Free Republic

The official behind the IRS' conservative nonprofit targeting scandal, Lois Lerner, was friends with the Wisconsin regulator who targeted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's conservative aides and allies. Lerner and Kevin Kennedy, director of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, were friends for 20 years and traded emails on campaign finance, politics, and personal matters between 2011 and 2013, emails obtained by the Wall Street Journal reveal. That was the same time frame the IRS increased its harassment of conservative groups and Wisconsin prosecutors conducted a secret John Doe probe of Walker's allies, raising the troubling question of whether they coordinated their...

Why was the IRS interested in efforts to ensure the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was legitimate? As the Obama Administration seeks to pivot to a new explanation for their activist Internal Revenue Service (IRS), we find out they took particular interest in the Verify the Recall effort which took place in Wisconsin during 2012. Two of the three groups involved in Verify the Recall experienced delays in receiving their non-profit status. More ominously, the IRS asked at least one other conservative organization, in another state, about their relationship with the effort. The North East Tarrant Texas Tea Party...

Madison - State election officials say they likely will need extra time to review recall signatures even though Gov. Scott Walker has said he will not challenge the petitions against him - a move that would give Walker more time to raise unlimited sums of money. Meanwhile, Republican legislators groused Wednesday that the Government Accountability Board was not doing a thorough enough analysis of the signatures even as it was asking them for $975,000 to do its work. "It just seems like they are doing the bare minimum but not enough to instill confidence in the system," said Rep. Robin...

MADISON — The numbers don’t add up, and Wisconsin’s elections watchdog can’t explain it. A third-party analysis of petition signatures in recall campaigns lodged against four Republicansenators found large disparities between the number of signatures claimed by recall committees and the signature count scanned and made public by the Government Accountability Board, or GAB. That means one of two things, said Mark Antill, executive director of TruetheVote.org, a nonprofit aligned with the tea party that advocates for election integrity. Either the campaigns inflated the number of signatures or the GAB, which oversees the state’s campaign finance, elections, ethics and lobbying...

Madison - A Dane County judge on Wednesday doubled the amount of time state election officials could have to review an unprecedented number of recall signatures filed against Gov. Scott Walker and five other Republicans. That will give the Government Accountability Board 61 days instead of 31 days to examine the petitions and determine whether recall elections should be held this summer. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess also granted the Republicans more time to challenge the signatures. Their challenges will be due next month, and the accountability board will take those challenges into account as it determines whether recall...