The FBI has been stonewalling the House investigation into the IRS scandal.
Obama claimed he was outraged by this scandal and would hunt down the perpetrators. He lied of course. He instead apparently told the FBI to block all investigations wherever possible.
Finding out what’s in it: A mother with multiple sclerosis has lost her health insurance because of Obamacare.
She will likely face an IRS audit now as well, since she has gone public with her story. Can’t have these little people speaking bad of our great leader.
Working for the Democratic Party: A cancer patient who went on Fox to talk about how Obamacare has made him lose his health insurance is now being audited by the IRS.
Another way to describe this despicable behavior by the Obama Administration and the IRS is that they are fascist, jack-booted thugs. But that would be uncivil of me, even if it is entirely accurate.
Update: The insurance broker who saw the Fox news report and then helped the cancer patient keep his insurance is now also being audited.
Working for the Democratic Party: The Obama administration yesterday proposed outlawing political speech by any non-profits.
The IRS would enforce these new rules, which would make official the harassment of conservatives that the IRS did during the run-up to the 2012 election. Though they claim these rules would apply to all political groups, you and I know that they will likely use these rules selectively to squelch the speech of the administration’s opponents.
If you have any doubt, consider the selective manner in which the National Park Service enforces its laws. The leftist Occupy movement was allowed to do whatever it liked during its protests, despite being in clear violation of the law, but veterans were blocked from visiting open-air national monuments during the government shutdown in October.
This decision by the Obama administration also reveals Obama’s total support for that IRS harassment of conservatives. He liked it, and now wants to make it official. Moreover, the failure of his so-called investigation into the IRS scandal to contact any of the groups harassed, even after six months, tells us again that President Obama actually supported the harassment and is acting to stonewall the investigation.
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails provide more evidence that IRS official Lois Lerner was lying when she said the IRS scandal was confined to the low-level employees in Cincinnati.
An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails. “Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups.
The truth was that the low-level employees in Cincinnati were getting their orders to harass conservatives from high up the chain in Washington.
The House committee investigating the IRS scandal issued a new subpoena yesterday.
In reading the article, it is very clear to me that the Democrats and the Obama administration are stonewalling the House committee, and that the so-called bi-partisan report being prepared in the Senate is likely to be a whitewash.
Working for the Democratic Party: IRS official Lois Lerner illegally provided private tax information to other government agencies.
A conservative government watchdog says it has obtained emails revealing that the Internal Revenue Service sent conservative groups’ private tax exemption application and tax return information to the Federal Elections Commission, in violation of federal law.
According to Judicial Watch, the emails from Jan. 2009 to the present, provided by the FEC in response to an August 2013 Freedom of Information Act request, yielded a “revealing email chain” between former Internal Revenue Services (IRS) Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and enforcement attorneys at the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Working for the Democratic Party: Not only did Sarah Hall Ingram illegally share confidential taxpayer information with White House officials, she met with White House officials 165 times.
Of Ingram’s 165 White House meetings with White House staff, a staggering 155 of them were hosted by deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew, according to a June Watchdog.Org analysis of White House visitor records. Ingram exchanged confidential taxpayer information with Lambrew and White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz, according to 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
I notice that Obama’s so-called outrage over the IRS scandal has not caused him to remove Hall as the person in charge of the IRS’s implementation of Obamacare.
Working for the Democratic Party: Sarah Hall Ingram, now in charge of administrating Obamacare for the IRS, not only advised the White House on how to harass conservative organizations, her emails appear to have illegally included confidential tax information.
And just remember: This woman is now in charge of managing the IRS department that will implement Obamacare, giving her access to everyone’s health and tax records. If you say something that she (or Obama) doesn’t like, don’t be surprised if those records end up in the hands of Obama, to use against you.
Gee, maybe this explains why the Democrats have been willing to even shut down the government to get Obamacare up and running.
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.
Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence suggests the IRS and the White House illegally exchanged confidential taxpayer information.
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.
Theft by government: A store owner’s entire bank account was seized by the IRS, even though he was not charged with any crime and had recently passed an audit.
The government falsely accused me of violating federal banking laws by making frequent cash deposits of less than $10,000. It is illegal to make deposits of less than $10,000 in cash if you are doing it to avoid regulations that require the banks to report larger deposits to the IRS. It’s not against the law, though, to make smaller deposits when there is a legitimate, legal business reason. That is exactly what I have been doing. My clerks routinely deposited cash earned at Schott’s at a bank right across the street. It’s never a good idea to risk letting too much money accumulate on-site. Like many other small businesses, my store’s insurance policy specifically limits coverage for cash losses to $10,000. The government would have learned that if it asked me, but it didn’t.
Just last year, we were audited by the IRS to make sure we complied with “anti-money-laundering” laws. The IRS gave us a clean bill of health. Our store has been making deposits this way for decades, and the IRS looked through our books during the audit. Yet no one said anything to me about violating any law. The IRS even sent me a letter about their audit saying, “No violations were identified.” Without any warning, officials just cleaned out my bank account.
Remarkably, the government doesn’t even have to charge me with any wrongdoing to keep my money. Many people know about criminal forfeiture, which allows police to seize the ill-gotten gains of convicted criminals. In my case, the government used civil forfeiture, which lets the government take money from people who have never been charged with any crime. Adding insult to injury, federal civil forfeiture law does not even grant me a hearing before or soon after they snatched my account. They’ve had my money for 10 months. I’ve been forced to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers just to get a hearing before a judge. Even more bizarre, under civil forfeiture, the government’s case is not against me, but against my property. This is why the official case has the ridiculous name, United States of America v. $35,651.11 in U.S. Currency. This is not just absurd; it’s unconstitutional.
Understand that the IRS could do this to anyone, without justifying their position in the slightest. And keep the money.
Posted on the road in New Mexico.
We’ve only just begun: The Treasury Inspector General has found that the IRS cannot account for $67 million of Obamacare funds.
he “Health Insurance Reform Implementation Fund” (HIRIF) was tucked into Obamacare in order to give the IRS money to enforce the tax provisions of the healthcare law. The fund, totaling some $1 billion of taxpayer money, was used to roll out enforcement mechanisms for the approximately 50 tax provisions of Obamacare. According to the report: “Specifically, the IRS did not account for or attempt to quantify approximately $67 million [from the slush fund] of indirect ACA costs incurred for Fiscal Years 2010 through 2012.”
The report also found other spending abuses, including using the money for travel that was unjustified.
But everything’s under control. The Democratic Party will make sure Obamacare is funded, no matter what!
Lois Lerner, who is at the center of the IRS scandal, is now retiring from the IRS.
It is good she is out of the IRS, but she better not think this will get her off the hook.
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.
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.
Working for the Democratic Party: New emails show that Lois Lerner and the IRS specifically targeted conservative groups for harassment in 2011.
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.”
