Free Republic

The Disturbing Truth Behind Your Next Income Tax Return By Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor, Laissez Faire Books The least of the problems with income tax is that it takes your money. The really big problem is that the income tax takes your life. It gives the government direct access to the things you own and sets up the political-bureaucratic sector to be the final arbiter of what you can and cannot consider to be yours. Illustrating this point is the bitter news that the IRS has considered it completely legal to demand access to your email archive whenever it wants....

After a contentious Wednesday hearing with IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, South Carolina Republican congressman Trey Gowdy threatened to hold the top tax official in contempt of Congress unless he produces disgraced IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails by the end of this week. Gowdy spoke with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren about Wednesday’s hearing, where a slew of GOP congressmen tore into Koskinen’s claim that responding to the Oversight committee’s subpoena for Lerner’s emails could take years. “All we want are the emails to or from Lois Lerner — I’m not talking about private taxpayer information. That’s 6103, that’s confidential, that’s...

New emails have been released about whether Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall pressured a state agency to change its estimate of Obamacare cancellations. Udall wanted the state Department of Insurance to downgrade its estimate of Obamacare-related insurance cancellations from 250,000 to just 73,000, because some Colorado residents were offered replacement plans. After releasing his own estimate in November, Udall plunged the state government into a media storm involving Gov. John Hickenlooper’s communications director and the insurance commissioner, according to the newly released emails. “Udall is broad brushing and assuming that because Anthem and Kaiser offered early renewals, the people who...

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials—including one at the heart of the IRS “targeting” scandal—violated agency policies and possibly federal records laws by using private email to send confidential taxpayer information, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a letter. In a Sept. 30 letter to IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel obtained by the Free Beacon, Oversight Chairman Darrel Issa (R., Calif.) said an investigation revealed a “troubling pattern” of at least four top IRS officials using their private email addresses to relay confidential tax information. “This not only raises the prospect of violations of the Federal...

Down in South Texas, health care providers are reporting an unusual problem with the federal marketplace: Many patients don’t have email addresses and, therefore, can’t sign up online. The Brownsville Community Health Center had 50 people show up on Tuesday ready to sign up for health coverage -- many even brought pay stubs and income documentation -- but not a single one of them had an email address. "If you don’t include an email address, they won’t let you through," said Christela Gomez, the special projects coordinator and lead certification application counselor at the center. Although the center considered helping...

With the federal government nearing shutdown, House Speaker John Boehner stood on the House floor Monday and called on his colleagues to vote for a bill banning a “so-called exemption” that lawmakers and staffers receive for their health insurance. “Why don’t we make sure that every American is treated just like we are?” Boehner asked, seeking to prohibit members of Congress and Capitol Hill aides from getting thousands of dollars in subsidies for their health insurance as they join Obamacare-mandated insurance exchanges. Yet behind-the-scenes, Boehner and his aides worked for months with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Minority...

A series of leaked emails from House Speaker John Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, show that the Speaker may have coordinated with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) to exempt Congress from Obamacare. The emails were leaked Tuesday by David Krone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s chief of staff, who actually has a history of this sort of thing. The leaks, which are a major taboo in Washington, show Rep. Boehner (R-Ohio) worked behind the scenes earlier this year to address confusion over a provision in the Affordable Care Act that would force members of Congress and their aides...

Lois Lerner, The center of the Internal Revenue agency scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed that they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy, according to several of her emails.

Newly released emails show that Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy. The email, released by a House committee investigating the IRS, seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t specifically targeted. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SPECIAL COVERAGE: Tea Party Voices -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner said in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle...

In a sign her troubles have undergone a significant expansion, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week that formerEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has hired a lawyer as new details of her use of private email accounts to conduct official government business were revealed. The agency and its previous head have still breathed easy despite months of inquiries andFreedom of Information Act requests fromChris Horner of theCompetitive Enterprise Institute and American Tradition Institute. Jackson and enviro-crats have been shielded by colleagues’ efforts to block access to records, delay their delivery, or conceal damning information with redactions. Nevertheless the indefatigable Horner has continued...

The National Security Agency unlawfully gathered as many as tens of thousands of e-mails and other electronic communications between Americans as part of a now-discontinued collection program, according to a 2011 secret court opinion. The 86-page opinion, which was declassified by U.S. intelligence officials Wednesday, explains why the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled the collection method unconstitutional. The judge, John D. Bates, found that the government had “advised the court that the volume and nature of the information it has been collecting is fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe.”

A key figure in the State Department’s Benghazi attack response team has become the central target in an email probe launched by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). Issa on Thursday demanded that Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s former spokeswoman and current assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, hand over every email she sent between Sept. 11, 2012 and Sept. 16, 2012. Nuland played a key role in crafting the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi, Libya attacks that killed four Americans. Congressional critics such as Issa believe that Nuland helped the White House obfuscate...

Having appeared to confirm no 'actual' American emails were intercepted in previous statements, it seems President Obama has some more questions to answer after the Guardian reveals that in fact, the Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years. “The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails,” the Guardian's Greenwald wrote. “It also details the Internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people...

The maker of the popular Firefox browser is moving ahead with plans to block the most common forms of Internet tracking, allowing hundreds of millions of users to limit who watches their movements across the Web, company officials said Wednesday. The decision comes despite intense resistance from advertising groups, which have argued that tracking is essential to delivering well-targeted, lucrative ads that pay for many popular Internet services. When Firefox’s maker, Mozilla, first publicly suggested that it might limit blocking in February, one advertising executive called it “a nuclear first strike” against the industry. Widespread release of the blocking technology...

The recent news that the NSA is collecting information on Americans from nine internet sources has brought to the forefront a confrontation between traditional sources of information and the legal framework of the government's right to investigate individuals. This topic has several main issues. At the top of the list is President Obama's outrageous statement that Americans may need to give up some freedom for security from terrorism. The president has no right to decide what degree of freedom Americans can have. The freedom Americans have is defined not by any one elected official but by the Constitution. The Fourth...

Eric Holder -- Obama's Attorney General -- should be impeached by the Republican House of Representatives. Without a doubt, Holder's obvious perjury in lying to Congress is the most serious offense. But to understand one of Holder's underlying offenses (in a long string), one must know the difference between "good law" and "bad law." Under the letter of the law, the search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails appears proper. But the Attorney General defied U.S. Supreme Court precedents. In March 1971, The New York Times received a copy of the secret Vietnam War "Pentagon Papers," 7,000 pages...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press. The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more...

It’s 4 p.m. ET as I’m writing this. If you had that time plus “deeper complicity for Holder in the Rosen investigation” in the pool, congrats.We already knew that he signed the warrant for Rosen’s e-mails. Now we know for sure that it wasn’t pro forma. President Good Government announced yesterday that he’s ordered the Attorney General to review the DOJ’s guidelines for snooping on reporters. Imagine how dismayed Eric Holder will be when he finds out what Eric Holder’s done. The Justice Department said on Friday that officials up to Attorney General Eric Holder vetted a decision to search...

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.