Free Republic

2011, while working as a college English instructor and writing articles for this and other sites about corruption in education, I set up a website called Dissident Prof with my own funds and by working in my basement. After one of my long-time readers sent an unsolicited $500 donation, I decided to apply for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Thus began the ordeal with the IRS. I suffered through fifteen months of stonewalling followed by demands to quickly meet a financial and ideological inquisition. I am now a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against the IRS, because we now know the...

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was a no show Tuesday for a House Judiciary hearing accusing him of misconduct. That didn't stop lawmakers from blasting Koskinen and calling for his impeachment. The hearing stems from a 2013 investigation into IRS official Lois Lerner. Lerner was accused of unfairly targeting conservative and tea party groups by delaying their requests for tax-exempt status. Koskinen, who was brought in by President Barack Obama after the scandal unfolded, promised to provide key evidence, including thousands of Lerner's emails to assist Congress in their investigation. Tapes obtaining those emails were destroyed. Although many of the emails...

RS Commissioner John Koskinen has declined to testify in his own defense at a congressional hearing Tuesday, but insisted in a statement that his bungling of a subpoena doesn’t rise to the level of “treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors” needed for him to be impeached. The Judiciary Committee hearing is being viewed by some House Republicans as the precursor to impeachment, with the House’s top investigator saying Mr. Koskinen defied a congressional subpoena that demanded all of former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner’s emails be preserved as part of the investigation into tea party targeting. But Mr. Koskinen,...

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will not appear at a “misconduct” hearing Tuesday where Republicans will lay out a case to impeach him for allegedly failing to comply with a congressional subpoena, the IRS told POLITICO. Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee summoned the tax chief to answer accusations from the House Oversight panel that he failed to preserve documents Congress requested for its probe of the IRS tea party scandal. They also say he never told the full truth about erased back-up tapes containing copies of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner. Some Republicans even suspect the IRS...

A self-identified IRS employee admitted he would go after, target and try to end conservative groups who wanted to abolish the IRS, to Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing those groups, on a Washington Journal segment on C-SPAN. Mitchell, a political law attorney who has represented conservative groups during the IRS targeting scandal since 2010, was a guest on C-SPAN to discuss the possible impeachment of the IRS commissioner John Koskinen. The first caller was a self-identified IRS employee who said he would go after the groups Mitchell represents if their goal was to abolish the IRS. “I am a lowly...

The IRS has seen a surge of scams, see the most recent below. The IRS reminds taxpayers to guard against all sorts of con games that arise during any filing season. Tax Refund Scam Artists Posing as Taxpayer Advocacy Panel A new email scam targeting taxpayers has emerged. According to the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (TAP), taxpayers are receiving emails that appear to be from TAP about a tax refund. These emails are a phishing scam, where unsolicited emails which seem to come from legitimate organizations -- but are really from scammers -- try to trick unsuspecting victims into providing personal...

Donald Trump says he would like to release his tax returns to the public, but just can't. "I'm being audited now for two or three years, so I can't do it until the audit is finished, obviously. And I think people would understand that," the Republican front-runner said at Thursday night's Republican debate in Houston. The Internal Revenue Service and tax experts, though, say he can. "Nothing prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information," IRS spokesman Anthony Burke said in an email. Audits aren't out of the norm for someone with Trump's wealth, legal experts say, and there's nothing...

Donald Trump, Christian Martyr I was starting to doze off. The debate was all but over, and the exhaustion from the day was catching up with me, as was the scotch. The rush of finally seeing the candidates go after Trump in a serious way was wearing off replaced by a mix of dread and resignation that it may all be too little too late. (Note: I don't think it is, and I won't be giving into despair either, for reasons Charlie explains here.) I was only half listening when Donald Trump came into the spin room on CNN to...

Dr. Ben Carson told the audience tonight at the CNN GOP debate that after he spoke out against Obamacare at the National Prayer Breakfast he was audited by the Obama IRS. Ben Carson Criticized Obama TO HIS FACE At The National Prayer Breakfast In 2013 (MRCTV) Dr. Carason: I never had an audit until I spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. And then all of the sudden they came in and said, "We just want to look at your real estate dealings." And then they didn't find anything. And then they took a look at the whole year. And they...

In June 2014, the IRS seized $153,907.99 from Ken Quran's bank account - his life savings - even though he did nothing wrong. . . the IRS may seize a person's bank assets if it discovers a pattern of frequent transactions under $10,000. Banks are required to report cash transactions over $10,000 and it's a crime if one tries to avoid that reporting by purposefully keeping all transactions below that amount. The laws are intended to suss out drug trafficking, money laundering and organized crime or terrorist activity. But the IRS doesn't need any evidence of wrongdoing before seizing the...

The ACLJ has secured an important victory in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case against the IRS on behalf of Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire. After a year of litigation, which followed over four months of waiting for the IRS to respond to its FOIA request, we finally succeeded in compelling the IRS to comply with its obligations under federal law. As we have previously written, Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire issued a FOIA request to the IRS in June 2014 seeking communications between two New Hampshire legislators and certain IRS officials, including Lois Lerner, the IRS's...

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS scandal, is breaking her silence in an unapologetic interview where she says she's not sorry and maintains she “didn’t do anything wrong” -- despite widely documented evidence that her division targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. The former head of the tax-exempt unit, speaking with Politico, gave her first media interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. She has twice refused to answer questions before Congress, but used the interview to publicly assert her innocence. "I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for...

House Republicans have dug up emails from Lois Lerner in which the former IRS official refers to some in the Republican Party as “---holes” and "crazies" – an exchange they say shows her “animus” toward conservatives. The November 2012 emails were released Wednesday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., as part of his renewed call for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate. Lerner is the ex-IRS official who led the unit accused of targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny. In the email exchange, Lerner appears to be chatting with...

Scandal: The tangled web of IRS deceit unravels a bit more with news recycled backup tapes of lost emails still exist and statements before a federal judge that Lois Lerner's hard drive was irreparably damaged were untrue. Deliberately destroying evidence pertaining to the investigation of possible criminal activity is a crime. So is lying about it to Congress and the courts as part of a cover-up of that activity. On July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by the targeted conservative group True the Vote, told Obama administration lawyers he...

Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin’s legal foundation is asking a federal judge to sanction the Environmental Protection Agency for destroying public records. The Landmark Legal Foundation asked federal District Judge Royce Lamberth to sanction the EPA for the destruction of emails and text messages concerning the delay of large new environmental regulations until after the 2012 election.

Scandal: An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes. Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records, if nothing else, are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself. As we have noted, Lois Lerner's lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is currently claiming that seven different IRS officials experienced computer crashes that erased their emails and made it impossible for the IRS to cooperate with congressional investigations into the IRS targeting matter. The wave of computer crashes apparently struck both Washington, D.C. — where Lois Lerner oversaw the agency’s Exempt Organizations division — and also Cincinnati, Ohio — where agents processed tax-exempt applications. The Federal Records Act requires IRS employees to save all of their emails pertaining to agency business and to also print those emails out in case they have a computer crash.

"Lois Lerner Caught Granting Muslim Brotherhood front groups Tax Exempt status as far back as BUSH ADMINISTRATION" One of the reasons Republicans like Rep. Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania won’t come forward with the truth about Malik Obama’s tax exempt status and Lois Lerner’s role in it likely has to do with what she was permitted to do when a Republican president was in office. Calling attention to Lerner’s signature being at the bottom of the Barack H. Obama Foundation’s (BHOF) approval letter is certain to cause the Republican Party headaches over its complicity in taking the country to where it...

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said Tuesday that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has done “a terrible job communicating” in the investigation into former IRS official Lois Lerner’s missing emails. “Obviously, I think he is doing a terrible job communicating, and obviously, they made huge mistakes as far as how they’ve retained records and whether or not they’ve been upfront and whether or not those records were available,” McCaskill said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This guy did a terrible job being arrogant yesterday. We all think of the IRS as being arrogant, and he kind of confirmed that,” she added about his...

Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began. Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law. Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS...