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The old adage says that where there's smoke, there's fire is getting truer with every new revelation in the ongoing IRS scandal. Since the onset of the scandal, America has been told a pack of lies from the Obama administration and various federal agencies. First they claimed that it was just a couple of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office, which has been refuted in that orders came down from Washington to interfere with conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Then we found out that other federal agencies got involved with harassing and intimidating tea party conservative groups. Next came the...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American...

Let’s play Guess The Federal Agency in order to see where the next political scandal may originate. Here are a few hints: This bureaucracy supposedly has safeguards to prevent politicization, enforces a broad, arcane, and contradictory regulatory and statutory code, and treats potential targets of investigations as guilty unless they prove themselves innocent. Wait a moment … I just described nearly every federal agency in existence. My bad.In this case, though, I’m talking about the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the Byzantine, irrational campaign regulations put in place over the last several decades on federal candidates and...

President Barack Obama intends to nominate two lawyers with government experience to become commissioners on the Federal Election Commission, the agency that oversees and enforces campaign finance laws. One of the nominees would fill a Democratic vacancy on the commission and the other would replace the Republican vice chairman, the White House said. Obama’s nominee to replace Republican Donald F. McGahn is Lee Goodman, who served as a top aide to former Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore of Virginia. Obama’s Democratic nominee is Ann Ravel, the chair of the California Fair Political Practices Commission. She would fill the seat vacated earlier...

Scandal: Before his 2010 letter urging the IRS to target conservatives, the Senate majority whip's 1996 campaign benefited from the targeting of his opponent by a Federal Election Commission official with a familiar name. Perhaps not surprisingly, the IRS scandal may have its roots in Illinois politics with the 1996 targeting of Illinois conservative Al Salvi by a familiar name, Lois Lerner, then head of the Enforcement Division of the Federal Elections Commission. That year, Democrat U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin and Republican State Rep. Al Salvi were locked in a battle for the U.S. Senate seat Durbin would eventually win....

Because he posed a threat to Dick Durbin’s US Senate election in 1996, Illinois Republican Al Salvi was threatened by a United States government official. That official was Lois Lerner and she was using her position as a representative of the Federal Election Commission. In the course of her FEC inquisition of Salvi for alleged election law violations, Lerner made a statement that amounts to extortion. Following the Chicago way, Durbin made a series of FEC complaints against Salvi and Lerner took the point in handling his case. According to Salvi, at one point Lerner made an offer to him...

BREAKING>>> Lois Lerner Told Republican in 1996: “Promise me You Will Never Run Again, and We’ll Drop This (FEC) Case” Lois Lerner, the controversial director of the tax-exempt organizations division at the Internal Revenue Service, has a long sordid history of targeting conservatives. Under the direction of Lois Lerner, the Federal Election Commission sued the Christian Coalition in the 1990s. She harassed the Christian Coalition for three election cycles. She lost her case. Lerner even asked one conservative during the case if Pat Robertson prayed over him. (Sound familiar?)

In 2008 the American Issues Project released an ad tying Barack Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. “Barack Obama launched his political career with the direct assistance of Bill Ayers.” (VIDEO-AT-LINK) The Obama camp used the DOJ to demand an investigation and prosecute American Issues Project That’s not all… Obama goons threatened 10,000 GOP donors with legal trouble and public harassment if they continued to support Republican candidates. The Wall Street Journal reported, via Jammie Wearing Fool: On Aug. 21, 2008, the conservative American Issues Project ran an ad highlighting ties between candidate Obama and Bill Ayers, formerly of the...

Story highlights: Lois Lerner, the embattled director of Exempt Organizations at the IRS, served as head of the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) enforcement division from 1986 until 2001. While there, the FEC sued the Christian Coalition for allegedly conspiring with political candidates. During the case, representatives for the FEC asked intrusive questions on religion of several people involved, including Lt. Col. Oliver North. At one point, a representative demanded to know details regarding Pat Roberstson praying for North after reading a letter from North to Robertson indicating as much. The group’s attorney also noted that during the investigation third parties...

Under the direction of Lois Lerner, the Federal Election Commission sued the Christian Coalition in the 1990s. She harassed the Christian Coalition for three election cycles. She lost her case. Lerner even asked one conservative during the case if Pat Robertson prayed over him. (Sound familiar?) These actions landed her at the IRS where she used the same tactics against conservatives and Christians – only on a much larger scale. 500 conservative and Christian groups were illegally targeted by the Obama IRS during her tenure. For twenty-seven months the Obama IRS refused to approve any Tea Party applications for tax-exempt...

Twice they say is a pattern. Or a charm. And there isn’t much charm in using government agencies to conduct an illegal war against the opposition. Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency’s growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct. Prior...

Reviewing the charging documents in the case against former Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., D-Ill., it is impossible not to wonder how he got away with stealing his campaign funds for so long. For a period of at least seven years, Jackson misused his campaign funds to buy personal items, including a $40,000 Rolex watch, mink capes, mounted elk heads and Michael Jackson memorabilia, among other things. Part of the problem is that since 2001, the Federal Election Commission — the agency charged with monitoring campaign finances — has specifically permitted candidates to use campaign funds to pay family members....

Minutes after Newsweek published a story on the threat of illegal foreign and fraudulent online campaign donations late Monday afternoon, the Obama campaign struck back hard with a response smearing one of the article’s authors and offered an anemic defense of its online fundraising operations.

BOISE, Idaho -- Former Republican U.S. Sen. Larry Craig aims to fend off a federal election lawsuit against him by arguing his infamous July 11, 2007, Minneapolis airport bathroom visit that ended in his sex-sting arrest was part of his official Senate business. Craig is hoping to avoid repaying $217,000 in campaign funds the Federal Election Commission claims he misused to defend himself. The FEC sued Craig in June in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleging he converted the campaign money to personal use by spending it on his legal defense after he was accused of soliciting sex in...

The Federal Election Commission this week struggled again with Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein's request for a loosening of the usual fundraising limits, in the wake of the massive embezzlement by former campaign treasurer Kinde Durkee. The upshot: Feinstein didn't get the go-ahead she sought, but neither did the six-member FEC come to a official consensus decision on the key question. There could be more discussions to come. Feinstein asked the FEC for permission to raise more money from contributors who had already maxed out under federal campaign limits, . . .

This video is a follow-up to Adrian Murray’s facebook post over the weekend, in which he says that he donated to the Obama campaign as “Adolph Hitler,” occupation “Dictator” living at a German address. As you can see in the clip, citizen journalist George Scaggs of Austin tries the same thing at three different campaign sites, that of Obama, Romney and Santorum. Only the Obama site accepted the donation without the verification number. Let’s take a look at the three campaign websites mentioned in the video ... [graphics] The Obama campaign’s donation page for Americans living outside the US also...

The Democratic National Committee outraised its Republican counterpart by about $3 million last month, according to reports released Monday. The DNC raked in $13.3 million in January, compared to the Republican National Committee’s haul of $10.5 million. The Democrats’ report includes $6.2 million in contributions to the committee, as well as $7 million channeled through the Obama Victory Fund, a joint committee set up by President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and the DNC. But the Republican fundraising arm had more cash in the bank by the end of last month, the Federal Election Commission reports show. The RNC had $23.4...

Edwards' campaign spent nearly $900G in 2011 despite FEC complaintPublished February 09, 2012 | FoxNews.com John Edwards' failed presidential campaign racked up close to $900,000 in expenses in 2011, according to newly filed finance reports, dropping thousands of dollars on airfare and hotels despite a ruling from federal election officials that he still owes taxpayers more than $2.1 million. The dozens of pages of filings for the year do not go into detail about where the flights were headed or where the hotels were booked. The purpose of the travel expenses was not clear. But they appeared to criss-cross the...

And only some, but this Friday night news dump serves another purpose. The mainstream media finally had to talk about the bundling Jon Corzine did for Barack Obama this year in the context of the MF Global scandal and the disappearance of $1.2 billion in customer funds: President Barack ObamaÂ’s re-election campaign has returned campaign contributions from Jon S. Corzine, former chairman and chief executive officer of MF Global Holdings Ltd., according to a Democratic official.Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee refunded the money from the former New Jersey governor out of an abundance of caution, said the...

Rep. McGovern introduces Constitutional amendment By Staff reportsMetroWest Daily News Posted Nov 16, 2011 @ 03:39 PM U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern has introduced a Constitutional amendment in the House of Representatives to repeal the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The amendment would restore the Founding Fathers’ intent to grant rights to people, not corporations, according to McGovern’s office.The legislation, H.J. Res 88, is intended to “clarify the authority of Congress and the States to regulate corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities established by the laws of any state, the United States,...