A top activist with the anti-tax Tea Party movement has had a personal brush with federal tax collectors. Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, owed, with her husband, over half a million dollars to the IRS when the pair filed for bankruptcy last year, according to filings examined by TPMmuckraker.
The couple's bankruptcy filing, made in August 2008 to the US Bankruptcy Court for Georgia's Northern District, stated that Martin and her husband Lee Martin, of Woodstock, Georgia, owed the IRS $510,000, after making a payment of $16,640 that June. The couple also owed just over $71,000 to Ford Motor Credit, the automaker's financing arm.
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Martin, who has worked in the past as a GOP consultant in Georgia, has been a prominent face of the Tea Party movement, making television appearances and speaking to reporters.
She hasn't hidden her and her husband's financial woes, portraying them as evidence that she speaks for ordinary Americans affected by the economic downturn. She told USA Today that when she got involved with the Tea Party movement, "we had just lost our house and had ... moved into the rental house." The paper reported that "Lee's temporary-employee firm had 5,000 workers before it went down in the recession." Said Jenny Beth: "I didn't want other people paying for my mortgage, and I wanted to prevent that in other places," she says.
And in an interview the couple gave to Fox News around the same time, Jenny Beth said: "We've been hit by the financial crisis and the recession, and we are like everyday Americans."
But the bankruptcy and the debt to the IRS was mentioned in neither appearance.
