Free Republic

We've known for weeks the argument made by senior IRS officials that targeting of conservative Tea Party groups was carried out by a "few low-level agents in Cincinnati" is bogus. Now, we have even more proof. NBC News reported last night that the signatures of senior level IRS officials, including that of IRS Tax Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner, are on documents that were sent to Tea Party groups asking for more information. Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and...

CHRIS WALLACE: Why single out Crossroads when you didn't mention a single liberal group, and there were a bunch that were applying for tax-exempt status at exactly that point with the name "progress" in their name. SEN. DICK DURBIN: I can just tell you flat-out why I did it. Because that Crossroads organization was boasting about how much money they were raising as a 501(c)(4). Let's get back to the basics. Citizens United really unleashed hundreds if not thousands of organizations seeking tax-exempt status to play in political campaigns. The law we wrote as Congress said that they had to...

The “tonight’s news” referred to by The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza comes via the New York Times: Wow, tonight's news dramatically escalates the war between DOJ and Fox. Somebody is not telling the whole truth.— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 27, 2013 News Corporation said on Sunday that it had no record of being notified by the Justice Department nearly three years ago of a subpoena for the telephone records of a reporter at its Fox News cable channel [James Rosen]. The company’s chief legal counsel at the time also said that he had never seen material from the government related...

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,” The Daily Caller has learned. Department of Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler has not responded to questions from The Daily Caller about whether Holder himself was armed — and if so, with what sort of weapon. Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed...

The dam protecting the IRS scandal began to crack today when Lois Lerner, the IRS official who announced, and apologized for, the improper singling out of conservative-leaning organizations by IRS employees under her command, announced through her criminal defense lawyer that she will not testify as scheduled tomorrow before the House Oversight Committee. Rather, she will assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This marks a milestone in the IRS investigation. It can now be taken as more or less established that crimes were committed by Obama administration employees. LernerÂ’s lawyer tried to minimize the significance of her invoking the...

New evidence has emerged that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez may have improperly prosecuted Wells Fargo, Bank of America and dozens of other banks for lending discrimination by using deficient mortgage data in investigations. IBD has learned the special prosecutor spearheading Perez's record number of statistics-based cases of racism against lenders told federal bank regulators in 2010 he lacked key home loan data needed to conduct the kind of iron-clad "regression analyses" that would hold up in court. Still, Perez's civil-rights division used the shaky data to force bank defendants into a record $600 million in settlements, including loan set-asides...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who apologized for targeting conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny is married to an attorney whose firm hosted a voter registration organizing event for the Obama presidential campaign, praised President Obama’s policy work, and had one of its partners appointed by Obama to a key ambassadorship. IRS Exempt Organizations Division director Lois G. Lerner, who has been described as “apolitical” in mainstream press coverage of the IRS scandal, is married to tax attorney Michael R. Miles, a partner at the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. The firm is based in Atlanta but has...

Coach is Right published this article well before the current IRS scandals had broken. We thought readers might be interested in taking another look at this slight infraction committed by our “voluntary” taxing authorities. In September of 2011, 60 million health records involving 10 million Americans were illegally confiscated by members of the IRS. The theft took place at an unidentified place of business in California. Referring to itself as the John Doe Company in a lawsuit filed last week against the 15 IRS agents who took part, plaintiffs claim that...

With Soros funding, anything is possible. The growing scandal where the IRS unfairly targeted politically-conservative groups can be traced back to a lobbying effort begun by George Soros-funded liberal groups in 2010, after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.

Senate Democrats blocked a resolution condemning the targeting of tea party groups by the Internal Revenue Service Wednesday, according to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. The resolution Paul introduced Tuesday condemns the targeting of tea party and other affected groups. The resolution further calls for investigations and criminal charges against those who authorized or were involved in targeting people on the basis of their political beliefs. “This resolution is not about Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal. It is about arrogant and unrestrained government vs. the rule of law. The First Amendment cannot and should not be renegotiated depending...

Scandal: Senate Democrats, including supporters of the Disclose Act, provided the names of groups they wanted targeted in a taxpayer-funded witch hunt overseen by an IRS employee and Obama campaign donor. Using the Citizens United case as a pretext, retiring Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., on July 27, 2012, wrote IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to investigate 12 conservative groups he accused of violating their tax-exempt status and engaging in coordinated political activity. The groups Levin asked to be targeted for special scrutiny were Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Priorities U.S.A., Americans Elect, American Action Network, Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund, Americans...

Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.

USBC News Wire- Yet a another major scandal is rocking the already extraordinarily unpopular Obama administration, this time the controversy involves abuses by the IRS in targeting US citizens based on their political views. It appears that agents used keywords to target groups in opposition to the governing Democratic administration. Remarkably, the agents found it acceptable to single out patriots for unprecedented behavior. The agents singled out their fellow citizens by using keywords such as “patriot” or “tea party” (itself a reference to the earliest American patriots) to identify groups that object to the policies of the current administration. Lois...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted on May 10 that “low level” staff in its Cincinnati office, supposedly “not motivated by political bias,” targeted 75 conservative tax-exempt organizations, including many Tea Party organizations applying for exemption under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code. The groups were singled out for audit and investigation because they used the names “Tea Party” and “Patriot.” Yet in July 2011, the IRS had warned employees to drop audits of donors to similar 501(c)4 organizations.

Conservatives who have been wondering how Obama survived the 2012 election now have fuel for the common complaint that he stole the election by cheating. And no, I’m not talking about the vote rigging in precincts where he had more votes than voters. Nor am I talking about petitions where signature gatherers illegally forged names in order for Obama to qualify for a state primary ballot. I’m also not talking about Obama’s failure to vote on much legislation when he was an Illinois state senator, nor on his ability to produce any meaningful legislation for the three weeks he acted...

After more than 18 hours of gunfights and door-to-door searches, the Boston Police Department and its partners in the greater metropolitan area were prepared for anything when they finally caught up with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  According to the Washington Post and the Associated Press, however, the same couldn’t be said for Tsarnaev.  Despite initial reports of a firefight and possibly a suicide attempt, police now acknowledge that the younger terrorist was unarmed when they finally discovered him hiding in a boat in Watertown: Although police feared he was heavily armed, the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had no firearms when he came...

<p>George Zimmerman's attorneys on Monday formally accused prosecutors of being unethical, saying that for seven months, they hid a pair of lies by their most important witness, and that they should be punished for it.</p> <p>The allegations, spelled out in a new court pleading, mark a new low in the case.</p>

Posters comment....There is no more law if this isn't correctedMore than three months after the Justice Department administered a virtual slap on the wrist to global banking giant HSBC after a whistleblower’s report to WND of massive fraud was confirmed, Attorney General Eric Holder admitted to a Senate panel he believes some banks are too big to prosecute. Under questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday, Holder said he was not referring specifically to HSBC, because it would not be “appropriate,” but the message was clear. Banks the size of HSBC are “too big to jail,” as a member...

Democrat Melowese Richardson has been an official poll worker for the last quarter century and registered thousands of people to vote last year. She candidly admitted to Cincinnati’s Channel 9 this week that she voted twice in the last election. Richardson insists she has done nothing wrong and promises to contest the charges: “I’ll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama’s right to sit as president of the United States.”

In 2009, Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, presumably speaking on behalf of the newly inaugurated Barack Obama, issued the so-called Ogden memo, instructing federal prosecutors to not target medical-marijuana patients..... "Do you intend to carry this all the way through forfeiture?" Guilford asked U.S. Attorney Greg Parham. "Yes, absolutely, your honor," Parham responded. "The only evidence in this case is a $37 purchase of medical marijuana and an anonymous comment on a website that anybody could have written," Pappas says. "For this, they want to take a $1.5 million building."