Free Republic

2011, while working as a college English instructor and writing articles for this and other sites about corruption in education, I set up a website called Dissident Prof with my own funds and by working in my basement. After one of my long-time readers sent an unsolicited $500 donation, I decided to apply for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Thus began the ordeal with the IRS. I suffered through fifteen months of stonewalling followed by demands to quickly meet a financial and ideological inquisition. I am now a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against the IRS, because we now know the...

RS Commissioner John Koskinen has declined to testify in his own defense at a congressional hearing Tuesday, but insisted in a statement that his bungling of a subpoena doesn’t rise to the level of “treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors” needed for him to be impeached. The Judiciary Committee hearing is being viewed by some House Republicans as the precursor to impeachment, with the House’s top investigator saying Mr. Koskinen defied a congressional subpoena that demanded all of former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner’s emails be preserved as part of the investigation into tea party targeting. But Mr. Koskinen,...

In October 2015 the DOJ announced it was dropping the investigation into the IRS, Lois Lerner, and the unlawful sharing of taxpayer data in the IRS targeting investigation surrounding True The Vote et al.

The ACLJ has secured an important victory in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case against the IRS on behalf of Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire. After a year of litigation, which followed over four months of waiting for the IRS to respond to its FOIA request, we finally succeeded in compelling the IRS to comply with its obligations under federal law. As we have previously written, Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire issued a FOIA request to the IRS in June 2014 seeking communications between two New Hampshire legislators and certain IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, the IRS's...

This seems to be one of the more popular phrases popping up in both the State Department and the Justice Department these days: prosecutorial discretion. Even though the phrase seems fairly self-explanatory, here’s a quick definition: Prosecutorial discretion refers to the fact that under American law, government prosecuting attorneys have nearly absolute powers. A prosecuting attorney has power on various matters including those relating to choosing whether or not to bring criminal charges, deciding the nature of charges, plea bargaining and sentence recommendation. This discretion of the prosecuting attorney is called prosecutorial discretion. The reason the term is important...

The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case. Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to "materially false" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up. Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.

On Friday, in a letter to the chairman and the ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, Peter Kadzik, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department, let Lois Lerner (shown) off the hook:

WASHINGTON (AP) — No IRS official would face criminal charges arising from the political controversy over the processing of applications for tax-exempt status, the Justice Department announced Friday. In a letter to members of Congress, the department said that while investigators had found "mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia," there was no evidence of a crime. "We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution," the letter stated. The department also announced that Lois Lerner, who headed the division that processes applications for tax-exempt status...

Washington (CNN)The Justice Department notified members of Congress on Friday that it is closing its two-year investigation into whether the IRS improperly targeted tea party and other conservative groups. There will be no charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner or anyone else at the agency, the Justice Department said in a letter.

**SNIP** To know NASCO is to understand why Mr. Jones’ 2007 letter to Lois Lerner, in which he discusses a “sentiment” for charities to become more transparent, is so typical of NASCO’s hypocrisy about transparency, honesty and ethics. Their annual conference was once completely closed off from representatives of nonprofit organizations because NASCO did not like being criticized for their questionable and overbearing tactics. Indeed, in his 2007 letter to Ms. Lerner, Jones criticizes “’push back’ from the nonprofit sector.” These bureaucrats do not like criticism from those they regulate, and they are effective at chastening their critics. Jones also...

Not a smidgen. To date, we’ve been aware of two email accounts used by disgraced IRS official Lois Lerner. The first was her official government account and the second was a personal home account. Both have produced materials salient to the ongoing investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups….And they’re about to be joined by yet another address. HTML5 video is not supported! According to IRS attorney Geoffrey J, Klimas, Lerner a third email account has been uncovered from which Lerner was conducting official IRS business. As the Washington Times reports:

Newly released emails from Lois Lerner show the former IRS official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal calling Republican critics “evil and dishonest,” and even “hateful.” The emails -- part of a report released Aug. 6 by the Senate Finance Committee -- offer a revealing look at Lerner, who used to head the division that processes applications for tax-exempt status and was at the center of the scandal over the alleged targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The bipartisan report found evidence that both the Obama administration’s political agenda, and the personal politics of IRS...

"Near the end of Nien Cheng's Life & Death in Shanghai, there's a mysterious revelation of a motive behind the Cultural Revolution: atonement for a secular sense of sin."A new look at Lois Lerner's IRS e-mails shows her terming conservatives undeserving of 501 tax processing as "evil and dishonest" and "hateful".That should have put them at the front of the queue, targeted for red-carpet treatment, if they are in the same league as a famous political foundation valued in the billion dollar range.

Most Americans tend to agree that Abraham Lincoln was one of this country’s better presidents, having saved the nation from imploding on itself with the Civil War. Former IRS chief Lois Lerner, however, does not apparently have the same thoughts about keeping the South in the union. “Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in 2014. “He should (have) let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.” The Senate Finance Committee released a report yesterday that examined 1.5 million pages of IRS emails. A significant focus...

documents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)... confirm that the IRS used donor lists to tax-exempt organizations to target those donors for audits. The documents also show IRS officials specifically highlighted how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may come under “high scrutiny” from the IRS. The IRS produced the records in a Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking documents about selection of individuals for audit-based application information on donor lists submitted by Tea Party and other 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations....Lois Lerner, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, is mentioned four times in the report...In 2009, Barack Obama “joked” about having the IRS...

Full title: Federal Court Orders IRS to Produce Newly Recovered Lois Lerner Emails, IRS Fails to Meet Court Deadline (Washington, DC ) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton announced today that Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the IRS last week to begin producing, every Monday, nearly 1,800 newly recovered Lois Lerner emails. Judge Sullivan ruled on the matter from the bench during a status conference on July 1, 2015. Despite the court order, the IRS failed to produce any Lois Lerner emails yesterday. The IRS also failed to provide Judicial Watch a status of the Lois Lerner email production issues, as...

Judicial Watch: New Documents Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Plan to Seek Criminal Charges of Obama Opponents (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity. The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving...

I was watching in horror a series of Mark Dice videos of interviews in which passersby signed petitions to repeal the First Amendment toshut down criticism of Obama because it was all clearly racist. petitioned to repeal the Bill of Rights; revealed they didn’t know when and why we celebrate the Fourth of July; signed up to ban the American flag and replace it with a New World Order one. I wanted to believe the people responding were outliers -- just ignorant San Diego beachgoers. Unfortunately there are too many indications they are not, and that this disregard for the...

Agency destroyed e-mails after telling Congress they couldn’t be found. House Republicans investigating the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups are seriously considering an effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen or other agency employees for “culpable misdemeanors” pertaining to the destruction of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, the former official at the heart of the scandal. “We’ve briefed the leadership’s counsel, and I think that they’re open to it, but it’s the type of thing where this town is like, ‘oh, that’s not how we do things, it’s not really been used lately,’” a Republican member of the House Oversight...

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...