Former IRS director Lois Lerner: 'I didn't do anything wrong'

Former IRS official Lois Lerner, who oversaw the agency's probing of Tea Party groups and others applying for tax-exempt status, insists she is not the partisan criminal Republicans made her out to be, and she says she is "not sorry for anything I did."

"I didn't do anything wrong," she tells Politico in an interview published Monday.

Lerner resigned one year ago after an internal audit determined the IRS inappropriately targeted Tea Party groups — future investigations found it targeted liberal ones, too — and faulted Lerner for "neglect of duties." Yet Lerner believes she merely became the scapegoat because she was the first official to publicly reveal the agency had gone too far in scrutinizing such groups.

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"I assume the other part of it is because I declined to talk, and once I declined to talk, they could say anything they wanted, and they knew I couldn't say anything back," she says.