Free Republic

President Obama’s bewildering response to the mounting Internal Revenue Service scandal has been to simply deny there is a scandal, dismissively labeling it “phony.” He seems confident that in a moral version of rock-paper-scissors, denial always beats accusation, irrespective of the freight of evidence behind it. This has been the top-down strategy for partisan Democrats from the beginning. As head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, Lois Lerner casually insisted any wrongdoing was fully attributable to a few “line people in Cincinnati” who were “not so fine.” Now we’ve learned from the testimony of IRS lawyer Carter Hull that...

Full title: NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue...

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...

IRS-Gate: From stonewalling Congress to Federal Election Commission collusion to harassment of already-tax-exempt conservative groups, the IRS scandal metastasizes. Someone high-up was clearly giving orders. 'Phony scandals," to use President Obama's term, should not generate near-daily news coverage from a media that would like nothing better than to see its dream president let off the hook. Yet everywhere you look comes another bolt of lightning keeping this Frankenstein monster "alive!": • In addition to conservative organizations being ultra-scrutinized in applying for tax-exempt status, existing conservative groups like Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, around since 1979, and the Claire Booth Luce Policy...

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...

There are lots of despicable people in Washington engaged in a lot of unsavory behavior, so it would be very difficult to get agreement if you asked regular people to select the most odious feature of the political class. Many people would probably choose corruption as the defining characteristic of Washington, and it would be hard to argue with that choice, but I think hypocrisy is an even better choice. There's something fundamentally wrong when people push for policies while making sure they don't have to abide by the results. Yet it happens all the time in government. 1. It...

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...

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...

It may turn out that within the IRS abuse of Tea Party, conservative, Jewish and other groups was another layer of abuse: women. Catherine Engelbrecht so far has the most harrowing story to tell, of abuse by multiple executive branch agencies after she founded the grassroots election security watchdog True the Vote. Now former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is naming names, saying that her tax information was compromised the very day she announced her Senate candidacy. That same day, the IRS slapped a lien on a house that it believed she owned, only to withdraw that lien when...

If there was one scandal I thought might actually stick on Barack Obama, it was his widespread use of the Internal Revenue Service to target his political enemies. I should have known better. I witnessed a scandal of this magnitude forgotten about by the media, by Congress and by other investigators after initial outrage was expressed. And that’s exactly what appears to be happening this time around. To review what happened this year, with this administration, the IRS initially admitted holding up tax-exempt letters for tea-party organizations. For days, and even weeks, it was a steady drip, drip, drip with...

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...

Let's see. Six progressive groups were flagged for extra scrutiny by the IRS, while out of 292 tea party groups that applied for special tax-exempt status ALL 292 groups were flagged. Naw....nothing to see here. Move along. Inspector General Russell George: “Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill. The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra...

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.

The IRS has hypocritically ignored the Constitution, having targeted groups whose names included what America once stood for: patriotism, freedom, and the Constitution. This will be emphasized on June 20, when Judicial Watch, the people's watchdog over the government, holds a public panel discussion with some of those who were victimized. American Thinker interviewed Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch's president, and some of those who were harassed and abused by the IRS. Fitton is not surprised by the Obama administration's actions and regards them as a continual Democratic tactic. He told American Thinker how, during the entire Clinton presidency, his group...

When the IRS is accused of “targeting”, don’t assume they’re speaking metaphorically. From Politico: As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, [Jeff] Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability..?“I think Americans raise eyebrows when...

The Affordable Care Act is So Unaffordable, Members of Congress and Their Aides are Quitting Because They Can't Afford It! BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, this is truly outrageous. There's a headline in The Politico today: "Obamacare? We Were Just Leaving..." And when I saw the headline, I thought it was gonna be an article about how Democrats are afraid of losing their seats because of all the skyrocketing costs of health premiums and all the other negatives associated with Obamacare. But that's not what this story is about. What this story's about is congressmen worried about themselves. In...

This little item could give the IRS’ whole “targeting” conservatives scandal a brand-new twist. Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) tweeted that he observed IRS agents training with AR-15s when he toured the Department of Homeland Security: A few weeks ago when I toured a DHS facility I saw #IRS agents training with AR-15's. I'm looking into the issue now. #PJNET

Urgent. While some Tea Party groups testified at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing last week over the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) abuse of power for targeting and harassing them and approximately 500 other conservative groups when they sought tax-exempt status, if you are looking for a political judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment or a special prosecutor to solve the tsunami of unlawful acts coming out of Washington, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election in his favor. The bottom line is this. You can’t get justice within...

Elizabeth Hofacre has turned out to be a gold mine to investigators of political corruption at the IRS. The Cincinnati-office specialist didn’t take kindly to having the entire mess dumped on the shoulders of her colleagues and herself, and has made it plain in depositions that this was no low-level innovation. The Hill became the latest media outlet to peruse the transcripts, and added a little more to the growing public record of the targeting effort’s genesis in Washington rather than Cincinnati: An IRS staffer in Cincinnati told congressional investigators that a Washington official was the driving force behind the...