The IRS stole the 2012 presidential election with its ruthless targeting of the tea party, an order that came from President Barack Obama himself, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, tells Newsmax TV.

Norquist — author of the new book "End the IRS Before It Ends Us: How to Restore a Low Tax, High Growth, Wealthy America" — said the agency dramatically slowed the tea party movement's growth when it questioned the validity of their tax-exempt status.

"That the attack on the tea party in 2011 and 2012 actually made sure that Obama got re-elected," Norquist said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

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"They kneecapped the growing tea party movement, slowed it down, scattered it.

"In 2010, we increased the number of voters through the tea party machinery from 3 million to 6 million. That didn't happen in '12. So the IRS actually stole an election."

The IRS's scrutiny of the tea party led to an investigation of the agency and the ouster of Lois Lerner, director of its Exempt Organizations Unit.

"The president said out loud, would somebody please get these people for me? And we saw Lois Lerner say, I'm being told and yelled at to do this even though I'm not legally allowed to," Norquist said.

"The president was saying it out loud, the Democrats in the Senate were saying it out loud on television, on radio. They sent her to go after the tea party and they damaged the tea party. They kneecapped a growing movement."

He added that while Democrats got away with it, the Republicans couldn't have.

"People would have been in prison … People knew they were breaking the rules, they knew they were breaking the law," he said.

Norquist's new book proposes a plan for cutting taxes for working Americans and for the major corporations that are fleeing for foreign shores — including a possible flat tax.

"We started off in this country before the tea party happened. We were paying 1 to 2 percent of our income in taxes. The British in London were paying 20 percent," he said.

"We grew, we expanded, people moved here, the country exploded because we were the low tax nation on the planet. Over time we're now spending 33 percent of our national income.

"We worked until April 24, April 24 this year just to pay taxes, federal, state, and local and most of that, two-thirds of that, is the federal government. The IRS collects this money."

Norquist also argued that the United States courts once struck down income tax.

"The first time they put it in in peacetime in the late 1880s. There is in our Constitution a phrase that said all taxes are to be uniform and that was understood to be even," he said.

"So you couldn't tax the West over the East, [which] was what happened with whiskey taxes. You couldn't tax the South over the North, which is what happened with excise taxes.

"We almost had civil wars, East, West, North, South over those unfair, non-uniform taxes … Now people have forgotten that."

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