Posted on 07/31/2013 4:47:38 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known for aggressive investigation of conservative groups during her tenure there, too.
“Several months ago . . . I spoke with you about the American Future Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization that had submitted an exemption application the IRS [sic],” the FEC attorney wrote Lerner in February 2009. The FEC, which polices violations of campaign-finance laws, is not exempted under Rule 6103, which prohibits the IRS from sharing confidential taxpayer information, but the e-mail indicates Lerner provided that information nonetheless: “When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” the FEC attorney wrote.
The timing of the correspondence between Lerner and the FEC suggests the FEC attorney sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners. The FEC received a complaint in March 2008 from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party alleging that the American Future Fund had violated campaign-finance law by engaging in political advocacy without registering as a political-action committee. The American Future Fund responded to that complaint in June 2008, telling the commission that it had applied for tax exemption in March of that year and was a “501(c)(4) social-welfare organization that was organized to provide Americans with a conservative and free-market viewpoint and mechanism to communicate and advocate on the issues that most interest and concern them.” According to the e-mail correspondence, a month after receiving the American Future Fund’s response, the FEC general counsel’s office — which is prohibited under law from conducting an investigation into an organization before the FEC’s six commissioners have voted to do so — contacted Lerner to investigate the agency’s tax-exempt status.
The FEC general counsel’s office, in its recommendation on the case, apparently didn’t tell the agency’s commissioners about how it had obtained the information about the group’s tax-exempt status. Recommending that the commissioners prosecute the American Future Fund, the general counsel’s office wrote, “According to its response, AFF submitted an application for tax-exempt status to the Internal Revenue Service . . . on March 18, 2008.” The footnote to that sentence reads, “The IRS has not yet issued a determination letter regarding AFF’s application for exempt status. Based on the information from the response and the IRS website, it is likely that the application is still under review.” In fact, an FEC lawyer knew that the organization had yet to obtain tax-exempt status because Lerner provided the confidential information.
The general counsel’s report was issued in September 2008, but it was over five months before the six FEC commissioners voted, in late-February 2009, on whether to prosecute the American Future Fund for violations of campaign-finance laws. (The typical lag time between the submission of a general counsel’s recommendation and a commission vote is about a month, according to a source familiar with the workings of the commission.) As the vote approached, on February 3, 2009, the FEC lawyer went back to Lerner for an update on the status of the American Future Fund’s application. “Could you please tell me whether the IRS has since issued an exemption letter to the American Future Fund? Also if the IRS has granted American Future Fund’s exemption, would it be possible for you to send me the publicly available information and documents related to American Future Fund?”
Despite the recommendations of the general counsel’s office, the six FEC commissioners split on whether to pursue the American Future Fund’s case and voted six-to-zero to close the case.
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp and ranking member Charles Boustany are calling on the IRS, in the wake of these revelations, to provide all communications between the agency and the FEC between 2008 and 2012. “The American public is entitled to know whether the IRS is inappropriately sharing their confidential tax information with other agencies,” Camp and Boustany write in a letter they will send to acting IRS administrator Danny Werfel on Wednesday.
The FEC enforcement attorney also inquired about the tax-exempt status of another conservative organization, the American Issues Project. “I was also wondering if you could tell me whether the IRS had issued an exemption letter to a group called the American Issues Project? The group also appears to be the successor of two other organizations, Citizens for the Republic and Avenger, Inc.” Also sought were “any information and documents that would be publicly available in relation to the American Issues Project, Citizens for the Republic, or Avenger, Inc.”
If the GOP continues to cower and play "DemocratLite' one day they'll turn around and no one will be following them.
I must echo the obvious...
RICO
Where is Congress on this crime?
Hello??!!?
Anybody home?
Is there any documentation for this?
Links? Articles, anything?
If this is documented, it should be repeated daily until the sleeping citizenry is awakened.
It doesn't affect you?
Dream on!
If true.
” I am ready to burn this whole effing thing to the ground. burn up those phone lines..get out to those district offices, get to Town Hall meetings. Make me sick to my stomach.
Absolutely!”
Might be a good idea to do some of the things Liz has suggested over the past 2 months, too.
I saw 0bama say, “All change comes from me,” and, “Write that down.” He specifically talked to reporters and pointed to himself and to the notes tablet, respectively. For the latter, he specifically meant that what he said at that specific moment was true at that second. Presumably because he said the words and the saying of the words was an accurate statement of what he was doing—not the validity of WHAT he said, just THAT he said it.
The Founding Fathers had no choice but to assume the Constitution would be represented and defended by honorable men, but in other writings, you get the idea they knew having scoundrels in charge was a big risk. That’s where we are today, almost exactly 226 years ago, scoundrels in charge. Very few honorable men in DC.
I don’t see this ending without blood shed.
This answers questions I had years ago about why the FEC didn’t do anything about the voting fraud and illegal contributions in the US. It’s bigger than just Lerner, but she’s the main perpetrator.
The question is, where were R’s and conservatives during all this? They didn’t know either, or did know and stayed silent?
When is boner going to pick a Special Prosecutor...the 12th of never...did boner get a payoff from zero?
An article about it is at http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/13373
A 3-hour interview with Doug Hagman and Julie McLeod in which the evidence is described can be heard at:
http://www.therothshow.com/demos/recent/hour1Aug0709.mp3
http://www.therothshow.com/demos/recent/hour2Aug0709.mp3
http://www.therothshow.com/demos/recent/hour3Aug0709.mp3
Shortly after that interview Hagman quieted down on the story. A well-placed source told me that was because one of his sources was killed and he wanted to protect his other sources, one of whom was concerned about the safety of her family. (A later article at canadafreepress says that Glenn Beck left Fox because his secretary was receiving almost daily threats and Fox would not provide security for her). I shared this information with Mike Zullo and he confirmed that the source we were worried about had fled the country in fear for her life.
Zullo was interested in knowing why the media was so silent about this, especially as they prepared to have their first press conference. As you probably know, the news of that press conference was overshadowed by the sudden death of Andrew Breitbart the same day as the press conference, less than 5 hours after he had called Joe Arpaio, heard his evidence, and said that the evidence was good and that he was glad Arpaio was addressing this. Also on the same day as the press conference, Rush Limbaugh received what he interpreted (and his staff treated) as a bomb threat - with reference to 2 famous assassinations.
And now Sarah Palin is saying that she was gagged from discussing how dangerous Obama is. Sharyl Attkisson has revealed that her computer was hacked. Michael Hastings is dead in what Wesley Clarke has said could well be a cyber attack of his car, Glenn Beck gave the media documentation of the Saudi “person of interest” at the Boston marathon bombing (the one Michelle Obama visited in the hospital, the regime deported claiming he had overstayed his visa, and who appeared again at a July 4th celebration for the military at the White House) being Bin Laden’s son Hamza and though reporters wrote articles about it none of the editors would allow the stories to be printed.
Hagman cannot come out with his documentation without the permission of the witnesses. After what happened to Breitbart and Michael Hastings, how easily do you think he will get that permission?
I gave the information to Zullo because I had closely looked at the timeline of events and other publicly-available information and it rang true - even in my dealings with local talk radio, which led me to believe that the threats extended all the way down the Clear Channel, Fox, and other radio networks.
The big push on Rupert Murdoch in Britain happened shortly after Sean Hannity had come out in support of Donald Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate,and a Media Matters representative had given an interview to Politico’s Ben Smith saying that they were going to use guerilla warfare to go after the reporters AND media companies they viewed as dangerous to their agenda.
When Michelle Malkin’s niece went missing and a guest on NPR’s “Wait, Wait” program poked fun at her, she responded by basically saying they shouldn’t make fun of her because she was distraught over her niece’s safety, and besides she had ridiculed “birthers”.
Stuff like that is circumstantial but when you put the timeline of various events together it is stunning.
And yes, I believe this is the story that needs to be broken loudly and clearly, because it makes sense of the other things we see. We really and truly have been taken over by a coup, complete with the Gestapo and propaganda machines.
Just in case you’re not able to look at all those links, I should add here that the media heads passed on the threat to their on-air personalities by saying that if they or any of their guests addressed the taboo issues, their careers would be over and the lives of them and their loved ones were questionable.
Compare with what happened with Lou Dobbs, who had shots fired into his home not long before he left CNN. The head of CNN was the guy who claimed that Obama’s BC had been lost from the HDOH.
And don’t forget that the LA Coroner’s office had one of their technicians poisoned with arsenic 3 days before the Breitbart autopsy came out. Michael Cormier had told the doctor that he thought he had been poisoned but was supposedly (according to the LAPD) sent home because he just had a “perforated bowel” (a fatal condition if not treated). So Cormier’s deathly ill condition would have been known within the coroner’s office at precisely the time that the coroner was deciding what to make public. Ultimately the autopsy included no claim of having even checked the body for the exclusive signs of covert medical assassination. And the LAP shrugged off Cormier’s arsenic poisoning without investigating, even though that amount of arsenic is rarely used because it is so easy to trace where it came from, since the symptoms set in about a half-hour after exposure to arsenic. IOW, whoever poisoned Cormier was comfortable doing it in a way so that the poisoning would be obvious to everybody, without fear that the LAPD would ever investigate even though it would have been a piece of cake to figure out who did it and where. In the meantime the doctors failed to diagnose the poisoning even when Cormier told them he thought he had been poisoned, and instead sent him home untreated with what they said was “only” a fatal-if-untreated condition... And the LAPD didn’t investigate any of it...
A lot of similarities to how the LA Coroner’s office dealt with Michael Hastings’ death... And how the military dealt with the deaths of SEAL Team 6 after Extortion 17... And Fast & Furious... and Benghazi...
The people who are supposed to be investigating suspicious things aren’t. Period.
Too many demorats in the republican party leadership positions?
Thanks for posting this! LOVE your screen name!! ;-)
FUB0!!
>>We could learn something from the Egyptians.
They worshiped idols concocted by eunuch priests instead of their Creator - and because of this, God gave them over.
Same ol’
Ahem - what the Egyptian people are doing now to overthrow radical Mozlem government! Nothing to do with ancient Egyptian beliefs or practices.
Unless you think today’s Egyptians are “tainted” because of what some of their ancestors did 3000 years ago, in which case you are certifiably insane.
Let my people go!
The Muslim religious concoction isn’t much different from the fraud perpetrated by the Pharaohs and the slave breeding eunuchs who propped them up.
Same Ol’
>>Nothing to do with ancient Egyptian beliefs or practices.
Bullshyte. Then and now.
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=albert+pike+pdf+morals+dogma
So then you're saying that Christian thought and belief in the area, for nearly 2000 years, has had no impact?
That seems like denying the power of God to change people.
Yeh, the people who are supposed to represent us, the people who swear to defend the Constitution, and get giant pay checks and loads of perks, sit around and let this crap go on.
They don't give a chit about the fact that hard working Americans are being harassed and bullied, by out and out thugs in the government- thugs who should be facing jail time for what they've done.
Then our so called representatives wonder why the people are apathetic, and stay home on election day.
What's the point of voting someone in, who won't do anything about this?
Why should some weak willed, timid, spineless, coward, be given a six figure job, with benefits, when they won't even protect the American people ?
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