Free Republic

he FBI and IRS probed allegations that Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign may have benefitted from “campaign finance criminal violations” by allowing a politically connected lawyer to help pay off Hunter Biden’s large tax debts but agents were blocked by federal prosecutors from further action, according to new information uncovered by congressional investigators. The previously unreported campaign finance inquiry was first alluded to in transcribed interviews by House investigators with two IRS agents and a retired FBI supervisor, and the allegations since have been augmented in recent weeks by new evidence uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee, the...

Agreement specifically blames Lois Lerner by name for failures The IRS admitted in court Wednesday that it wrongly targeted tea party and other conservative groups for intrusive scrutiny, placing specific blame on former senior executive Lois G. Lerner, and entered into a settlement designed to make sure that kind of political targeting never takes place again. The filing, made in federal court in Washington, D.C., amounts to a stunning apology from the Trump administration for actions taken under President Barack Obama, when hundreds of tea party and conservative groups were singled out for intrusive screening, forced to wait years for...

Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) asked Koskinen about the process, and for the commissioner to explain the logic behind giving tax refunds to illegal aliens who have committed a theft of a tax-payer’s identification number. Koskinen’s response, according to the Washington Examiner, was that it was in everybody’s interest to have the illegal aliens pay taxes with stolen id’s.

Compiled by: Larry Walker IIIn a February 2014 House Oversight Hearing, J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, stated that, "IRS employees are entrusted with the sensitive personal and financial information of taxpayers. Using this information to perpetrate a criminal scheme for personal gain negatively impacts our Nation’s voluntary tax system and it can generate widespread distrust of the IRS. TIGTA aggressively investigates IRS employees involved in identity theft-related tax refund fraud and refers these investigations to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Many of these employees face significant prison sentences as well as the loss of their...

Homeland Insecurity: The IRS is diligent to a fault when it comes to vetting conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. But it's out to lunch when vetting employees posing security risks. While the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Tea Party patriots in the run-up to last year's presidential election, it dispensed with basic background checks and hired a convicted Islamist traitor as a high-level official. Mohammad Weiss Rasool, whom the FBI busted last decade for tipping off an al-Qaida terrorist suspect, reportedly now works for the deputy IRS chief financial officer as a financial management analyst, drawing a lucrative salary...

Whether Democrat or Republican, do you really want your private tax information leaked with impunity? On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware. Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes. It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says. That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS...

This week, Ben Carson said that shortly after he gave a much-publicized speech criticizing ObamaCare at the National Prayer Breakfast, he found himself audited by the Internal Revenue Service. It makes him suspicious. There was a day when we might have written off a claim like this. But given what we’ve learned about the IRS and its targeting of right-of-center organizations, the burden of proof has shifted. Though the scandal is no longer making headlines, the questions about what was going on with IRS official Lois Lerner and her pals have never been answered. Meanwhile, the storyline fed keeps changing.

Dr. Ben S. Carson went years without ever having a run-in with the Internal Revenue Service. But his good fortune changed after his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in February, the former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon said Monday night at an event with business leaders and elected officials in Alabama. Alabama’s Yellow Hammer News tweeted Dr. Carson’s remarks from the annual Business Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner: “I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the Prayer Breakfast.”

IRS employees were “acutely” aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations and were egged into targeting tea party groups by press reports mocking the emerging movement, according to an interim report being circulated Tuesday by House investigators.

One might expect that the extra scrutiny applied to conservative political groups by the IRS would have ended after the practice got exposed three months ago. At least according to a recent deposition from the House Ways and Means Committee investigation into the scandal, IRS agents still are being directed to automatically apply extra scrutiny to applications mentioning the Tea Party, even if no other political activity is indicated in the application: Q: “If you saw – I am asking this currently, if today a Tea Party case, a group – a case from a Tea Party group came in...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access...

The Internal Revenue Service is still targeting tea party and conservative groups in their applications for tax-exempt status, a full three months after the scandal first erupted. "In plain English, the IRS is still targeting tea party cases," an aide to Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Washington Examiner.Camp, a Michigan Republican, released a transcript of testimony from an IRS agent who told a Ways and Means investigator that the agency was still targeting such groups, the Examiner reports. The testimony was given in a closed-door session on Aug. 1, according to the...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Internal Revenue Service supervisor in Washington says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status, including some requests that languished for more than a year without action. Holly Paz, who until recently was a top deputy in the division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, told congressional investigators she reviewed 20 to 30 applications. Her assertion contradicts initial claims by the agency that a small group of agents working in an office in Cincinnati were solely responsible for mishandling the applications. Paz, however, provided no evidence...

A WTHR-TV Indianapolis investigative report exposes a fraudulent scheme wherein the IRS is sending $4.2 billion per year to illegal immigrants as an "additional child tax credit" for children who don't even live in the U.S. Further, the IRS and Congress have been ignoring the scheme for years. The Inspector General's office has repeatedly identified the problem in audit after audit. The IG, Russell George says, "The magnitude of the problem has grown exponentially," but the IRS is doing nothing to stop it. "It's so easy it's ridiculous," the tax preparer whistleblower who exposed the fraud admits. Names are simply...

The Internal Revenue Service has failed to turn over documents requested by the powerful Senate tax-writing panel, which is investigating the tax agency´s practice of targeting conservative organizations. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the panel´s top Republican, gave the IRS a May 31 deadline to answer dozens of questions related to the special scrutiny the agency was giving to right-leaning groups seeking tax-exempt status. But the troubled IRS let the deadline go by.

The chairman of an anti-gay marriage group testified Tuesday that his organization has proof that the IRS leaked confidential donor details last year, calling for prosecution into what he described as a "felony." "This just smells and I hope this committee gets to the bottom of it," John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, said at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee. Eastman testified Tuesday alongside several Tea Party activists who all claim they were targeted by the IRS. The Tea Party groups offered a first-hand account of how the IRS singled them out when...

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...

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...

Asked if she knew where the attack originated from, she said she does but declined to name the location because it might hurt the law enforcement investigation. She did, however, say she wants the hacker "slammed to the wall." "We want to make sure everybody understands that our State will respond with a big, large-scale plan that is somewhat unprecedented to take care of this problem," Haley said.