Free Republic

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...

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald Read this tweet and what follows: https://twitter.com/SCClemons/status/343392529913356289 … 5:00 PM - 8 Jun 2013 194 Retweets 47 favorites Remember that tidbit about the Chinese president deciding not to sleep over at the lush Sunnylands estate with President Obama because of concerns of eavesdropping? Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. According to a series of tweets by Atlantic editor-at-large Steve Clemons, U.S. intel officials aren’t very careful about speaking their minds in public. Steve Clemons @SCClemons In Dulles UAL lounge listening to 4 US intel officials saying loudly leaker & reporter on #NSA stuff should be...

Heads or Tails?- By: Larry Walker II -Carla Dean: “Well, who's gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?” – Quotes from Enemy of the StatePRISM is allegedly a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily. PRISM has allegedly allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years. I say allegedly because every tech company in question denies its existence.According to the Washington Post: The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio...

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin Last February Maxine Waters in an interview stated “The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” She continued to reveal “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before”. This week Americans were surprised to learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone call information of American Verizon customers. Like all of the...

As a Second Amendment organization representing 375,000 members, we are writing to express our concern over Health And Human Services’ (HHS) proposed rule that was printed in the April 23rd, 2013 issue of the Federal Register. These regulations would, by executive fiat, waive all federal privacy laws and encourage doctors to report their patients to the FBI. Please understand a couple of things: First, the standard which a doctor would use to turn in a patient is embodied in Clinton-era ATF language and in the anti-gun Veterans Disarmament Act of 2007. Specifically, a doctor would report a patient if he...

The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities. The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.'s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA's operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers. The agency is using...

Americans are showing high levels of pessimism about their system of government, with a notable divergence along party lines, amid gridlock in Washington and recent high-profile controversies. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll out Wednesday found that 31% of respondents said they were generally optimistic about the American system of government and how well it works, with 29% saying they were generally pessimistic. That number is particularly dismaying when compared with historical optimism levels. In August 1974 – two years after Watergate and toward the end of the Vietnam War – a majority of Americans, 55%, said they were...

CAPITOL POLICE SUDDENLY WANTS TO SEE TEA PARTY WEBSITES BEFORE PROTEST APPROVED. And they are taking weeks to grant the request.The Tea Party Patriots were planning a rally in Washington DC on Wednesday June 19th. But they ran into a wall. The Capitol Police want to see their websites first. Kevin Mooneyhan from the Tea Party Patriots described this latest assault on the Tea Party: Below is the timeline of events surrounding our June 19th rally at the Capitol. We haven’t done anything to publicize this event yet because we wanted to make sure we had the permit in hand....

The corrupt—even criminal—activities rife in the Obama Administration has panicked its staunchest defenders. Forget the comparisons to Watergate or even to classic TV sitcom’s “I know nothing; I see nothing” Hans Schultz. Oh so yesterday. The triage of scandals, which initially stunned Democrats and Obama apologists into uncharacteristic silence, has since been re-branded to be something quite different than it actually is. For this, they owe Groucho Marx a debt of gratitude. Lying and cover-ups regarding Benghazi; stomping on the First Amendment; the IRS criminally targeting American citizens? Time to roll out the “Groucho Defense:” Who are you going to...

Testifying on Capitol Hill Tuesday, witnesses from Tea Party, pro-life and patriotic educational groups from around the country testified about their experience of intimidation and targeting from the Internal Revenue Service. Witnesses described being sent hundreds of pages from the IRS asking invasive questions about members, books, contents of prayers and the names of anyone attending meetings, including children. "The IRS sought documentation of our meetings, rallies, events, or candidate forums. That included video and audio transcriptions, notes, copies of all handouts; the political party of speakers, and an “issues” list. The IRS sought identifying information on employees; data on...

Ahead of new hearings on the IRS abuse scandal, the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has released transcripts of depositions it has taken with IRS employees. The employees directly contradict IRS honcho Lois Lerner’s claim that the targeting was merely the work of “rogue” employees in the IRS Cincinnati office. Q: So is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the IG are not in the Cincinnati office? A: I don’t know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn’t do anything wrong. We followed...

Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman is under fire from Congress for his agency's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative organizations. Shulman himself is under suspicion for his numerous visits to the White House compared to other administration officials. Additionally, Shulman's wife Susan L. Anderson reportedly works for the Washington D.C. based liberal organization Public Campaign. In fact, according to Anderson's Twitter feed, she worked on the Obama campaign: En route to airport after working 3 days 4 OFA, MiL just asks me If I know abt the Chrysler ads :) #Obama2012Anderson tweeted about spending time with union...

Watching the celebration at the NRA convention over the defeat of background checks was the most nauseating experience of the day. I am not a New York gun control liberal, either. I support a shotgun for home defense, a handgun for limited conceal/carry, and an assortment of hunting rifles to balance West Virginia's exploding deer population (as evidenced by hourly collisions with cars). So, I am hardly out of the mainstream. But, the gun safety debate is B.S. This foaming at the mouth, Obamar is coming for the guns, Nanny Bloomberg is a bad billionaire, and most despicable of all,...

Could the situation at the IRS get any worse? McClatchy joins CBS News in postulating that the scandal may well expand to more than just applications for tax-exempt status. Both news agencies are starting to take complaints about predatory and punitive audits and other actions and put them into a very ugly pattern — and ask some very difficult questions of the Obama administration: While the developing scandal over the targeting of conservatives by the tax agency has largely focused to date on its scrutiny of groups with words such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, these examples...

After I graduated college and before I landed my first real-deal job that included insurance benefits, I took out my own independent health insurance plan that covered all of the bases a young and healthy person like myself might need. It cost me about ninety dollars a month, and seeing as how I didn’t have any regular health care needs, it was pretty much just catastrophe insurance in case I happened to break my leg or get into a car accident or catch malaria or some other relatively unlikely scenario. I felt secure about the situation, knowing that I would...

Scandal: One IRS commissioner visited Obama's White House 118 times in 2010 and 2011. His successor also dropped in often. But under George W. Bush, the tax chief visited once in four years. Time for an audit. IRS Schedule O As the Washington Examiner noted last weekend, ex-commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service Douglas Shulman went to the White House some 118 times in 2010 and 2011, while Steven Miller, the acting director who took over from Shulman last November, himself made numerous trips there, White House visitor logs show. Business as usual for one of the most powerful arms...

It is a petition to end what many Tucson drivers describe as a traffic light trap. John Kromko is the man behind the petition. His group, Tucson Traffic Justice, claims the cameras are a scam. ... Ditching the cameras is not as far-fetched as it may seem. More and more cities are shutting down the system including San Diego, Los Angeles and Tempe.

The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News. Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of hisstock.

Included among the suspected terrorists were Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. At the time it was revealed, the program called “Operation Vigilant Eagle” caused some controversy but was quickly forgotten and buried by the media. For the DHS, Vigilant Eagle was the expression of the misdirected paranoia that exists at the agency’s highest levels, which since President Obama stepped into office have issued multiple reports about a supposed wave of terrorism by American conservatives of various stripes, from Tea Party members to off-duty cops.

IRS Directed to Lock Down All Agency Data By Eliana Johnson May 28, 2013 12:50 PM The Internal Revenue Service is in the process of locking down all computer data across the agency, a sign that investigations into the scandal-plagued agency may be taking a broader sweep than initially anticipated. Agency employees last Thursday received an e-mail alerting them, ”This is a late breaking top priority and things could change in the future,” according to an IRS employee who asked not to be named. Employees were directed not to “wipe, re-image or otherwise destroy any hard drives” on any machine...