Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence suggests that IRS official Lois Lerner attempted to hide her work from scrutiny when the IRS began its harassment of conservatives.
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.
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.
Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence suggests that elected Democrats have been aggressively lobbying the SEC to target conservative businesses.
“You’ve frustrated this committee. You’ve promised to do things and you’re not.”
Guess who? He was also accused of “slow-rolling” the investigation. Video at the link.
In related news the House investigation has now issued a subpoena for the requested documents.
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.”
A careful analysis of IRS behavior shows that the tax agency very clearly favored liberal groups while specifically targeting conservatives for harassment.
Go to the link and take a look. A picture is worth a thousand words. And in this case it is several pictures.
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.
Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence now suggests that the IRS harassed conservative organizations routinely, whether or not they already had tax exempt status.
Working for the Democratic Party: The records of the snooping into Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s confidential tax records have mysteriously been destroyed.
Working for the Democratic Party: Two days before IRS White House appointee William Wilkins established the guidelines for reviewing IRS applications of conservatives, he met with Obama.
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 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.
On April 25, 2012, Wilkins sent Hull and fellow Washington-based IRS official Lois Lerner “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS’ inspector general’s report.
It is quite possible that the two events are unrelated. This also could be the smoking gun linking Obama to the IRS scandal. Fortunately, the story notes that thirteen people attended this meeting, which means it should be possible to find out what actually happened there.
William Wilkins, the IRS chief counsel, now implicated in the IRS scandal to harass conservatives, is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire IRS.
Noonan’s review and analysis of yesterday’s testimony in the House is right on the money. The IRS scandal now points directly to the White House. Or as she notes,
It’s almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.
And this was done deliberately, by Wilkins, Obama’s political appointee, using the IRS for political purposes.
Moreover, the testimony yesterday also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed the harassment was merely the actions of some rogue agents in Cincinnati. The obvious question then is this: Who was Lois Lerner trying to protect by these lies? The obvious answer: her bosses, in the White House.
A summary of the IRS scandal testimony today before the House Oversight Committee.
With video. The key point is that the harassment of conservatives was managed and controlled in Washington, D.C., by high IRS officials including Lois Lerner and White House appointees.
The IRS scandal moves up the chain of command: Testimony today revealed that the harassment of conservatives was managed by a White House appointee in the IRS chief counsel’s office.
It appears that one of the four individuals whose tax records were illegally accessed for political reasons was Delaware senatorial Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell.
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability. [emphasis mine]
Now isn’t that reassuring?
Working for the Democratic Party: The harassment of conservative groups by the IRS was planned and run by officials in Washington, D.C., according to a retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday in the House.
Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
It appears he is naming names. Thursday’s hearing should be quite interesting.
O goody: The IRS now claims that the government official who willfully accessed confidential tax records illegally was not an IRS employee.
How does this make anything better? Instead of an IRS official rummaging through confidential tax records for political purposes, they apparently let others in government do it directly.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama Treasury Department admitted today that the IRS tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were illegally disclosed to unnamed government officials.
[O]f the four instances in which tax records were improperly accessed, three cases were determined to be “inadvertent.” “In the fourth case, we presented evidence of a willful unauthorized access to the Department of Justice, but the case was declined for prosecution,” Mr. George wrote. Of the three cases that the inspector general called “inadvertent” disclosures, Mr. George said his office referred one to Justice with a recommendation that no prosecution be brought. He said Justice officials agreed with his office’s assessment. No reason was given for Justice’s rejections of prosecutions.
I wonder why the Obama Justice Department declined to prosecute that fourth case, which was “willful” and thus very illegal.
