people from other political organizations too.
That included an 83-year-old great-grandmother who was once held in a World War II internment camp, New Mexico Watchdog has discovered.
“I’ve always paid my taxes and everything,†Marianne Chiffelle told New Mexico Watchdog. “What I do think is, it doesn’t surprise me…because of this government we have at the moment.â€
According to a review of documents conducted by the online news organization Politico, (in a story headlined “The IRS wants YOU — to share everythingâ€), the IRS asked the Albuquerque Tea Party about connections to other groups, including “Marianne Chiffelle’s Breakfasts.â€
That prompted us to do some digging.
It took New Mexico Watchdog less than an hour to learn that “Marianne Chiffelle’s Breakfasts†is not some restaurant chain, but a reference to the volunteer work of Chiffelle, a retiree who helps organize informal 9 a.m. meetings for members of the Bernalillo County Republican Party.
The group meets on Fridays at a Golden Corral restaurant. “We’ve had these meetings for a long time,†Chiffelle said. “It’s not a business.â€
Chiffelle is a naturalized American citizen who was born in what was then called the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. Her father was an executive for Shell Oil and when World War II broke out Chiffelle was sent to a Japanese internment camp where she spent four years, from age 12 to 16.
After the war, she moved to the Netherlands and in 1960 she and her late husband immigrated to the United States.