Tag: IRS scandal

“The Obama Administration’s behavior during the first week of the shutdown has been the best argument against Obamacare anyone has ever made.”

7:43 am

Another reasonable thought: “The Obama Administration’s behavior during the first week of the shutdown has been the best argument against Obamacare anyone has ever made.”

The American people do not want Obamacare, and they are demanding that Washington act to protect them from the harmful effects of this unfortunate law. The president’s response has been to ignore them, allow the government to shutdown, and then use his power to close national parks and monuments, stop paying veterans’ benefits, and cut off cancer research. This is exactly why we should not expand the government’s power over our health care choices. What power the government has, it will use – and misuse – to advance its own interests, even if that means punishing the American people along the way. [emphasis mine]

Just think what any power-hungry politician, from either party, might do if he or she had unfettered access to your personal health records. If you express any opposition to them, they might even use that information to attack and destroy you.

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IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, used their private email accounts to illegally transmit confidential tax information.

7:39 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, used their private email accounts to illegally transmit confidential tax information.

“[W]e have uncovered a troubling pattern of IRS officials sending official documents to non-official email accounts as well as the use of non-official email accounts to conduct official business,” the September 30th letter to acting IRS Commissioner Dan Werfil reads. “In some instances, IRS officials have sent taxpayer protected information to non-official email accounts.” The officials were identified as then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, Lois Lerner, who headed the office at the center of the scandal, Judith Kindall, and Nikole Flax, who worked in Lerner’s office.

In the letter to Werfil, Issa said that the committee had found over 1,600 pages of emails and documents related to official business in non-official email accounts. Nearly 30 pages of the material contained confidential tax information. The revelation raises serious questions about privacy and the security of the confidential data transmitted to the private email accounts. There is also a question of what might have been done with the data after it was sent to the private accounts. Those records would not be subject to the normal rules of transparency or freedom of information requests.

The only reason I can think of for these IRS officials to do this is because they wished to hide what they were doing, which also suggests that what they were doing was downright wrong.

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IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted.

9:00 am

Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted, according to an interim House report.

In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”

It was about this time that both Obama and Democrats in Congress were demanding the IRS go after conservative organizations.

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New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

10:22 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

A handful of liberal organizations were definitely targeted for close inspection, but it appears to me that these were merely picked to give the IRS some cover while it mainly focused at harassing as many conservatives organizations as possible.

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The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.

9:02 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.

An IRS letter sent to [a tea party] group last week and obtained by The Washington Times contains a laundry list of requests related to virtually all the group’s activities, including its involvement in the 2012 election cycle and its get-out-the-vote efforts, fundraising activities, all radio and TV advertising, and other information. The IRS also is asking for detailed financial records, including “the amounts and percentages of your total expenses that were for fundraising activities in the tax year 2011, 2012 and 2013.” [emphasis mine]

Key quote: “We got away with discriminating against you and we’re not stopping.”

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The IRS official who released the confidential tax information of conservative groups to a left-leaning news organization has been promoted.

10:04 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS official who illegally released the confidential tax information of conservative groups to a left-leaning news organization has been promoted.

Light will be replaced by Cindy Thomas, a 35-year IRS veteran who ran the Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati throughout the 2-year period that conservative groups were targeted. “Cindy brings a strong background in EO Determinations and the history of the organization,” Corbin told employees. “And, since she is located in Cincinnati, she will provide a voice for the process and challenges faced in determinations work.” Thomas’s promotion will not be without controversy, given that, in November of last year, she signed off on the illegal release to the left-leaning ProPublica, of nine pending, confidential applications for tax exemption filed by conservative groups. One of those organizations, the Colorad-based Citizens Awareness Project, yesterday filed a federal lawsuit against the IRS over the release of its application.

Boy, Barack Obama is really hunting down those rogue IRS agents in Cincinnati and teaching them a lesson for harassing his conservative opponents.

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An IRS agent admitted this week in testimony to a House committee that the IRS is still harassing conservatives, three months after the targeting was revealed.

3:04 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: An IRS agent admitted this week in testimony to a House committee that the IRS is still harassing conservatives, three months after the targeting was revealed.

I am not surprised. Obama, and his Democratic cronies, want this harassment of their opponents to continue. They want to use the vast and powerful machinery of the federal government in any way possible to hinder any opposition to their power and control.

As I’ve said earlier, they are jack-booted thugs, nothing more, nothing less.

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New evidence strongly suggests that the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups is continuing, despite the on-going Congressional investigations.

9:39 am

New evidence strongly suggests that the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups is continuing, despite the on-going Congressional investigations.

The IRS’ infamous Cincinnati office, which handles applications from groups applying for tax-exempt nonprofit status, badgered pro-life groups for information on their protesting activities as recently as late June 2013, well after IRS investigations began on the floor of the House of Representatives and elsewhere. “We’ve had three more groups come to us that have had problems with the IRS — some very recent, some current or still pending. One of them just got their determination letter,” Peter Breen, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, which represents pro-life groups targeted by the IRS, told The Daily Caller. “It’s continuing, and it needs to be addressed.”

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Emails between IRS official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office show them twice colluding to illegally influence the FEC to prosecute conservative groups.

9:53 am

Working for the Democratic Party: Emails between IRS official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office show them twice colluding to illegally influence the FEC to prosecute conservative groups.

The timing of the correspondence between Lerner and the FEC suggests the FEC attorney sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners. The FEC received a complaint in March 2008 from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party alleging that the American Future Fund had violated campaign-finance law by engaging in political advocacy without registering as a political-action committee. The American Future Fund responded to that complaint in June 2008, telling the commission that it had applied for tax exemption in March of that year and was a “501(c)(4) social-welfare organization that was organized to provide Americans with a conservative and free-market viewpoint and mechanism to communicate and advocate on the issues that most interest and concern them.” According to the e-mail correspondence, a month after receiving the American Future Fund’s response, the FEC general counsel’s office — which is prohibited under law from conducting an investigation into an organization before the FEC’s six commissioners have voted to do so — contacted Lerner to investigate the agency’s tax-exempt status. [emphasis mine]

Simply put, the law states that when the FEC receives a complaint, the commission must then decide whether to initiate an investigation. Until it does so, however, it is a crime for the FEC’s general counsel to do any investigation. It is also a crime for the IRS to provide them any confidential tax information. Yet, the FEC’s general counsel did do an investigation on at least two conservative groups prior to a vote and Lois Lerner at the IRS provided them what they wanted, all illegally.

It appears that for justice to be served and for trust to be restored to these bureaucracies a lot of people need to be fired. Unfortunately, I do not expect that to happen. The Democrats clearly want to take advantage of this corrupt bureaucracy to wield power and destroy their enemies, and the Republicans are too wimpy to fight back. The result: The corruption and abuse of power will continue to happen, and it will happen with increasing aggressiveness against conservatives.

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