Free Republic

Congress's investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it's turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn't politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation. In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff—including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz—that a Tea Party matter is "very dangerous," and is something "Counsel and [Lerner adviser]...

In between bowls of chicken poodle soup and deciding to provide air cover for al-Qaeda in Syria, our Dear Leader, Barack Hussein Obama, found time to meet with mayors from our crumbling major cities. From Justin Sink of The Hill: *** "President Obama told a collection of big-city mayors Tuesday at the White House that he would continue to use executive actions to combat gun violence plaguing major cities. In the meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder and the mayors of 18 cities from across the nation, Obama discussed commonly applicable strategies to reduce youth violence. 'He also vowed to...

CINCINNATI, August 20, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Graphic images of aborted babies have been known to induce profound and searing emotions, ranging from tears and trauma, to nausea and revulsion. Some Planned Parenthood supporters decided the images made a perfect backdrop for a self-portrait. The Ohio-based Stand True Pro-Life Outreach protested outside a Planned Parenthood fundraiser on Saturday. “Summer’s Over – What a Drag…” at The Cabaret charged attendees between $10 and $30 to see drag queens strut their stuff. “We protested and witnessed at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Cincinnati last Saturday, it was a Drag Queen show,” said Bryan...

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) said late Friday that he worries that the Internal Revenue Service is so incompetent "that they can't stop their own illegal behavior." The Illinois Republican, in an interview with Fox News, said that the agency was continuing to engage in the illegal targeting of conservative political groups, even after President Obama vowed the practice would stop when abuses were revealed earlier this summer. "After the investigation had already begun, after the illegal behavior had already been exposed, they were asking pro-life groups how much of their time was being spent in prayer, how much of their...

The White House publicity machine has tried to turn the national conversation from the topics of the day to attempt to make our President relevant again. Obama, who has gained the new nickname Griffin (as in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man), has all but disappeared since his failed attempt to change the national gun laws in the beginning of this year. To clear grass so high that Obama needs a weed whacker just to be seen, his team has attempted a typical Obama technique. In this case they are creating a new mantra to discredit legitimate concerns of American voters...

Trey Gowdy was asked today if the GOP has proof that the president was involved in the IRS scandal, citing the objection of Elijah Cummings and Democrats. But Gowdy says that was never an allegation to begin with. However, given that Jay Carney lied about it being about two rogue agents in Cincinnati, Gowdy says that to say the White House wasn't involved now is balderdash.

I have seen this movie before and hummed its title theme in my nightmares. On April 7, 2001, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, wanted on a bundle of minor seatbelt infractions, ran from Cincinnati Police through Over-the-Rhine and was shot dead by Officer Stephen Roach in a pitch-black alcove on Republic Street. The neighborhood’s scars have been scrubbed clean by development, but anger and confusion erupted into riots and curfews resulting in lawsuits, a federally monitored Collaborative Agreement and sweeping police reforms. On February, 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, seemingly a world away in a Sanford, Fla., neighborhood that wasn’t his own,...

Authorities say the Cincinnati-area man who was badly beaten by six teens almost a year ago in a Cincinnati suburb has died. Pat Mahaney, 46, died yesterday in the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said Julie Wilson, spokeswoman for the Hamilton County prosecutor’s office. The six teens, all 13 or 14, injured Mahaney in August and told police they did it because they were bored and looking for something to do. Wilson said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters has asked the coroner for an autopsy. Three of the youths have pleaded guilty to felonious assault. Wilson would not elaborate on...

On Monday, police in Cincinnati arrested a group of teenagers who reportedly terrorized folks in the downtown area, in a series of violent assaults. All of the beatings and robberies took place between June 1 to July 4. Cortez Baker, 16, Randolph Jones, 16, and Kentrelle Aldridge, 16, have all been charged with several counts of robbery and assault, and more charges are likely to be filed.

Questions raised about attacks that already are happening Al [Sharpton] and Jesse [Jackson] may worry that the acquittal of George Zimmerman will usher in a new era of white-on-black violence in America. After all, the local CBS affiliate is reporting that police officers already are training for violence. “There has been some talk among the officers that we believe that this training has to do with the fact that there might be some type of civil unrest, but we are hoping that that doesn’t happen,” said Javier Ortiz with the Fraternal Order of Police. The affiliate also said in Broward...

One of the dumbest moves made by Lois Lerner (and those above her who presumably approved her strategy to deflect blame) was blaming her subordinates in Cincinnati as "rogue agents" who launched the anti-tea party jihad the IRS has been carrying on ever since the 2010 midterm elections threatened the Obama agenda. She may have expected they would remain quiet and accept their role as scapegoats. Perhaps that is how she has operated before in the vast federal bureaucracy, using the threat of poor performance evaluations and truncated career advancement to intimidate subordinates into remaining quiet and covering her rear...

A Cincinnati-based Internal Revenue Service employee is pushing back against claims by Lois Lerner and other top IRS officials that the agency’s Cincinnati office was responsible for the the targeting of tea-party groups and the botched processing of their applications for tax exemption. Elizabeth Hofacre, who coordinated ”emerging issues” cases for the IRS and handled all tea-party applications between April and August 2010, called Lerner’s May 10 disclosure of the scandal at a tax-law conference ”a nuclear strike” on Cincinnati employees. Hofacre told House Oversight Committee investigators in an interview, the transcript of which has been reviewed by National Review...

Rep. Elijah Cummings has yet to reveal the name of the “conservative Republican” IRS agent he claims started the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, despite evidence that the targeting was overseen by a registered Democrat working out of Washington, D.C. Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland and the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, claimed this week that an unnamed Republican manager in the IRS’s Cincinnati office started the agency’s targeting of conservative groups, and that “the case is solved” with no evidence of White House wrongdoing. Cummings claimed in a letter to Republican Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa,...

Elizabeth Hofacre has turned out to be a gold mine to investigators of political corruption at the IRS. The Cincinnati-office specialist didn’t take kindly to having the entire mess dumped on the shoulders of her colleagues and herself, and has made it plain in depositions that this was no low-level innovation. The Hill became the latest media outlet to peruse the transcripts, and added a little more to the growing public record of the targeting effort’s genesis in Washington rather than Cincinnati: An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the...

An IRS agent in the embattled Cincinnati office is lashing out at the agency's managers for pinning the blame on them for the targeting of conservative groups, describing one official's attempt to pass the blame as a "nuclear strike on us." According to transcripts of interviews that House investigators conducted with two Cincinnati office employees and which Fox News reviewed, agent Elizabeth Hofacre claimed that the idea this program was the work of two rogue agents is "absurd." She said that when Lois Lerner, the high-level official who oversaw the Cincinnati unit and is now on leave over the scandal,...

ItÂ’s commencement season. College seniors across the country are donning mortarboards, getting misty-eyed and preparing to face the realities of President Barack ObamaÂ’s sparkling economic recovery. The Daily Caller is a little misty-eyed, too, because college students will soon disperse from campuses for a long summer, which likely means far fewer stories about stupid and otherwise outrageous occurrences on campus. The time is right, then, to celebrate the academic year that was. Here are the 20 stupidest, most outrageous and most cringe-worthy campus moments of 2012-13. Florida Atlantic University: Worst university in AmericaWhat an embarrassing year for Florida Atlantic. The...

From the outset, Internal Revenue Service lawyers based in Washington, D.C., provided important guidance on the handling of tea-party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to both IRS sources and the inspector general’s report released in mid May. Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to...

CINCINNATI, OH (FOX19) - The claim that the ongoing IRS scandal is limited to low level employees is falling apart. The six Cincinnati workers we have identified, who sent scrutinizing letters to conservative groups with words including "patriot, liberty, tea party or 9-12" in their names are Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman identified only as Ms. Richards. But was all of this done at the hands of a small group of Cincinnati employees working together? During Friday's congressional hearing, that appeared to be the theme. Now, that explanation just became less likely....

Monday afternoon, ABC News released a chilling report that details what journalists have faced while trying to get some answers from the Cincinnati IRS office, which is where a majority of the Tea Party targeting took place. According to ABC, an "armed uniform police officer with the Federal Protective Service" "escorted" reporters through the public building. ABC says if the intent wasn't to "scare off" employees who might talk, "it was the effect."

New defenses and distractions in the IRS scandal are going to come rolling out from the administration and its defenders like water off a duck's back. One ploy is evident in this sympathetic story from Friday's Washington Post seeking to portray the IRS Determinations Unit as a just a group of nice, non-partisan number-crunchers: The [determinations] staff member [in Cincinnati], who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that the determinations unit is competent and without bias, that it grouped together conservative applications “for consistency’s sake” — so one application did not sail through...