Free Republic

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...

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!)...

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...

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..

“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...

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Obama Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for withholding documentation from Congress in the ongoing IRS Tea Party Scandal investigation. The Oversight Committee accuses the Obama Administration of impeding and obstructing the investigation. “During the past two weeks, President Obama and you have repeatedly labeled the IRS’s strategy of targeting Americans for their political beliefs as a ‘phony’ scandal. While the Obama Administration has so publicly deflected responsibility for the targeting, it simultaneously has attempted to thwart congressional oversight into the matter… the IRS has engaged in a systematic effort to delay, frustrate,...

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.

It feels like House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has spent half of his tenure trying to pry improperly redacted information out of The Most Transparent Administration, Evah‘s obfuscating death grip. Fortunately, however, it’s a role from which Chairman Issa does not shy. At a hearing this morning with acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel, Issa grilled Werfel on the omitted documents he feels the IRS is slow-rolling the Committee on turning over, as well as the heavily redacted ones they have turned over — finally prompting Issa to assert the the agency has left him no choice...

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team. In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic. In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against...

Months later, the IRS is still targeting activists who oppose Obama's policies. By Katrina Trinko Months after the inspector general’s report in May that revealed the IRS had specifically targeted tea-party groups applying for tax-exempt status as charitable organizations, the IRS continued to stall pro-life groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to the Thomas More Society (TMS). What President Obama condemned as one of various “phony scandals” isn’t nearly over yet.

When Obama condemns “phony scandals,” we can assume investigators are getting warm. Back on May 13, President Obama reacted heatedly to news that the IRS had delayed and harassed conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. “I have got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” he told reporters. How is the president living up to that pledge? At best, meh. At worst, we are seeing a slow-motion cover-up. In a speech he made last week, he railed against an “endless parade” of “phony scandals”...

The old adage says that where there's smoke, there's fire is getting truer with every new revelation in the ongoing IRS scandal. Since the onset of the scandal, America has been told a pack of lies from the Obama administration and various federal agencies. First they claimed that it was just a couple of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office, which has been refuted in that orders came down from Washington to interfere with conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Then we found out that other federal agencies got involved with harassing and intimidating tea party conservative groups. Next came the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has chosen a retired corporate and government official with experience managing numerous organizations in crisis to take over an Internal Revenue Service under fire for targeting political groups. Obama said his nominee for commissioner of the tax agency, John Koskinen, "is an expert at turning around institutions in need of reform." "With decades of experience, in both the private and public sectors, John knows how to lead in difficult times, whether that means ensuring new management or implementing new checks and balances," Obama said in a statement. "Every part of our government must operate...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American...

The House’s chief investigative committee on Tuesday accused the IRS of stonewalling its probe into the agency's unfair targeting of Tea Party groups and other politically-affiliated organizations, saying Congress has received only a fraction of the documents it requested and many of those are useless. The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee letter directly blames acting Commissioner Danny Werfel for the “systematic manner” in which his agency has “attempted to delay, frustrate, impede and obstruct” the committee’s investigation, despite his promising just weeks earlier to fully cooperate. “The actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the...

Amazingly, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew doesn't think it's "appropriate" for him simply to ask the IRS's chief counsel (and President Obama's political appointee) William Wilkins what he knows about the targeting scandal. Obviously, it's much easier to continue to insist that there's "no evidence" of wrongdoing if one goes far out of one's way to avoid learning any potentially unwelcome facts. Jack Lew Refuses To Answer If William Wilkins Has Been Asked About IRS Targeting

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace went after Treasury Secretary Jack Lew over the investigation—or lack thereof, in Wallace’s estimation—of alleged targeting by the IRS of conservative 501(c)(4) groups. The IRS scandal—which had receded in recent weeks after an audit by the Inspector General revealed progressive groups were scrutinized in addition to conservative organizations, and produced no evidence linking the behavior to a political appointee—was revived this week when President Barack Obama’s invoked “phony scandals” in his speech in Galesburg, Illinois. Lew was directed by Obama to follow up on the Inspector General’s report

The establishment press's general refusal to cover clearly newsworthy developments in the Obama administration scandal involving the targeting of conservative, tea party, prolife and other groups by the Internal Revenue Service has been so negligent and blatant that several leading conservatives, including the MRC's Brent Bozell and talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, called it out in an open letter earlier this week. Consistent with the rest of their colleagues, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, appears to have had no substantive story on the scandal since July 18 -- and that one was about primarily Democrats beating the false meme...

Americans voted twice for a big-government President, and now we’re beginning to experience the impact of big government. Are you shocked? It’s been nearly five years of the President and Congress spending future generations into the oblivion of debt, the Executive Branch securing control over huge chunks of the private economy (two car companies, multiple banks and the health care industry are only part of it), and a dramatic expansion of both the defined role, and the powers of the IRS. At this point in the Obama presidency, we the people should not be surprised by a government that has...

When on today's Morning Joe, Obama spokesman Jay Carney had the chutzpah to call the IRS mess a "phony scandal,"Joe Scarborough ripped into him, calling Carney out for using "talking points," instructing him to "answer the question" and informing Carney that "I'm not somebody you talk down to from your podium." Ouch! H/t NB reader cobokat. Scarborough reminded Carney that he hadn't told the truth when he initially claimed that the scandal was limited to low-level employees in the IRS Cincinnati office, that it now appears that it may go at least as high as the IRS Chief Counsel, appointed...

If you are looking for a political-judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment, or a special prosecutor to hold accountable the unlawful acts coming out of the Obama administration, beginning with the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse and targeting of conservatives, Tea Party groups, and Christians, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s re-election in his favor. The IRS targeting reportedly began as early as 2010. Three years later, no one has been held accountable and the facts continue to drip out in slow motion. Last week, for instance, as the Daily Caller reported,...

A conservative group suing the Internal Revenue Service on Monday amended its lawsuit over the agency’s processing of its request for tax-exempt status to include the agency’s chief counsel, William Wilkins. Acting on behalf of True the Vote , a Houston-based voter watchdog group, the ActRight Legal Foundation first asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in late May to grant its request for tax-exempt status and award damages for what it described as unlawful conduct by the IRS. Last week, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) released a transcript in which an...

The IRS insists that there is no legal remedy for determining whether an applicant's constitutional rights have been violated, and that offended parties must be satisfied with a "good enough" remedy, even if it is not perfect. The IRS is doing everything it can to prevent accusers from determining whether its decision making processes violated the constitutional rights of applicants for tax exempt status On Friday, July 19, in federal district court in Washington, D.C., Department of Justice lawyers who have the misfortune of having to represent the Internal Revenue Service were forced to reveal exactly how desperate the IRS...

Obama-appointed IRS Chief Counsel is sued. IRS targeted Christine O’Donnell. So. Buckle in. True the Vote, the Tea Party-style group targeted by Internal Revenue Service officials who are now at the very heart of the IRS scandal, is suing William Wilkins. That would be the William Wilkins who is the IRS Chief Counsel. True the Vote, “the nation’s leading voters’ rights and election integrity organization,” is announcing today that it is adding Wilkins — one of only two Obama political appointees to the IRS — to its federal lawsuit against the IRS. The group is also adding five other ranking...

A top former Obama Cabinet member who met with IRS officials at the White House during the targeting scandal is currently out of the country, a White House source told The Daily Caller. Former acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeffrey Zients has still not returned from an overseas exile that began after his departure from the Obama administration in April, two weeks before the IRS scandal broke. Zients met with then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman and Shulman’s political aide Jonathan Davis and spokesman Frank Keith at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House complex on April...

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office...

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, met with Obama on April...

What was the IRS chief counsel doing in a meeting with the President of the United States?  According to the Daily Caller and Dick Morris and verified by downloadable visitor logs, William Wilkins came to the White House on April 23, 2012 at 3:54 in the afternoon and departed shortly after 11 pm that evening.  Assuming that Jay Carney doesn’t personally know three William Wilkins who would get seven hours of face time with Barack Obama, it appears that the man who at least knew of the targeting of Tea Party and other groups had an opportunity to brief the...

I have never, in my life, seen such a level of stupefying and willful ignorance and irrationality exhibited in a debate over current events or public policy as I have with the verbal storm that has darkened our horizon over the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. This manic opinionating by people with no grasp of the facts truly has been enough to cause a rational and balanced person to run screaming from social media into hiding under an obscure motel bed somewhere in West Kansas. Seriously! There are people making asinine (and worse) statements about the Zimmerman verdict on Twitter and...

Chairmen demand additional information regarding internal discussions about the status of Tea Party groups. WASHINGTON – Several high-ranking Republican lawmakers are seeking additional documents from the Internal Revenue Service following revelations that the agency’s practice of blocking requests for tax-exempt status from several political groups may involve an official close to the White House. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is probing the ongoing IRS scandal, led a group of four committee and subcommittee chairmen asking Daniel Werfel, commissioner of the nation’s tax collection agency, to provide additional information regarding internal discussions...

Newly released information shows a very close relationship between President Obama and his man at the IRS, who delayed the Tea party applications. William Wilkins is a long time donor to the democratic party and once fought a case against the IRS in which he defended Jerimiah Wright and the Trinity Church in 2008. Wilkins was a registered lobbyist for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr since 1988, and was also a member of the Tax Practice Group, where he counseled nonprofits on compliance. As a lobbyist, he spread money around to both republicans and democrats, but Wilkins worked for...

Barack Obama issued an executive order on July 16, 2013 titled “HIV Care Continuum Initiative” which he claims will be a national movement and federal involvement in the war on HIV/AIDS. According to the executive order, recommendations are that HIV testing be administered for “all individuals ages 15 to 65 years” and this will be overseen by the US Preventative Services Task Force, coordinating with, you guessed it, criminal Kathleen Sebelius’ Department of Health and Human Services.

We can now officially say that the IRS harassment of conservative groups is a political scandal connected to the Obama political machine. Despite the best obfuscatory efforts of Obama henchmen like Rep. Elijah Cummings, yesterday the IRS scandal was tied to a political appointee of President Obama. Step-by-step the chain is being followed upward by the House Oversight Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa. Jay Carney's assurances that two rogue agents in a back office in the 27th most populous metropolis of America were the problem has been exposed as a blatant, outrageous lie. Now we know that Obama's hand-picked...

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel. That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed...

BOOM! FOX News reporter Carl Cameron told Bill O’Reilly tonight that House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) has information that will move the IRS scandal up into the White House. The committee is meeting on Thursday. “What he said to me today was make sure to watch tomorrow’s hearing because he’s going to present the evidence to prove it…. That he can get it right up all the way into the White House before it was all revealed.”

So says a low-level IRS whistleblower who will testify on Capitol Hill tomorrow morning.  The Washington Post reports: The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity. Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown...

The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity. Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown that Washington IRS officials were involved in the controversy, but Hull’s comments represent the closest connection to the...

Top House committee chairmen said Wednesday that they have learned that the IRS sent some tea party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status through special scrutiny at the direction of agency officials in Washington, in a revelation that appears to confirm political targeting. The committee chairmen released partial excerpts of interviews with IRS employees that show they were prepared to rule on some of the tea party groups’ applications, but Lois Lerner, an official at the root of the investigation, overruled them and instead created the complex and intrusive inquiries that have become the center of a Washington scandal. Carter Hull,...

Lois Lerner is a nasty piece of work, and one aspect of her arrogance could well be her undoing. She enjoyed wielding her power so much that she boasted about it, and in doing so in a 2011 interview with Business Week, she conceded a point that could be used to prove criminal culpability. Patrick Frey, who writes Patterico's Pontifications, uncovered the incriminating crowing: A reader sends a very interesting tidbit buried in a November 17, 2011 Businessweek.com article about the IRS and not-for-profit universities. The article is about the IRS making inquiries into "whether schools improperly claimed tax-exempt status for...

For a few years during the middle of the 19th Century, a secretive political party rose to prominence in American politics, spurred by a cultural fear of new immigrants from Europe. Membership in the party was tightly limited, and when members were questioned about the party’s activity, they were only to respond: “I know nothing.” Today, more than a century and a half later, we have an adherent of this “know nothing” political philosophy in the White House. President Barack Obama’s standard response to questions about key problems facing his Administration is, “I know nothing.” Obama’s plea of ignorance has...

Most liberals who rail against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case probably don’t realize they’re useful pawns for a sinister cause. These earnest chanters of slogans and sporters of bumper stickers say they want to overturn the case or amend the Constitution to “get big money out of politics.” They think they’re just fighting for clean government. In reality, they’re cheerleading for the Obama administration to wage a broader battle in the long war to intimidate and silence conservative America. Like a horror movie’s teasing scenes, where campers laugh, oblivious to the monster in the shadows, this report is more...

One of the most important and so-far least noted threads in the IRS sandal cloth is the inexplicable remark made by Austan Goolsbee, at the time the Chairman of the White Council of Economic Advisors about the taxes paid by the Koch brothers - arch villains in the Manichean delusions of the American left - that would require his knowledge of their confidential tax returns. Did the White House senior staff illegally browse through the tax records of their political enemies? The Washington Free Beacon has been trying to find out, and uncovered an interesting response: CJ Ciaramella reports: The...

“There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status,” Nyhart said in a statement provided to ABC. “It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.” Visitors to the 1133 19th St. NW office floor shared by Common Cause and Public Campaign are greeted at the sign-in desk for Common Cause, with Public Campaign’s office located to the visitors’ left-hand side. Nyhart described the close relationship between the groups in his April 23 eulogy for Edgar on the...

On Tuesday, William W. Taylor III, attorney for Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the Tea Party targeting scandal who invoked her Fifth amendment rights before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on May 22, set forward his client's hard line conditions to return and testify openly before the committee."They can obtain her testimony tomorrow by doing it the easy way … immunity. That’s the way to resolve all of this," he told Politico.Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was unimpressed. "We hope she comes in and gives us the truth...

...IRS employees were accused of specifically targeting conservative groups for increase scrutiny over applications for tax-exempt status. Despite widespread evidence this wasn’t politically motivated — as well as signs it may have been justified — Republicans have continued to hold the controversy up as an example of government overreach. Today’s story from the New York Times on IRS “filtering” should be the final word on whether this was political targeting or a more mundane instance of mistakes and misjudgments from overworked bureaucrats. This is all a way of saying that, a year from now, we should expect Republicans to run...

'Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet," read the New York Times headline. "Dem: 'Progressive' Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS," said U.S. News. The scandal has "evaporated into thin air," bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn't a scandal but a mere bungle—a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes. The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were...

Acting IRS administrator Danny Werfel is set to appear as the lone witness on Thursday before the House Ways and Means Committee to testify on his report — an update on the agency’s follow-up to an inspector general’s report concluding it inappropriately targeted tea-party groups — in which he said the agency’s discrimination was not limited to conservative organizations but occurred across the ideological spectrum. One member of the committee, who happens to be the fourth-ranking Republican in Congress, is not buying Werfel’s claims. “The IRS is in full spin mode,” Representative Peter Roskam tells National Review Online. The Illinois...

Twelve different groups within the IRS targeted conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, according to the attorneys representing tea party plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the IRS. The revelation disproves the suggestion by a top congressional Democrat that only one IRS group was responsible for scrutinizing tea party and conservative applications.

Republicans on a House committee rejected strenuous Democratic objections in voting Friday that Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner waived her constitutional right against self-incrimination at a prior hearing. The resolution was the first step in an effort by Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee, to force Lerner to return to answer questions about targeting of conservative groups by the unit she headed. It passed on a 22-17 vote, with every Republican in favor and every Democrat opposed, following an unusually vitriolic hearing. ... Under subpoena to testify before Issa's panel on May...