Free Republic

Stand Your Ground: A big hypocrite in the IRS scandal targeting Tea Party groups sets his sights on a conservative think tank, asking its suspected supporters: "Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?" Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is on a witch hunt that threatens anew the free speech rights of Americans who don't hold his views or those of the Obama administration. This time he has targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of state legislators who promote free markets, limited government and federalism, ahead of a "stand your ground" hearing Durbin announced after George...

It seems that not only is Justice blind in Washington, D.C., but she's been kicked out of town altogether. On Saturday, it was reported that Cindy Thomas just got a big promotion. If you don't know who Cindy Thomas is, she was the IRS official in charge of the exempt organizations office in Cincinnati. This was one of the IRS groups who targeted conservative tea party groups for harassment and intimidation. They also illegally leaked confidential tax information to other agencies and liberal groups. Cindy Thomas is a 35 year veteran of the IRS (bet her pension plan is rocking!)...

President Obama promised he would unite the world…and he’s right.Representatives from dozens of nations have bitterly complained about an awful piece of legislation, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), that was enacted back in 2010.They despise this unjust law because it extends the power of the IRS into the domestic affairs of other nations. That’s an understandable source of conflict, which should be easy to understand. Wouldn’t all of us get upset, after all, if the French government or Russian government wanted to impose their laws on things that take place within our borders?But it’s not just foreign...

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

The IRS official in charge of the exempt organizations office in the Cincinnati branch at the time conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were unfairly targeted just got a promotion. Cindy Thomas has been appointed to the senior technical adviser team for the Director of Exempt Organizations. Thomas, a 35-year IRS veteran, will fill the spot vacated by Sharon Light. Light, a one-time close adviser to Lois Lerner, is the sixth senior IRS official to leave the agency. Lerner is the employee at the center of the political storm that hit the nation earlier this year. She was the first...

A Colorado conservative group is fighting back against the IRS for disclosing its confidential financial information to a liberal news organization by suing the government agency as well as Attorney General Eric Holder. The Daily Caller reports that the Citizens Awareness Project filed the suit in federal court Thursday demanding that it be awarded $1,000 for every instance in which an unauthorized person viewed the information disclosed on the Internet by ProPublica earlier this year. The conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit group was one of several whose applications for tax-exempt status from the IRS was mishandled. "Defendants' conduct has caused plaintiff to...

A conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose application for tax exempt status was among several wrongfully given to ProPublica earlier this year is suing the IRS over the disclosure and demanding big bucks in damages. The Denver-based Citizens Awareness Project filed the suit in federal court Thursday, asking the court to award it $1,000 for every time unauthorized persons saw its confidential returns, as well as other unspecified damages. In addition to the IRS, the suit names the United States of America and Attorney General Eric Holder as defendants. “Defendants’ conduct has caused Plaintiff to incur actual damages in the form of...

According to Team Obama’s “phony scandal” narrative, when the Internal Revenue Service processed 501(c)(3) tax-exemption applications, it equally tormented liberals and conservatives. No big deal, the argument goes. The IRS suffers from even-handed inefficiency rather than an un-American habit of slamming critics of the president of the United States. Unfortunately for the Obamites, actual facts annihilate their institutional-incompetence defense. New data deepen the suspicion that the IRS is the latest and most worrisome weapon in the left’s arsenal. Using his authority under Internal Revenue Code Section 6103, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) requested and received data...

There is no connection, of course, between the prosecution of Whitey Bulger and the recent spate of scandals and revelations roiling the Obama administration. Or is there? * * * The corruption of the federal government was a key element in Bulger’s trial, as it was in so much of his sadistic career. Officials charged with defending the public from gangsters like Bulger used their considerable influence to defend the gangster instead. * * * The Bulger trial, the IRS scandal, and our surveillance state are the latest reminders that even the best government in the world depends on human...

WASHINGTON – For President Barack Obama, August was supposed to be the time when a major immigration bill landed on his desk. There was hope for movement on a deficit deal with Republicans, and in the optimistic early days of his second term, even a belief that he would have achieved stricter gun laws. Instead, Obama finds his fifth year in office beset by distractions, perhaps none with broader implications than the revelation of secret government surveillance programs. That matter dominated Obama’s hourlong news conference Friday. The issues that the White House had hoped to be promoting this summer? They...

Sarah Palin joined Eric Bolling on Fox News this morning to take a mini-victory lap over some Democrats suddenly embracing the idea she put forth years ago over health care “death panels.” Palin felt somewhat vindicated, but didn’t want to “condone them… for trying to jump off the Obama train wreck.” She told Bolling that rationing was in the health care law from the beginning, and the Democrats who didn’t notice it until now did not want to look like “buffoons.” Palin also took the media to task for wasting an opportunity at President Obama‘s big press conference to grill...

<p>In what is as close to saying 'trust us, we're from the government,' as it gets; President Obama's traitor-identifying, blame-pointing, cover-your-assing speech on Friday has done nothing to end the supposedly "critical NSA counter-terrorism tool," from being used on American citizens. People of America should be relieved, as the President stated unequivocally that he is "comfortable that the program is not being abused." If only American citizens were able to see all the moving pieces, Obama implied, they would say "you know what? These [government] folks are following the law," but because the program remains classified, it remains impossible to know what is really going on. Reassuring rhetoric aside, as the AP notes, Obama offered these inspiring words regarding the ongoing concerns that law-abiding citizens may still have beyond his assurances: "I would be worried too, if I weren't inside the government." Another teleprompter-less glimpse of what he really thinks? Perhaps; but for now, the NSA will continue to sweep phone records of all Americans with the possibility of creating similar databases of credit card transactions, hotel records, and Internet searches.</p>

What really happened to Navy SEAL Team 6? In August 2011, the elite special forces unit suffered the worst battlefield calamity in its history. A Taliban fighter shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying 22 Navy SEAL Team 6 members in Afghanistan. All 38 persons on board — the Navy SEAL warriors, other U.S. military personnel and seven Afghan soldiers — were killed. Grieving family members have been demanding answers. They may now get some as Congress finally opens an investigation. Navy SEAL Team 6 has attained international prominence for one reason: They were responsible for killing Osama bin Laden. They...

The intensity of the Obama administration's participation in this cover-up became clear in May 2012. At that time, Congress had placed a clause inside the Defense Appropriations Act requiring the Pentagon to award Purple Hearts to Ft. Hood's victims. Rather than accept this eminently reasonable demand, which simply required the administration to acknowledge reality, Obama's emissaries announced he would veto the appropriations bill and so leave the Pentagon without a budget unless the clause was removed. SNIP THE SAME is the case with regards to the September 11, 2012, attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Already on the day...

August 8, 2013 Column One: When failure carries no cost By CAROLINE B. GLICK This week, after a three-and-a-half-year delay, US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was finally placed on trial for massacring 13 and wounding 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. Hasan was a self-identified jihadist. His paper and electronic trail provided mountains of evidence that he committed the massacre to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. Islamic supremacists like Hasan, and his early mentor al-Qaida operations chief Anwar al-Awlaki, view as enemies all people who oppose totalitarian Islam’s quest for global domination. Before, during and...

The Brain Dead American Media missed this veiled threat in Obama's opening statement: "We shouldn’t forget the difference between the ability of our government to collect information online under strict guidelines and for narrow purposes, and the willingness of some other governments to throw their own citizens in prison for what they say online" Tell that to the arab who made a movie and posted it to the Net and who was blamed for creating the Benghazi Attacks ? Tell that to all those who have been surveilled by federal agencies using the NSA databases ? Obama often uses words...

... Obama said yesterday that he would pursue reforms to open the legal proceedings surrounding government surveillance programs to greater scrutiny, the administration’s most-concerted response yet to a series of disclosures about secret monitoring efforts. At his first full news conference in more than three months, Obama said he intends to work with Congress on proposals that would add an adversarial voice — such as a lawyer assigned to advocate privacy rights — to the secret proceedings...

But there is more that is far from funny. Not only did I publicly detail the misfeasance of Magistrate Judge Robinson in dismissing the indictment against the fugitive Elizabeth Duke in my Petition, I requested in my Motion to Expedite that the Court let me file ex parte and under seal information which would explain "why" the Obama Department of Justice took the extraordinary step -- in violation of their own regulations -- to orally move without explanation to dismiss an indictment against a fugitive terrorist.

Small business owners across the country are receiving letters from the IRS questioning if they are reporting all of their cash income, in a new push by the agency some are saying could unnecessarily create fear in the small business community. The Wall Street Journal reports the initiative is an attempt to respond to what the agency feels is a widespread failure by small businesses to report all their cash sales. The agency says the letters are not the same as an audit, and it is simply seeking more tax information from the businesses. However, some lawmakers and business owners...

Thousands of small-business owners have received letters from the Internal Revenue Service questioning whether they are underreporting their business income, a harbinger of a broader initiative aimed at boosting federal tax receipts and ensuring compliance. The program is the latest move in the agency's effort to combat what it sees as a widespread problem: failure by businesses, including mom-and-pops, to report all cash sales in order to minimize tax bills. Tax officials say the letters don't constitute an audit and instead are simply a request for more information. Some business owners and some lawmakers, however, call the new IRS program...

Cleta Mitchell is the prominent Washington attorney whose practice has given her a front row seat on the IRS scandals. On the just completed NR cruise Cleta gave one of the most compelling presentations involving topical matters of current interest. I asked her if she would let me record some of her comments in four short videos. **snip**In the video below Cleta discusses the almost unbelievable case of True the Vote founder and president Catherine Engelbrecht. Jillian Kay Melchior aptly calls it “True Scandal.” Can it happen here? In Obama’s America, it apparently can. Listen up!

In just about seven weeks, people will be able to start buying Obamacare-approved insurance plans through the new health care exchanges. But already, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is predicting those plans, and the whole system of distributing them, will eventually be moot. Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.” “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said. When then asked...

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?by Jon RappoportJune 11, 2013Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo. That still doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.Snowden’s exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn’t mean we have the whole story.How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned...

Author Diana West says the Obama administration’s attempts to engage with the Islamic world are “very similar” to the “appeasement” policies pursued by Cold War-era presidents towards the Soviet Union. “[The Benghazi attack] is sort of the ideological anomaly, the thing that is not supposed to happen,” West, the author of “American Betrayal,” told The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas. “It threatens the whole strategic premise of supporting al Qaeda in Libya — This is what we did to over throw Gaddafi. This doesn’t really seem to have even registered with the Congressmen now investigating…It’s reality, it’s what happens when you...

Obama to Unveil New Plans for Surveillance Transparency President Could Also Address Terrorism Threat, Russian Relations By JARED A. FAVOLE And PETER NICHOLAS WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is set to announce new measures Friday to "increase transparency and restore public trust" in government surveillance programs, according to a House aide briefed on the plan. The president is expected to disclose specifics at a press conference scheduled for 3 p.m. Eastern time. The press conference, his first in months, comes amid a swirl of pressing issues, including the surveillance programs, new terrorism threats and the deeper chill in Russian relations. Mr. Obama...

Associated Press reporter Julie Pace told the Special Report panel on Fox News that his clipped response when asked about Benghazi Friday showed his discomfort with the topic that has beleaguered his administration for nearly a year. Fox News correspondent Ed Henry asked Obama about his promise to hold the attackers responsible for the Benghazi terrorist attack last September:BRET BAIER: Julie, Ed Henry asked about Benghazi and the president September 12th of last year saying that those responsible will be brought to justice. Take a listen to his answer.OBAMA: I also said that we’d get bin Laden and i didn’t...

Charging that Delaware officials have stopped cooperating with his investigation, Sen. Chuck Grassley on Friday sent a pointed letter to the state's Division of Revenue in which he outlines specific, outstanding questions that still swirl around the handling of former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell’s tax records. “On multiple occasions, my staff has requested a copy of your records retention policy, the opportunity to speak with [officials at the state's Division of Revenue] and other clarifications related to these matters. To date, you have failed to respond,” the letter from the Iowa Republican reads in part. In a case first...

It just never stops. Here on the European continent, the bureaucrats who run the EU have recently proven to the world how much a ‘government guarantee’ is really worth. We’ve been discussing in this column lately how the modern banking system is a total fraud– that dictatorial control of 70% of the world’s money supply has been awarded to just four central bankers. And that the vast majority of banks, especially in the western world, are laughably illiquid… and very thinly capitalized. But most people never really worry too much about their banks. We’re told, pratically since birth, that banks...

Dr. Orly Taitz has been pushing the Barack Obama eligibility issue for some time now. She has sought to go specifically through the court system and back in February she attempted to (Obama Eligibility Case Requested To Move To Oral Arguments At US Supreme Court) move to oral arguments on Obama’s eligibility to hold the office of president of the United States. She is also one that ( questions the motives) of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Mike Zullo in their investigation. In June she presented

Talk to the hand. I got a plane to catch.

This is how Democrats say thanks– Today Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went on KNPR in Las Vegas to discuss current affairs. One question he faced was about union uproar over Obamacare. Harry Reid said it’s time for them to give up their Cadillac plans and “put some skin in the game.” “Let’s understand where we are with the unions. One of the things we’ve learned with all of the hearings we held, dozens and dozens of them, is that if you have insurance you have to be able to have some skin in the game as we say in...

Few Democratic or Republican leaders have been as outspoken in their views on the Benghazi debacle and the administration’s role in a potential gun-running scheme than Sen. Rand Paul. In fact, the Kentucky Republican excoriated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her recent testimony on the matter, saying that if he had been president at the time, he would have “relieved” her of her post. Since then, the senator has been consistently pressing the administration for answers on whether it had been running guns through Libya, thereby catalyzing the death of Ambassador Stevens. A partial transcript of the senator’s...

President Barack Obama doesn’t have a strong hand or the dominant personality needed to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that’s why the United States backed out of a September one-on-one meeting, says Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. “If they neither fear you nor respect you, it’s going to be awfully hard to talk them into letting (NSA leaker Edward) Snowden come back into the United States in our custody,” King said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity.” …

What exactly happened at the U.S. consulate and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi on September 11, 2012? We now know that dozens of CIA operatives at the CIA Annex who survived the second attack have been shuffled around the country living under assumed names, forbidden to talk to the press; forbidden to talk to Congress, and are given monthly polygraph tests to ensure that they keep their mouths shut. Despite the Obama regime’s gag order on these CIA agents, the truth—or at least part of the truth—has come out. Dozens of the al-Qaeda offshoot Ansar al-Sharia stormed the consulate with...

(Washington, D.C., August 6, 2013) Last week, Freedom Watch, led by chairman and former prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, Larry Klayman, unveiled in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the likely leaker of classified state secrets to Washington New York Times chief correspondent David Sanger. There are unprecedented revelations, printed in the Times, that reveal the nation's cyber-warfare sources and methods against Iran's nuclear reactors and Israeli war plans among other classified leaks of sensitive information that severely harmed U.S.-Israeli national security. These leaks were perpetrated in the lead-up to the 2012 elections,...

Maybe it was the upbeat mood of a man about to go on vacation, but President Obama seemed feistier than usual in making the case today for his policies on surveillance, health care and immigration reform. During his second term, Obama has sometimes seemed back on his heels in defending his policies against Republican attack, but that wasn’t the case in his White House news conference Friday. He argued for what he called, at one point, “common sense” solutions, with seeming confidence that he has the upper hand politically against the GOP. Obama’s attempts to hold the middle ground, and...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Here are 239 examples of Barack Obama’s lying, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, etc. In the 2008 United States election, I wrote in Ron Paul for President. In the 2012 election, I voted for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. Those who are of a more leftist persuasion than myself might want to consider voting for the Green Party in future elections. Some of the things on this list are major events that should scare the daylights out of any true liberal who cares about civil liberties.Other things on this list are medium things that some Obama supporters may...

A new video shows Lois Lerner talking about the pressure being brought to bear on the IRS to halt GOP money going into the 2010 election: Newly uncovered video shows Lois Lerner discussing the political pressure that swirled around the IRS in 2010. Lerner says "everyone" was "screaming at" the IRS to stop the flood of money pouring into the 2010 elections through 501(c)(4) groups as a result of Citizens United. Lerner spoke to a small group at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy on October 19, 2010, just two weeks before the wave election that brought the Tea Party...

A key figure in the State Department’s Benghazi attack response team has become the central target in an email probe launched by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). Issa on Thursday demanded that Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s former spokeswoman and current assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, hand over every email she sent between Sept. 11, 2012 and Sept. 16, 2012. Nuland played a key role in crafting the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi, Libya attacks that killed four Americans. Congressional critics such as Issa believe that Nuland helped the White House obfuscate...

White House: NSA monitors ‘very small percentage’ of Web traffic By Justin Sink - 08/08/13 02:43 PM ET White House press secretary Jay Carney defended National Security Agency programs on Thursday, saying they "examine only a very small percentage" of the world’s Internet traffic. Carney insisted that emails sent by ordinary Americans overseas were "not being read" and that NSA was only collecting information it was "explicitly authorized" to collect. "And while NSA analysts examine only a very small percentage of the world's traffic, if communications of U.S. persons are incidentally collected, the agency must follow minimization procedures that are...

CNN spent an hour of prime time Tuesday night to air a special anchored by Erin Burnett, “The Truth about Benghazi.” They claimed to have learned two vital lessons from their supposedly extensive investigation of that tragedy: It must never happen again, and politics trumped patriotism. Really? That’s it? Are you kidding? The smiling, earnest naivete of Ms. Burnett suggested a graduate student who worked, you know, like really hard at the library all weekend — but apparently didn’t get within spitting distance of a reasonable conclusion.

In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted..

I can't for the life of me, folks, figure out WHY Boehner and Congress have not to date used their legal and Constitutional powers of appointing special prosecutors to try corrupt government officials in the Obama Administration over "phony scandals" Benghazi, the IRS Tea Party targeting, NSA and others? This seems especially poignant since Boehner said that it mattered set (IRS) agents would end up in jail over tea party targeting!? Now they act like nothing has happened/Have they gone limp? Maybe it's time to remind Boehner and all that they have this power? (202)-225-0600.

The seeds of the IRS targeting of conservative groups were planted by Eric Holder in 2001 when as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton he convinced incoming Attorney General John Ashcroft to seize the building of a conservative megachurch, says the church’s retired pastor. “Our church was taken over by the IRS in 2001 based on the recommendations of Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to incoming Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft,” said Greg Dixon, former pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. “The church was the sacrificial lamb to pave the way for the future targeting of conservative groups. We...

I was recently over at the website 'Obama Release Your Records' viewing their articles and came across a revealing post in the comments section by king obot Kevin Davidson aka Dr. Conspiracy. He runs a disinformation website called 'Obama Conspiracy Theories' that claims Obama's birth certificate is 100% authentic. He opposes Sheriff Joe Arpaio's investigation into Obama's birth certificate and selective service registration. The post revealed that Mr. Davidson is trying to get Sheriff Joe's Cold Case Posse in trouble with the IRS. His post states: "I and some other anti-birthers have referred certain matters to the IRS that we...

“If you thought the IRS targeting — scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it — was forgotten, think again,� said CNN’s Jake Tapper, introducing Dana Bash’s report last night on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s expansion of the probe. Issa requested information from the Federal Election Commission after leaked e-mails suggested that coordination may have taken place between the two agencies in pursuit of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. That may increase the focus on one particular figure in the scandal, as well as potentially add more to it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO House Oversight Committee...

In another exclusive about the investigatory practices of the executive branch, Reuters uncovered an IRS manual that instructed its agents to concoct phony investigative trails when using tips from the DEA’s Special Operations Division. The manual, found in an archive of Reuters’ parent company, mirrors the instructions given to DEA agents building cases for prosecution: Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.The practice of recreating the investigative trail,...

Reuters) - Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years. The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defence lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips...

Two different conservative organizations with whom we’ve got contacts have received letters from Sen. Dick Durbin’s office today which look an awful lot like the actions that precipitated the IRS scandal. Apparently there’s a massive fishing expedition afoot. This came to the our buddy Kevin Kane at the Pelican Institute… Dear Mr. Kane, I write to seek information regarding your organization’s position on “stand your ground” legislation that was adopted as a national model by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

...Interview after interview of IRS employees by congressional investigators began to expose the inconsistencies in the administration’s narrative. There were no “rogue” agents, only employees who followed the implicit or explicit directions of more senior IRS officials in Washington. When Washington told Cincinnati IRS employees to “hold” other tea party cases while officials in Washington scrutinized early “test cases” concerning the group, they did it. When Washington told them to assign a tea party case coordinator, they obliged. Employees also told investigators that the IRS chief counsel’s office was not, as the American people were first led to believe, merely...