Free Republic

WASHINGTON–It’s been two years since the IRS targeting scandal broke, but Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, said on Thursday they’re still looking for answers.The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, chaired by Cruz, on Wednesday questioned IRS Commissioner John Koskinen about the agency’s cooperation with investigations, and rehashed accusations of a White House conspiracy to target conservative groups.“The American people have a right to be angry when an instrument of the american government is used a partisan cudgel,” said Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate running on abolishing the IRS. “I have to...

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

“We are treating this as an act of domestic terrorism,” said Bill Killian, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee. U.S. Attorney William C. Killian said. However, Killian said that the investigation would bear out precisely what kind of crime this was, and he cautioned people not to get caught up in the label. (Washington Post) How ironic that it is Bill Killian – who was the most reluctant official to speak at today’s press conference. William Killian is the Department of Justice official who vowed to criminalize social postings on Facebook and Twitter.

The archbishop of Philadelphia said Monday that Roman Catholic school officials who fired a married gay teacher showed uncommon “character and common sense.” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said the nuns and board members who run Waldron Mercy Academy are not seeking controversy, but simply following the church’s teaching. Chaput, in a statement, thanked school leaders “for taking the steps to ensure that the Catholic faith is presented … in accord with the teaching of the church. They’ve shown character and common sense at a moment when both seem to be uncommon.” …

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees erased computer backup tapes a month after officials discovered that thousands of emails related to the tax agency's tea party scandal had been lost, according to government investigators. The investigators, however, concluded that employees erased the tapes by mistake, not as part of an attempt to destroy evidence. As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were erased, according to J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The revelation is likely to fuel conspiracy theories among conservatives who say the IRS has obstructed congressional investigations into the scandal. George...

In discussing the scandal engulfing former House speaker Dennis Hastert, who is due in court this week, one thing must be made absolutely clear. What he is alleged to have done to young boys has absolutely nothing to do with being gay or gay rights. * Almost immediately after the news broke of Hastert’s indictment, folks looked to Congress for signs of hypocrisy. Former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, made an assertion during an appearance on Huffington Post Live last Monday that was flat-out inappropriate. “Dennis Hastert twice as speaker tried to get the house to pass a...

Sen. Whitehouse: Bring RICO Charges Against Climate Wrongthink By Walter Olson on 6.5.15 Another step toward criminalizing advocacy: writing in the Washington Post, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) urges the U.S. Department of Justice to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change, with the activities of “conservative policy” groups an apparent target of the investigation as well. A trial balloon, or perhaps an effort to prepare the ground for enforcement actions already afoot?

Writing online, author Elisa Gabbert answered one of her reader's questions about whether he should stop writing because of his "privilege" of being white and male. An anonymous reader asked Gabbert: "I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals in and out of the writing community—but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t...

<p>People line up Wednesday morning at the clerk’s office of the Court of Appeals’ in Madison for the release of thousands of emails and other records that have been under court seal. The records open a new window into the years-long John Doe probe run by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm. John Doe proceedings are often conducted in secret and give prosecutors the power to compel people to produce documents and testify.</p>

Writing in the Washington Post, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, offered a curious suggestion for dealing with global warming skeptics: (Snip) That's right -- a sitting U.S. Senator is suggesting RICO laws should be applied to global warming skeptics. Courts have been defining RICO down for some time and in ways that aren't particularly helpful. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled RICO statutes could be applied to pro-life activists on the grounds that interstate commerce can be affected even when the organization being targeted doesn't have economic motives. (Snip) In February, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., attempted a...

There may be evidence that the government agency in charge of enforcing Oregon anti-discrimination laws colluded against Aaron and Melissa Klein, former owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery, with the pro-LGBT group Basic Rights Oregon. The Daily Signal, the news arm of The Heritage Foundation, exposed the communications contact between officials at the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries and Basic Rights Oregon, obtained through a public records request, in their story titled, "Emails Raise Questions of Bias in Case Against Bakers Who Denied Service for Same-Sex Wedding." The communications between the two groups raises questions of the impartiality...

Judicial Watch has just released a new batch of documents forced out of the IRS that show the Obama administration’s scandalous misuse of the IRS to target Tea Party and other conservatives goes far deeper than realized. Included in the new batch of documents is a February 2012 email from Lois Lerner, who was then head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations Branch, asking that a special program be set up to “put together some training points to help [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of revealing too much information to Congress. Amid the hundreds of released pages, Judicial Watch also...

FULL TITLE: Green Billionaire Activist Tom Steyer Escalates His War On Science, Truth And Western Industrial Civilisation Billionaire activist Tom Steyer, a household name here at Breitbart, has created a “war room” targeting Republican political candidates who are sceptical of climate change. Aiming to swing the results in 2016, Steyer’s campaign will ‘put candidates in the hot seat for their climate denial’ and attempt to link the GOP to “Big Oil” and the Koch brothers wherever possible. Steyer said he would spend “what it takes” for this campaign rather than committing to a specific figure beforehand.

One of the most admirable things about Europe is that most (if not all) of the right-wing rhetoric that you hear in the US is explicitly against the law there. For example, attempting to link Islam with terrorism, saying that gay marriage isn’t really marriage, or saying that trans women aren’t really women would get you charged with discrimination and/or incitement to hatred. Numerous European public figures have been charged with hate crimes for implying that large-scale immigration is connected to higher crime. In fact, a politician in Sweden was prosecuted for hate crimes for posting statistics about immigrant crime...

In my column on the plea agreement the Obama Justice Department allowed David Petreaus to enter after it was discovered that he mishandled classified information, I noted that he had been required to sign a separation agreement when he left the CIA. It is called a “Security Exit Form” and is obviously the CIA version of the State Department departure form described in Jim’s post (and linked in Shannen’s column) that Secretary Clinton should have signed upon leaving government service. The prosecutors’ outline of the evidence against Petraeus includes the following (at pages 11-12, paragraph 27): [O]n or about November...

As two Missouri Police Officers were shot early Thursday morning in Ferguson, amateur video captured the gleeful celebration of a (presumably white) leftist provocateur who bellowed just seconds following the shooting "acknowledgement 9 months ago would have kept that from happening." While Americans both black and white have reacted with horror at the violence in Ferguson, the pseudo-Bolshevik whose voice was captured on tape seemed to revel in the pain suffered to the two law enforcement personnel. KerryPicket_viaYouTubeA 32-year-old Webster Groves police officer was shot in the face and a 41-year-old St. Louis County police officer was shot in the shoulder...

Former four-star general and CIA chief David Petraeus pleaded guilty to one count of retaining classified information for handing over information in personal notebooks to his biographer girlfriend in 2011. He agreed to pay a $40,000 fine; prosecutors said they would recommend two years' probation instead of prison, although a judge could decide otherwise. It's a sad close to a government career for the man whose counterinsurgency strategy turned around the war in Iraq. He's an American hero who seemed all that much more upright when he resigned in November 2012 after admitting to an affair that compromised his position...

An Indianapolis bakery that drew national media attention a year ago after refusing to make a cake for a same-sex “wedding” has closed its doors. Randy and Trish McGath, the owners of the former 111 Cakery, said they closed the business down because Trish, the shop’s primary baker, was tired and wanted to spend more time with her grandchildren. The work was “wearing [Trish] out,” said Randy, who has since transitioned to a job selling recreational vehicles. Last March, the McGaths endured a campaign of internet harassment by homosexual activists after a local television station reported that the couple had...

The Justice Department is stepping up scrutiny of the increasingly cozy ties between candidates and their outside allies, a move that could jolt the freewheeling campaign-finance atmosphere ahead of the 2016 elections. A rare conviction of a Virginia campaign operative this month is part of a broader focus on cases in which candidates may be violating a federal ban on sharing strategic information with well-funded independent allies, Justice officials said. “The opportunity to commit the crime has increased dramatically,” said Justice spokesman Peter Carr. “Illegal coordination is difficult to detect, which is why we strongly encourage party or campaign insiders...

In an exit interview, the attorney general says his critics may be partly driven by race.