Free Republic

The chairman of an anti-gay marriage group testified Tuesday that his organization has proof that the IRS leaked confidential donor details last year, calling for prosecution into what he described as a "felony." "This just smells and I hope this committee gets to the bottom of it," John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, said at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee. Eastman testified Tuesday alongside several Tea Party activists who all claim they were targeted by the IRS. The Tea Party groups offered a first-hand account of how the IRS singled them out when...

CNSNews.com) – The government has “forgotten its place,” Becky Gerritson, president of the Wetumpka, Ala. Tea Party, told the House Ways and Means Committee at a hearing on Tuesday on the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative groups. “I am a born-free American woman – wife, mother, and citizen – and I’m telling my government that you have forgotten your place,” Gerritson said. “It is not your responsibility to look out for my well-being or to monitor my speech.”

If you’re going to step in the ring with your government, you should expect to get punched in the face. And by “step in the ring,” I of course mean “avail yourself of the same perfectly legal tax strategies that are routinely permitted to liberal nonprofits.” I confess, while I expected some stupid and predictable Democratic scandal spin this week, I didn’t expect to watch a congressman indirectly defend government discrimination on grounds that the victims could have avoided it by simply not asserting their statutory rights in the first place. And yet here we are.That’s not the only problem...

A tea party witness from Alabama launched into emotional testimony Tuesday as she described her group’s political abuse at the hands of the Internal Revenue Service. “We peacefully assemble. We petition our government. We exercise the right to free speech. And we don’t understand why the government tried to stop us,” Wetumpka Tea Party President Becky Gerritson said during her opening statement before the House Ways and Means Committee. “I’m not here at as a serf or a vassal,” she went on, beginning to choke up. “I’m not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born-free American woman, wife, mother...

Here is a copy of the Democratic talking points at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing today in Washington DC. Democrats handed this out to the press before the hearing. Democrat Sander Levin, the ranking member on the committee, said the IRS targeting scandal is not a partisan scandal.

LIVE: Conservative Groups Testify to Lawmakers on IRS Scrutiny 10am EDT (7am PDT)

While appearing Tuesday on KABC’S morning show, “McIntyre in the Morning,” veteran ABC News analyst Trey Hardin dropped a bombshell when he said he is convinced that the IRS scandal emanates from the West Wing of the White House. Hardin states his case with “with a very strong sense of certainty,” but does not offer any new information to support the claim: “I will tell you this on the IRS front. I’ve worked in this town for over 20 years in the White House and on Capitol Hill and I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that...

May 31, 2013 White House defense: Visitor logs too unreliable to reveal whether Shulman actually visited 157 times Vince Coglianese The White House on Friday pushed back against news that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times from 2009 to 2012.Shulman is a central figure in the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, having led the agency while those groups were singled out for harassment.When challenged last week by congressional investigators about just 118 of the 157 apparent White House visits, Shulman did not dispute the number, only identifying several reasons why he visited so...

The entire pretext by which the Obama Justice Department justified spying on James Rosen was flimsy enough. They trumped up the notion that they might charge him as a criminal co-conspirator to justify the warrant that allowed them to read his e-mails and access his phone records. This was always absurd, based on ridiculous notions about how Rosen approached his reporting work.

If you're not gonna love me, fear me. That, my friends, is the bottom line on all these White House scandals--trust me. To intimidate. To bully. To use the powers at your disposal to dispose of those who challenge your power. I don't know where this IRS intimidation of conservative groups goes. Or the Justice Department targeting journalists goes. Or Health and Human Services hitting up private companies to promote a controversial healthcare law goes. But I do know what it says, what all these scandals say. That this White House doesn't play nice. But it does play rough. Get...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Bush had one White House visit by the IRS commissioner. Why did Obama have 157? If you’re not already familiar with the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups under Obama, you can read all about it at entry #170 in this earlier post of mine: Here are 180 examples of Barack Obama’s lying, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, government waste, and other misdeedsThere are two new things in this next article, and I’m not sure which of the two is more interesting.First, during Obama’s presidency, the IRS commissioner made more visits to the White House – by a...

Obama officials who’ve visited the White House (As prepared by The Daily Caller) Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.

If you put together all of the White House visits by Cabinet members Eric Holder, Kathleen Sebelius, and Hillary Clinton, you might approach the number accumulated by a non-Cabinet official from an agency in the news lately. Douglas Shulman visited the White House far more often during the Obama administration than the closest members of Barack Obama’s own team, with perhaps six times as many visits as Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more...

We've known for weeks the argument made by senior IRS officials that targeting of conservative Tea Party groups was carried out by a "few low-level agents in Cincinnati" is bogus. Now, we have even more proof. NBC News reported last night that the signatures of senior level IRS officials, including that of IRS Tax Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner, are on documents that were sent to Tea Party groups asking for more information. Additional scrutiny of conservative organizations’ activities by the IRS did not solely originate in the agency’s Cincinnati office, with requests for information coming from other offices and...

Add another item to the list of red flags that may get you audited: Adopting a child. The Internal Revenue Service mishandled tax returns of adoptive families, flagging for further review 90% of those who claimed the adoption tax credit for the 2012 filing season. And a report by the federal agency’s Taxpayer Advocate Service also found that nearly 70% of adoptive families — more than 35,000 — had at least a partial audit of their tax return. By contrast, just one percent of all returns are audited.

The Internal Revenue Service, charged with implementing the biggest change in tax laws in 20 years due to Obamacare, has created eight offices and special "teams" to handle the chore, way more than initially revealed. Besides the top office headed by the woman in the middle of the IRS-Tea Party scandal, there are seven others and a special enforcement team that make up an organization chart that mirrors the organization of the IRS itself, according to a Treasury Inspector General's report. The June report focused on concerns that the IRS, which is filling the Obamacare offices with 2,137 agents and...

It seems like only yesterday that IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner was claiming she knew nothing about the dastardly work of those shadowy "low-level employees in the Cincinnati office" - who somehow remain shadowy to this day, despite having been blamed for the worst abuse-of-power scandal in living memory. The Incompetence Defense beloved of this administration, and so effective with a media that would never accept it from a Republican official, was deployed with gusto. Lerner was shocked, shocked, to discover gambling against Tea Party groups going on at Rick's Tax Exempt Organizations Cafe American. But now National...

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s embattled director of Exempt Organizations, could be held in contempt of court and jailed for refusing to testify before Congress, civil-rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz says. "She's in trouble. She can be held in contempt," Dershowitz told "the Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV. "Congress . . . can actually hold you in contempt and put you in the Congressional jail." Lerner, grilled Wednesday on the IRS' targeting of conservative organizations, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — but not before insisting "I have done nothing wrong." Her brief statement of innocence has opened...

".......Since 2006, with the beginnings of the breakaway of populist conservatives from the national Republican Party via the Tea Party movement, the GOP has been trying to figure out how to co-opt and capture it once again, just as George W. Bush did with many elements of the conservative movement in the early years of the 21st century." ".......Men and women of the Establishment Republican Party like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who previously regarded the Tea Party Movement as something unpleasant and unsophisticated, are now trying to be their friends."

Lois Lerner, the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt groups, took her too-clever-by-half act to Congress yesterday and may have waived her right to claim her Fifth Amendment privilege in the process. Appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, she couldn’t resist citing a little history, bragging on her public service, instructing the committee as to the purpose of the Fifth Amendment, and proclaiming her innocence of everything the committee might be interested in — all before asserting her Fifth Amendment privilege. Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) was a bit taken aback. He had never seen anybody try...