Who is Virginia Puddister?

She is the Internal Revenue Agent who decided to ask the Leadership Institute, a conservative organization, about the identities and activities of its student interns. The questionnaire is reproduced above.

The Arlington, Virginia-based Leadership Institute is a conservative activist training organization founded in 1979 by Virginia Republican National Committeeman Morton C. Blackwell, the youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater. The institute was audited in 2011. As The Daily Caller has reported, at least two different IRS offices made a concerted effort to obtain the group’s training materials.

The Leadership Institute’s audit, which was conducted by the IRS’ Baltimore office and which ended with no determination of wrongdoing but cost the conservative group $50,000 in legal fees, only covered the year 2008, leading employees to speculate that the IRS’ primary interest was figuring out how the group operates during a presidential election year.

“They were very interested in seeing what conservative organizations were doing in 2008, and where the interns from 2008 were now employed,” Leadership Institute vice president of programs David Fenner told the Daily Caller, adding that he “absolutely” believed the IRS audited information from 2008 because it was an election year.

“We declined to give them the names” of former interns, Fenner said.

I think that the people who conduct these witch hunts ought to have a light shined on their activities.