Tag: IRS

“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”

9:15 am

“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”

The quote comes from a House hearing today where lawmakers blasted the head of the IRS for claiming it has lost two years worth of Lois Lerner’s emails.

Update: I think it worthwhile to include video of this exchange between Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The arrogance of Koskinen is, to use Ryan’s world, unbelievable.
» Read more

Leave a comment

In 2010 the IRS illegally provided the FBI with confidential tax information totaling 1.1 million pages.

10:43 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: In 2010 the IRS illegally provided the FBI with confidential tax information totaling 1.1 million pages.

[O]n June 4, DOJ told the committee that its prior assurance was inoperative: the disks actually include confidential taxpayer information that was give to the FBI in violation of federal law. This is a serious matter; violation of the applicable statute carries a penalty of five years in prison.

The obvious inference is that the IRS didn’t just send the FBI a bunch of publicly available Form 990s filed by non-profits. Rather, the IRS included Schedule B to those forms–the documents that name the organization’s donors, and provide their addresses and the amounts they contributed. Donor information contained in Schedule B is confidential. Illegally communicated, it would give the FBI a checklist of individuals who could be investigated and potentially criminally prosecuted, much as Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for a chickenfeed election offense a few years later.

But don’t worry, there’s not a “smidgen of corruption” according to Obama in this IRS scandal.

3 comments

The IRS now claims it has lost emails from six other key employees involved in the agency’s effort to harass conservatives.

9:35 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS now claims it has lost emails from six other key employees involved in the agency’s effort to harass conservatives.

The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

How convenient: These six employees just happened to have computer crashes destroying these key emails.

8 comments

The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

6:11 pm

The IRS time bomb ticks some more: The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

Read it all. The legalities here are not in favor of the Obama administration and the IRS. They are very exposed. The last few paragraphs of MItchell’s letter illustrate this quite starkly:

In addition to seeking responses to the questions in this letter, we also seek your consent to immediately allow a computer forensics expert selected by TTV to examine the computer(s) that is or are purportedly the source of Ms. Lerner’s “lost” emails, including cloning the hard drives, and to attempt to restore what was supposedly “lost,” and to seek to restore any and all “lost” evidence pertinent to this litigation.

We also seek access to all computers, both official and personal, used by any and all of the Defendants from and after July 1, 2010, in order to ensure preservation of the documents of all Defendants in this action.

We wish to resolve our concerns amicably but, absent your consent, we will file such motions as deemed necessary and appropriate asking the Court to require that you respond to the questions contained in this letter, and to permit such forensic examination described herein and for such other relief as may be appropriate for this egregious breach of legal authority and professional ethics.

Due to the time-sensitive and urgent nature of this request, please respond by noon on Wednesday, June 18, 2014.

These demands are entirely legal and routine in lawsuits with circumstances such as this. Even the most partisan Democratic judges in the courts are going to find it very difficult to protect the IRS and the Obama administration here.

As was said over and over and over again during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, it wasn’t the crime so much as the coverup that destroyed Richard Nixon. It looks like the same thing might be happening to Barack Obama.

7 comments

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

9:34 am

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

It’s one thing to get a political hack to lie under oath or to take a fall to keep himself viable in that world, it’s quite another to get the non political people who have no real skin in the game to be willing to perjure themselves before congress in an attempt to claim incompetence.

These guys simply aren’t going to take the fall for a bunch of political hacks.

The clock is ticking, as soon as the IT guys are under oath the IRS scandal is going to explode and that blast is going to take a lot of people with them.

The only way this bomb will go off, however, is if the Republicans in Congress light the fuse. They have to push the issue, forcing these lower level IT people to testify. Sadly, these Republicans too often act like they are afraid of their own shadow, thus letting the worst acts of corruption slip without so much as a peep.

Hopefully the results of the November election will give these guys some backbone.

7 comments

The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

4:24 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

More here. And here a Democrat demands a special prosecutor.

I have been traveling so I missed posting the original story about this absurd claim by the IRS. It is a downright lie and a coverup and should be answered with prosecutions and imprisonment.

6 comments

A citizen’s group is offering a one million dollar bounty to “anyone who can provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence” that implicates either the IRS leadership or members of the Obama administration as ordering the harassment of conservatives.

10:03 pm

Pushback: A citizen’s group is offering a one million dollar bounty to anyone who can provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence’ that implicates either the IRS leadership or members of the Obama administration as ordering the harassment of conservatives.

One comment

The IRS appears to be stonewalling a Freedom of Information request for all documents relating to communications between that agency and thirteen Democratic elected officials from 2009 to 2013.

9:15 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS appears to be stonewalling a Freedom of Information request for all documents relating to communications between that agency and thirteen Democratic elected officials from 2009 to 2013.

Those officials include former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, former Commissioner Steven Miller, senior IRS official Joseph Grant and former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner. Members of Congress named in the request include Sen. Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Reid (D-NV), DSCC Chair Sen. Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Landrieu (D-LA), Sen. Pryor (D-AR), Sen. Hagan (D-NC), Sen. Begich (D-AK), Sen. Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), Sen. Franken (D-MN), Sen. Warner (D-VA), Rep. Braley and Rep. Peters (D-MI).

Since that request was received by the IRS nearly one year ago, IRS Tax Law Specialists Robert Thomas and Denise Higley have asked for more time to fulfill the request six times.

As has been said many times before, it ain’t the crime but the coverup that does the most damage. I suspect the requested documents will be very damaging to these Democrats, as the material will likely show that they colluded with the IRS to use the tax agency to harass conservatives. Delaying their release, however, only means that we will likely get to see these documents closer to the 2014 election.

Leave a comment

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.

10:13 am

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.

4 comments

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.

2:31 pm

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?

3 comments

The IRS audited 10 percent of all Tea Party donors, a rate much higher than for average Americans.

9:52 pm

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.

17 comments

The new more sinister IRS scandal.

10:07 am

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.

One comment

The IRS scandal spreads.

11:53 am

The IRS scandal spreads.

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.

4 comments

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.

9:31 am

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.

One comment

A comprehensive list of Lois Lerner’s partisan effort to use the IRS to attack conservatives.

10:09 am

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.

4 comments

Emails now show that IRS officials Lois Lerner and Holly Paz fed private tax information of True the Vote to Democratic Congressmen Elijah Cummings.

2:39 pm

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).

10 comments

A government investigation has found evidence of numerous IRS employees of performing illegal political activity in support of President Obama and fellow Democrats.

8:41 am

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.

Leave a comment

According to the testimony of IRS agents to a House committee investigating the IRS scandal, the harassment was specifically aimed at conservative groups.

9:49 am

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.

3 comments

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.

10:46 pm

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.

2 comments

Just hours before she was scheduled to testify about IRS harassment of conservatives, 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.

12:06 am

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?”

3 comments

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.

11:32 pm

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.

Leave a comment

The harassment of conservatives by the IRS was instigated by Democratic elected officials in plain sight for all to see.

9:26 am

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.

Leave a comment

Former IRS official Lois Lerner has been recalled to testify again before a House committee in regards to the IRS’s harassment of conservatives.

5:30 am

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.

One comment

Ben Carson and his family and friends have been targets of IRS harassment since he criticized Obama in 2013.

10:19 am

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.

One comment
1 … 3 4 5 6 7 … 10