Posted on 10/07/2017 10:21:32 AM PDT by jazusamo
Obama Administration Used Confidential Taxpayer Information to Push Obamacare
It’s Government Gone Wild Time In Washington, DC
Judicial Watch Sues Justice Department for Mueller Russian Special Counsel Budget
Your Judicial Watch uncovered yet another Obama IRS scandal – and one that includes the massive Health and Human Services (HHS) running Obamacare AND the Obama White House directly!
We received two productions of documents, 77 pages and 108 pages , from the IRS revealing that the Obama IRS coordinated with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Obama White House Behavioral Sciences “Team” in a $5 million program to pressure Americans to sign up for Obamacare.
The documents also contain inter-agency agreements between the IRS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) devised to circumvent potential legal prohibitions on unauthorized disclosure or inspection of taxpayer information collected by the IRS.
The documents were produced in Judicial Watch Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:17-cv-00615). They were produced under court order in our April 2017 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the IRS and HHS, which we filed after the agencies failed to respond to November 2016 FOIA requests for:
In September 2016, IRS Director of Individual Taxation Janet McCubbin writes to several of her colleagues:
Attached are drafts of the letters that IRS will send to selected taxpayers who paid a penalty for failure to have coverage or who claimed an exemption form the coverage requirement for tax year 2015 … As you know, we are planning to send several different versions of the letter to see which types of messages work best.
***
These letters have been drafted with input from the White House Behavioral Sciences Team and CMS, and have been approved by CMS. And IRS staff provided a lot of assistance on the PDF.
The White House Behavioral Sciences Team was established in 2015 by an Obama Executive Order directing federal agencies to adopt research about how people make decisions into policy development.
The documents show that the agencies spent at least $5 million to develop the letters ( $4,820,702.83 and $179,297.17 ).
The documents released by Judicial Watch include letters targeting people who legally refused to sign up for Obamacare and elected to pay the penalty or individuals who claimed an exemption. The letter written to people who claimed an exemption states:
Why am I getting this letter?
The law requires people to have a minimum level of health coverage, qualify for an exemption, or pay a penalty when they file their taxes. Our records show you claimed an exemption from the health coverage requirement when you filed your 2015 taxes. If you or someone in your family doesn’t have health insurance or an exemption next year, you’ll likely owe a penalty for 2017. We are writing to make sure you know how you can avoid this penalty by signing up for health insurance or getting an exemption.
A document labeled “a privacy/legal question” seems to indicate the Obama administration was concerned its target letter might violate the law (26 U.S. Code § 7431 and 26 U.S. Code § 6103) protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer return information:
Inspection or disclosure by employee of United States
If any officer or employee of the United States knowingly, or by reason of negligence, inspects or discloses any return or return information with respect to a taxpayer in violation of any provision of section 6103, such taxpayer may bring a civil action for damages against the United States in a district court of the United States.
Under the Obamacare laws, HHS is authorized only to send a simple notification of options:
Secretary of the Treasury, acting Through the Internal Revenue Service and in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shall send a notification to each individual who files an individual income tax return and who is not enrolled in minimum essential coverage …
HHS may have overstepped its authority by threatening people with penalty fees.
How much will my penalty be next year if I don’t sign up?
The penalty for not having any health-coverage or an exemption in 2017 will be at least $695 per adult and $347 per child (up to $2,085 per family), and could be more, depending on your income.
Also, the “best-case” cost estimate for Obamacare is misleading because it neglects to mention the cost of deductibles and co-payments.
How much does health insurance at HealthCare.gov cost?
Most people who enroll in a plan through HealthCare.gov can find plans for $75 a month or less after financial help.
These documents are part of five promised document productions from the IRS. We will surely have more documents well into next year.
But we have enough evidence now of more Obama IRS abuses targeting innocent Americans – all in the name of Obamacare. No wonder it took a federal lawsuit and court order to get these documents—as they show the Obama White House and its agencies were happy to threaten and treat Americans like lab rats in order to bolster Obamacare.
Would you be at all surprised to learn that the local government here in Washington, DC is trying to break the law and defy the U.S. Constitution with a budget scam?
Your Judicial Watch has been on top of it. This week a hearing was held in our lawsuit against the Mayor and Chief Financial Officer of the District of Columbia. We filed the lawsuit on behalf of Clarice Feldman, a longtime taxpayer and resident of the District of Columbia, to prevent the DC government from expending taxpayer money from a budget that was not appropriated by Congress and presented to the president for signing. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ( Clarice Feldman v. Muriel Bowser and Jeffrey S. DeWitt (No. 1:15-cv-01967)).
At issue is the DC government’s attempt to dismiss a November 6, 2015, lawsuit . The U.S. House of Representatives filed an amicus curiae brief in March 2016 urging the court to deny the DC government’s efforts. In its amicus in support of the Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss the House declared :
The Local Budget Act is a naked and unabashed effort to strip Congress of powers vested in it by Article I of the Constitution, and to circumvent the constitutionally prescribed legislative process that the District and its supporters previously and repeatedly have acknowledged is the one constitutionally appropriate way to proceed.
In other words, the Local Budget Act turns the Appropriations Clause upside down, and is inconsistent with Congress’s plenary authority over all District appropriations. The only constitutionally permissible manner by which the District may achieve budget autonomy with respect to locally derived funds is for Congress to convey that authority to the District by way of the normal legislative process – and Congress has not yet done that.
In Feldman’s Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss , we take strong issue with the District of Columbia’s continued attempts to circumvent federal law, arguing:
Regardless of whether it is sound policy for the District of Columbia to have budget autonomy, [the defendants] cannot ignore the law. Yet, they do. Since October 1, 2015, Defendants have been illegally incurring obligations and expending local taxpayer funds pursuant to the Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Request Act of 2015 (“FY16 Budget Request”) that have not been appropriated by Congress and presented to the President for signing. As a District taxpayer since 1979, Plaintiff challenges Defendants’ lawlessness.
Federal law requires that DC’s annual budget be approved by a majority or two-thirds vote of the DC Council and have affirmative appropriation passed by both Houses of Congress and presented to the president for signing. In 2013, DC passed the Budget Autonomy Act of 2012, which “purportedly grants the District authority to incur obligations and expend local tax and fee revenue without an appropriation passed by both Houses of Congress and presented to the President for signing.” In other words, DC has sought to remove appropriation authority from Congress and grant it to itself.
This is quite simply a case of politicians gone wild. The DC government acts as if it can violate federal law and ignore the U.S. Constitution without repercussions. It is a federal crime to spend federal dollars without congressional authorization.
I’ll be sure to let you know about how the courts rule on this one…
Just yesterday we filed a major new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concerning the budget and administrative records of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-02079)).
We sued because the Justice Department, in scandalous fashion, failed to respond to an July 10, 2017 FOIA request for some basic info on Mueller’s budget and operations:
This past summer, The Washington Post reported that Special counsel Mueller submitted a proposed budget to the Justice Department, “but officials declined to make the document public and committed only to releasing reports of the team’s expenditures every six months.”
Judicial Watch is pursuing numerous additional FOIA lawsuits related to the surveillance, unmasking, and illegal leaking targeting President Trump and his associates during the FBI’s investigation of potential Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. You can review some of them here , here , here , here , here , and here .
The Mueller special counsel investigation is growing with seemingly little concern about costs to the taxpayer. I’ve been repeatedly remarking on Twitter , on television , and everywhere else that Mueller’s operation is bereft of oversight. (I was just on Lou Dobbs’ program yesterday talking about this very issue.)
Is the Justice Department hiding basic budget information about the Mueller special counsel operation because taxpayers and Congress would be outraged by the costs?
Mr. Mueller is not above the law and he shouldn’t be able to keep his budget secret.
Sadly, no one else in DC seems to be providing oversight of the Mueller juggernaut, so once again it is up to our citizens group Judicial Watch to go to court and demand accountability.
Once again, Judicial Watch does the heavy lifting on behalf of the American people.
Until next week…
At present there are corruption lawsuits pending in my city, county and state. Tell me this isn’t a Third World country.
Democrat lies, lies, lies, LIES.
Yeah, I remember the pajama boy ads. What a fail.
.
By the way, I want to acknowledge the awesome job of formatting you did in the original post. I know how much work that was.
Mueller is the dirt sweeper digging up EVERYTHING in Trump’s past to control Trump in the next election. Funded by Democrats and Rino Republicans and Traitor Attorney Sessions.
The deep state will not shrink without a fight.
Thank you, Windy. I appreciate it but can’t take credit for it.
The link below is a site that you can copy and paste to and it converts to HTML, it even converts photos.
Did Sessions actually say this?
I know he isn’t doing anything but didn’t hear that he put it into actual words.
Mueller should have been fired as soon as Comey admitted that he leaked to help create a special investigation.
Barack Obama often spoke of Declaring War On ‘Extremism’ and the need to crack down on “extremism”. FR Posted 1/13/15 by seekandfind
A list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be “extremists” or “potential terrorists” in official Obama-era U.S. government documents.
This list will really give you a good idea of what Barack Obama means when he uses the word “extremist”. Each of these 72 items is linked (at web site). As you can see, this list potentially includes most of the country........
1. Those that talk about “individual liberties”
2. Those that advocate for states’ rights
3. Those that want “to make the world a better place”
4. “The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule”
5. Those that are interested in “defeating the Communists”
6. Those that believe “that the interests of one’s own nation are separate from the interests of other nations or the common interest of all nations”
7. Anyone that holds a “political ideology that considers the state to be unnecessary, harmful,or undesirable”
8. Anyone that possesses an “intolerance toward other religions”
9. Those that “take action to fight against the exploitation of the environment and/or animals”
10. “Anti-Gay”
11. “Anti-Immigrant”
12. “Anti-Muslim”
13. “The Patriot Movement”
14. “Opposition to equal rights for gays and lesbians”
15. Members of the Family Research Council
16. Members of the American Family Association
17. Those that believe that Mexico, Canada and the United States “are secretly planning to merge into a European Union-like entity that will be known as the ‘North American Union’”
18. Members of the American Border Patrol/American Patrol
19. Members of the Federation for American Immigration Reform
20. Members of the Tennessee Freedom Coalition
21. Members of the Christian Action Network
22. Anyone that is “opposed to the New World Order”
23. Anyone that is engaged in “conspiracy theorizing”
24. Anyone that is opposed to Agenda 21
25. Anyone that is concerned about FEMA camps
26. Anyone that “fears impending gun control or weapons confiscations”
27. The militia movement
28. The sovereign citizen movement
29. Those that “don’t think they should have to pay taxes”
30. Anyone that “complains about bias”
31. Anyone that “believes in government conspiracies to the point of paranoia”
32. Anyone that “is frustrated with mainstream ideologies”
33. Anyone that “visits extremist websites/blogs”
34. Anyone that “establishes website/blog to display extremist views”
35. Anyone that “attends rallies for extremist causes”
36. Anyone that “exhibits extreme religious intolerance”
37. Anyone that “is personally connected with a grievance”
38. Anyone that “suddenly acquires weapons”
39. Anyone that “organizes protests inspired by extremist ideology”
40. “Militia or unorganized militia”
41. “General right-wing extremist”
42. Citizens that have “bumper stickers” that are patriotic or anti-U.N.
43. Those that refer to an “Army of God”
44. Those that are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”
45. Those that are “anti-global”
46. Those that are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
47. Those that are “reverent of individual liberty”
48. Those that “believe in conspiracy theories”
49. Those that have “a belief that one’s personal and/or national ‘way of life’ is under attack”
50. Those that possess “a belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism”
51. Those that would “impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”
52. Those that would “insert religion into the political sphere”
53. Anyone that would “seek to politicize religion”
54. Those that have “supported political movements for autonomy”
55. Anyone that is “anti-abortion”
56. Anyone that is “anti-Catholic”
57. Anyone that is “anti-nuclear”
58. “Rightwing extremists”
59. “Returning veterans”
60. Those concerned about “illegal immigration”
61. Those that “believe in the right to bear arms”
62. Anyone that is engaged in “ammunition stockpiling”
63. Anyone that exhibits “fear of Communist regimes”
64. “Anti-abortion activists”
65. Those that are against illegal immigration
66. Those that talk about “the New World Order” in a “derogatory” manner
67. Those that have a negative view of the United Nations
68. Those that are opposed “to the collection of federal income taxes”
69. Those that supported former presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr
70. Those that display the Gadsden Flag (“Don’t Tread On Me”)
71. Those that believe in “end times” prophecies
72. Evangelical Christians
The link below is a site that you can copy and paste to and it converts to HTML, it even converts photos.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thanks. That is so nice...
“Obama Executive Order Unleashes “Behavioral Science” Squad to “Nudge” You
by Alex Neman Sept. 18, 2015, The New American
“Under the guise of better “serving” the American people through government, Obama signed an executive order calling for federal agencies and departments to deploy emerging “behavioral science” techniques against the public.
The Obama order also establishes a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team charged with applying psychological research to manipulate the beliefs and behaviors of Americans under various pretexts, and guide the vast federal bureaucracy as it hones its abilities to manipulate the public. “ --SNIP--
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(HAT TIP ANIMA MUNDI)---this sub rosa stuff commands people to believe the absurd----(a) a total acceptance of gay marriage, (b) global warming tagged climate change, and, (c) Hillary looking into the camera, admitting to lying and betrayal, yet, she still is supported.
(NOT TO FORGET (d) Muslims are peaceful, (e) Mexico is our friend, (f) illegals violate our borders looking for a better life, (g) The Clinton Foundation is saving the globe.
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FREEPER ANALYSIS Behavioral Sciences and psychology are dismissed by our side is being USED by the other side. Psychology is not just “counseling” or some frivolous study. It is a weapon when used in certain ways to strategically position image, words, feelings of large groups of people.
Trayvon Martin becomes a moral cause, his name on everyone’s lips....fund-raising as a bonus. Kate Steinle killed by an illegal in San Francisco??? Well, “things happen.” Benghazi? “Well, so long ago”, etc.
We had better start paying attention to this and grab the language: stop using their terms, stop giving into their demands, stop apologizing for offending them, stop changing team names and acting as if their complaints are real when they are not. All of it is connected and goes back to manipulation of public opinion. These tools are available to us as well.
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ANALYSIS The spoken truth is what THEY say it is.....it must be stripped of any concept of 2000 years of man's knowledge of right and wrong.
2008 candidate Obama’s calm cool voice of reason was supposed to prevail. Remember when Obama calmly assured America that once he was elected all Mideast “hostilities” would cease. A confident Obama would make sure America was once again “respected” around the world. And who could forget Obama’s “Arab Spring” when all of the terrorists would suddenly become sap-happy humanitarians, weaving daisy chains while frolicking around the May pole?
2012 Ohaha used the same conniving 2008 strategy patented by PR honcho Anita (Mao) Dunn---to manipulate voters, to downplay Ohaha's bgrnd, his destructive policies ....and his scary plans for his next term.
Remember, Dunn said back then, that THEY and only THEY decided what the media and the voters should know about 2008 candidate Ohaha. The strategy was to have Ohaha and his shady handlers play the innocents---the "don't worry--we're harmless" act.
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The WH teemed with the kingpins of crooked Chicago politics. (Looting the Treasury and voter fraud are the Chi/mobs specialties).
Let us not forget----the minute they hit the WH, the Chi/mob went into action: (1) the WH Chi/mob took over the census---and have all the CV they need to file phony FEC reports using stolen federal dollars as campaign contributions. (2) Plus COS Rham (The Godfather) Emanuel was put in charge of the US Treasury.
2012 Ohaha even bragged his was the first "billion dollar" campaign---a creepy way to show how "popular" he is (gag).
As Judge Judy would say: "Show me where you got the money to pay for this."
Most welcome, it works like a charm.
Really, Siggy, why must we allow such üntermensch into our liebenschraum?
LOL!
LMAO
Sessions just isn’t the guy...we need someone with fire in their belly.
The reason why all the voices from the obozo administration are so vocal about supposed violations from the current Trump administration. They know how it worked when they were in charge and expect the same to be going on now. Projection in a way but really more assuming anyone coming after them is as rotten as they were.
Wow. What a useful tool. Would have saved me a ton of work, back when i was posting lots of threads.
Cool find. You might consider putting up a thread about that site to help other busy posters.
Was meinen sie?
Bttt.
5.56mm
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