How ten high-profile Democrat senators pressured the IRS to harass conservatives.
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released IRS emails show that the harassment of conservatives was directed by higher management in Washington and elsewhere, not confined to low level employees in Cincinnati.
The key fact here is that these emails prove that Lois Lerner and other officials in the Obama administration lied when they made the claim that the harassment was the work of low level employees.
But then, lying by this administration is par for the course.
Less than 24 hours after the House held Lois Lerner in contempt, the IRS has finally agreed to turn over all her emails to House investigators.
Republican lawmakers have been demanding the documents for months and, in March, Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa threatened to hold IRS commissioner John Koskinen in contempt if he did not produce the e-mails requested by the committee. Koskinen had told lawmakers it might take years to produce them. [emphasis mine]
Years, eh? That’s suddenly changed, hasn’t it?
What happens next for Lois Lerner?
The article is an excellent legal analysis of the situation and what could happen next.
The House today voted to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt.
The case now heads to Eric Holder’s Justice Department. I would not hold my breath waiting for them to uphold the law.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS audited 10 percent of all Tea Party donors, a rate much higher than for average Americans.
Republicans said 24 conservative groups were asked for their donor lists. The IRS initially told Congress that those lists were destroyed, but when they went through their files they discovered three lists that weren’t destroyed.
Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS to review the names on those lists to see whether any had been audited. The IRS reported back that 10 percent were audited — substantially higher than the average rate of 1 percent of average Americans who are audited each year.
In other words, the IRS acted as an agent of the Democratic Party to harass and strike fear into their opponents.
The new more sinister IRS scandal.
Yesterday was a significant day in the IRS abuse scandal. The scandal evolved from being about pesky delays in IRS exemption applications to a government conniving with outside interests to put political opponents in prison.
Emails obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act reveal Lois Lerner cooking up plans with Justice Department officials to talk about ways to criminally charge conservative groups that are insufficiently quiet.
Larry Noble, a law professor now with the Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center, was cited in the emails as someone agitating to jail conservatives who “falsely” report on IRS forms that they are not engaged in political speech. Lerner talked about setting up meetings with Justice Department election lawyers who wanted to talk about making Noble’s dreams a reality — this after Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised the idea of criminal charges for conservatives who are not sufficiently quiet, charges that they falsely completed an IRS tax exemption form. [emphasis mine]
It might be illegal to claim tax exemption for non-political activities and then use that tax exemption to do politics, but it has to be emphasized that this law was only going to be used against those who disagreed with Obama and the Democrats. In other words, the IRS and the Obama administration weren’t really enforcing the law, they were thinking of using the law to put their opponents in prison.
This article does an excellent job of connecting the dots, both in terms of who and when, based on what we now know, from solid evidence. The author’s conclusion:
We now have a sitting Democrat congressman, Elijah Cummings, a sitting Democrat senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Federal Elections Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service all implicated in the scandal. Flax’s involvement puts the abuse squarely into the IRS commissioner’s office. But it takes an entity above all of those agencies to coordinate their actions. That entity can only be the White House.
Flax worked for the head of the IRS at the time, proving once again that this harassment was not instigated by “low-level employees in Cincinnati”, as claimed by Lois Lerner.
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails show that former IRS Official Lois Lerner discussed prosecution of conservative tax exempt groups with Eric Holder’s Justice Department even as she was publicly admitting that the harassment of conservatives was improper.
Working for the Democratic Party: A comprehensive list of Lois Lerner’s partisan effort to use the IRS to attack conservatives.
The Democrats in Congress, who have been circling the wagons to defend Lerner, really do remind me here of the Republicans in Congress in 1973. At that time, the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and Republicans were doing everything they could to defend Nixon, even though the evidence was very much against him. The consequence then for the Republican Party was election day 1974, when they experienced devastating losses.
In the end those loses forced reform in the Republican Party. The time has come for the Democratic Party to undergo the same reform process.
Working for the Democratic Party: Emails now show that IRS officials Lois Lerner and Holly Paz fed private tax information of True the Vote to Democratic Congressmen Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland).
True the Vote was aggressively harassed by multiple federal agencies, including the IRS. Cummings is on the House committee investigating the IRS and Lois Lerner.
You think he has a conflict of interest? I do. And so does the head of the committee, Darrell Issa (R-California).
Working for the Democratic Party: A government investigation has found evidence of numerous IRS employees of performing illegal political activity, while working, in support of President Obama and fellow Democrats.
These activities were independent of the IRS’s management effort to harass conservatives, and provide further evidence that the tax agency was aggressively using its power during the 2012 election to get Democrats elected.
Working for the Democratic Party: According to the testimony of IRS agents to a House committee investigating the IRS scandal, the IRS harassment was specifically aimed at conservative groups.
“Only seven applications in the IRS backlog contained the word ‘progressive,’ all of which were then approved by the IRS, while Tea Party groups received unprecedented review and experienced years-long delays. While some liberal-oriented groups were singled out for scrutiny, evidence shows it was due to non-political reasons,” according to the Oversight staff report, which was obtained by The Daily Caller.
I think the basics of this scandal need to be restated again: The Obama administration, in league with Democrats in Congress, used the IRS to harass their political opponents. They didn’t do it because they had some honest desire to improve IRS operations, they did it to do direct harm to people they disagreed with in order to increase their own power.
If they do not suffer for this corruption of power, we, the free people of the United States, will suffer far more in the coming years.
The House committee investigating the IRS’s political harassment of Obama’s opponents has now unveiled evidence showing that former IRS official Lois Lerner committed perjury in Congressional testimony at least four times.
The evidence also shows that she was aggressively working for the Democratic Party, using her power as an important IRS official to bend the tax laws to attack that party’s political opponents.
Working for the Democratic Party: Just hours before she was scheduled to testify about IRS harassment of conservatives at a House hearing, the head of a conservative organization was called by an IRS official, telling her that her organization’s tax exempt status had finally been approved, after waiting more than 3 years.
As she noted, “And this is not political?”
Working for the Democratic Party: Even as the IRS was admitting last year that its harassment of conservatives was a mistake, the agency was working up its new rules to make the harassment official policy, under pressure from Democratic elected officials.
And what about the new official policy?
The tax agency has floated an outline of new rules that would limit those groups’ ability to host candidates, distribute voter guides or conduct voter registration or get-out-the-vote drives. A three-month period for public comments closed on Thursday, and the IRS had posted more than 115,000 comments. They were overwhelmingly opposed to the proposed rules, with both conservative and liberal-leaning groups saying the rules would stifle their ability to participate in important public debates.
One joint comment, filed by a dozen groups ranging from the immigration advocacy America’s Voice and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union to the right-leaning American Conservative Union and tea party-aligned FreedomWorks, asked the Obama administration go back and start over on the rules.
Working for the Democratic Party: The harassment of conservatives by the IRS was instigated by Democratic elected officials in Congress and the White House, in plain sight for all to see.
Read it. The author documents numerous examples of Democrats from 2010 to 2013 demanding the IRS do exactly what it ended up doing, harass and shut down the activities of their opponents. And they did it publicly, with pride. And they are still doing it.
Former IRS official Lois Lerner has been recalled to testify again before a House committee in regards to the IRS’s harassment of conservatives.
She took the fifth in her first appearance, while also making a statement announcing her innocence. According to numerous experts, this statement voided her ability to take the fifth. There might or might not be fireworks on March 5, when she has been called to return, as she will likely do nothing but cite the fifth amendment in her answers. How the congressmen respond to her non-answers will be interesting.
Working for the Democratic Party: Ben Carson and his family and friends have become targets of IRS harassment since he criticized Obama in 2013.
Carson said audits and other harassment began in May or June of 2013 and gradually expanded to include family members, associates, and his charitable endeavors.
“I’ve been quite I would say astonished at the level of hostility that I have encountered,” Carson said in an exclusive interview with host John Bachman on “America’s Forum” on Newsmax TV.
“The IRS has investigated me. They said, ‘I want to look at your real estate holdings.’ There was nothing there. ‘Well, let’s expand to an entire [year], everything.’ There was nothing there. ‘Let’s do another year.’ Finally, after a few months, they went away. But they’ve come after my family, they’ve come after my friends, they’ve come after associates.”
This harassment apparently occurred after the IRS scandal broke in the spring of 2013, which means that instead of ending the harassment that supposedly outraged him, Obama accelerated it by aiming it directly at his electoral opponents.
Senate Democrats to the IRS: You’re our only hope!
Senate Democrats aren’t interested in fixing the campaign-finance system. They’re interested in getting the IRS to intimidate their opponents and fix their own electoral woes in the midterms.
More here. The Democrats are making it very obvious that they support the harassment of their opponents by the IRS.
Working for the Democratic Party: 100% of the 501(c)(4) non-profit groups audited by IRS were conservative.
Working for the Democratic Party: At House hearings this week witness after witness have recounted how the IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
“I want to make three primary points here today,” said Mitchell. ”First, the IRS scandal is real. It’s not pretend, it’s real. Number two, the IRS scandal is not just a bone-headed bunch of bureaucrats in some remote office contrary to what the President of the United States told the American People on Sunday. And, number 3, the IRS scandal is not over. It is continuing to this day. And the Department of Justice Investigation is a sham. It is a nonexistent investigation.”
The article also notes that Obama’s claim that there is not a “smidgen of corruption” about this scandal is a lie, especially since the IRS began this story by admitting it had acted improperly in targeting conservatives, and had made this admission after the then IRS head had told Congress that no improper targeting had taken place. (In other words, he lied in sworn testimony to Congress.)
More information about this week’s on-going IRS hearing in the House can be found here. I have also posted below the fold some of the testimony of Cleta Mitchell and Catherine Engelbrecht. Watch it. Their description of the government attacks on conservatives is quite horrifying.
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“I will not retreat. I will not surrender. I will not be intimidated, and I will not ask for permission to exercise my constitutional rights.”
The words of one conservative who was harassed by the IRS and the Obama administration merely because she opposed them politically. Her most recent action? She is filing a formal complaint against Democrat Congressman Elijah Cummings for joining in on that harassment.
The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
The massive abuse of government power by the Obama administration against their conservative opponents nationwide makes anything done in New Jersey by Chris Christie’s underlings seem petty and inconsequential.
“I think it was a sham from the beginning.”
And what might that sham be? If your first thought is of the Obama administration’s investigation into the IRS scandal, you’d be right on the money!
The Obama administration closed the investigation without interviewing any of the victims of the harassment by the IRS.
Meanwhile, the administration as well as the Democrats in Congress are working hard to codify that harassment, so that the IRS can continue to work for the Democratic Party through the 2014 election.
Seven months after the IRS scandal broke, the FBI has finally contacted some of the conservative groups that were harassed by the tax agency.
“After seven months of no contact from federal investigators, a small number of our clients recently received a request for an interview from the FBI,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice, which represents more than three dozen groups.
He said the clients were evaluating FBI’s request but were troubled by the revelation of Ms. Bosserman’s political leanings. “This development creates a serious conflict of interest and raises more questions and doubts about the Obama administration’s promise to get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.
The last paragraph refers to the fact that Barbara Bosserman, the person named by Obama to lead the FBI investigation, is also a big time donor to Obama’s campaign. The conservative groups have very legitimate reasons not to want to talk to the FBI under these circumstances, as anything they say might instead be used against them by this very partisan use of government power.
We must once again contrast how Obama has dealt with this admitted misuse of government power with that of Chris Christie. Tells us a great deal about Obama, doesn’t it?
More than eight months after an outraged President Obama said he would get to the bottom of the IRS harassment of conservatives, we finally find out who is heading his investigation: a big name Democratic Party donor.
“By selecting a significant donor to President Obama to lead an investigation into inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, the Department has created a startling conflict of interest. It is unbelievable that the Department would choose such an individual to examine the federal government’s systematic targeting and harassment of organizations opposed to the President’s policies. At the very least, Ms. Bosserman’s involvement is highly inappropriate and has compromised the Administration’s investigation of the IRS,” Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday. “We request that you immediately remove Ms. Bosserman from the ongoing investigation.”
In other words, Obama and his administration are stonewalling, which strongly suggests that they had everything to do with approving and directing this harassment of their political opponents.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS is now harassing the insurance broker who has helped people losing their insurance under Obamacare.
The man received a visit from a Treasury Department Inspector General who demanded personal information about the cancer patient the broker was helping. When this information was refused, the official instructed the broker
to resolve the issue with the IRS immediately, and that if he did not, “you may be visited again by other IRS representatives in your home and we do reserve the right to garnish your wages and lien your assets.”
How nice. Obey the orders of the Obama administration or they will use the IRS to destroy you.
Note also that this harassment is going on right now, six months after the scandal was revealed and Obama claimed he was outraged by it and would put a stop to it. He lied. As he revealed recently in his interview on MSNBC, he sees nothing wrong with this harassment.
I just realized that my post above left out one important detail: The cancer patient had appeared on Fox to describe how he had lost his health insurance because of Obamacare. Almost immediately thereafter both he and his broker received audit notices from the IRS.
Why is the IRS regulating political activity at all?
The answer is that many Democratic politicians and progressive activists think new rules limiting political speech by nonprofits will benefit Democrats politically. Stymied by judicial decisions restricting direct government regulation of political speech, and by a Federal Election Commission whose bipartisan makeup prevents Democratic commissioners from forcing through partisan rules on a party-line vote, these politicians and activists have decided to dragoon the IRS into doing their work.
More precise terms to describe this kind of behavior are fascists and jack-booted thugs.
