COEUR d'ALENE - U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo has stepped into the investigation of the Internal Revenue Service's alleged harassment of the tea party and other conservative groups.

The senator got personally involved after learning that Phil and Leslie Damiano of Hayden Lake were allegedly harassed when they applied for nonprofit status for the Tea Party Patriots of North Idaho.

"We applied for political nonprofit status last year," Leslie Damiano said Thursday. "We felt their questions and what they were requiring to be too invasive, so we just decided to bow out."

Damiano said the IRS was requesting information on the group's rallies, speakers, donors and some of their members.

"Namely those people who were directly involved in the organization," she said. "So we decided to dissolve the group altogether in 2012."

When the Damianos decided to fold, they discussed their problems with Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice. Damiano said it turns out that Sekulow was instrumental in breaking the national scandal.

"He told us that this was happening all over the country," she said. "At the time, we really didn't see a scandal of this gravity, but when this broke, we weren't surprised."

Right after the scandal broke, Damiano said that Senator Crapo's office contacted her to ask if they had experienced any problems during their process. Crapo sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.

"Senator Crapo was aware of our group and he even encouraged us to form it," she said. "We told Karen Roetter (Crapo's local staff person) that, in fact, we did have some of the same problems."

Since then, they have been working with his staff to provide documentation for a congressional investigation into the matter.

The senator issued a press release on Thursday saying he's meeting with the Damianos at a special meeting of the Panhandle Pachyderm Club today at Templin's Red Lion Inn in Post Falls. The meeting is open to the public and starts at noon.

Crapo's office has been providing information and testimony into the Finance Committee's investigation. The committee started holding hearings on the matter last week.

During one hearing, the senator grilled the IRS inspector general on his findings in a recent internal investigation.

"How could an agency with the power the Internal Revenue Service has engage in this kind of conduct and it not be politically motivated?" he asked the inspector general, adding that most people can understand why that type of conduct is concerning. "And that there was no finding of any kind of political motivation I think is almost beyond belief."