Free Republic

The government’s war on conservatives hasn’t stopped. On Saturday, Christine O’Donnell revealed a second onslaught from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in addition to the illegal accessing and abuse of her income tax records by the Internal Revenue Service. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is investigating the IRS on that. News recently broke that the IRS targeted Dr. Ben Carson, for the first time, immediately after he criticized Barack Obama. O’Donnell revealed on Saturday morning that the FEC is demanding payment of tribute (my words) to settle false accusations invented by a George Soros front group. Perhaps such shakedowns are an...

A national tea party group is asking for permission to keep their donors secret — just like the socialists. Citing a long litany of harassment examples, the Tea Party Leadership Fund is asking the Federal Election Commission for the same right granted to the Socialist Workers Party to shield the names and information of their donors from the public. In a new request to the FEC shared with POLITICO, the group argues that tea party donors and activists are being targeted for harassment by government officials and private groups — and they cite derogatory comments by politicians and overbearing government...

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

“If you thought the IRS targeting — scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it — was forgotten, think again,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper, introducing Dana Bash’s report last night on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s expansion of the probe. Issa requested information from the Federal Election Commission after leaked e-mails suggested that coordination may have taken place between the two agencies in pursuit of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. That may increase the focus on one particular figure in the scandal, as well as potentially add more to it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO House Oversight Committee...

Rep. Darrell Issa's demand follows CNN report of contact between the IRS and FEC House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa demanded Wednesday that the Federal Election Commission turn over records of more than five years of communications with the Internal Revenue Service -- a move that significantly expands the California Republican's ongoing probe of alleged federal targeting of conservative groups. In a letter to FEC Chairman Ellen Weintraub -- a Democrat -- Issa cited CNN reporting on Monday that raises "the prospect of inappropriate coordination between the IRS and the FEC about tax-exempt entities." Among other things, Issa asked for...

The IRS targeting scandal is best understood as part of a larger effort to limit the political speech of conservatives and business groups. That became clearer last week regarding the Federal Election Commission, and now evidence is spreading to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Senior Republicans on the House Oversight Committee recently wrote to new SEC Chairman Mary Jo White to report on disturbing events that occurred under her predecessor, and to request agency documents. As at the IRS, there's an emerging pattern at the SEC of senior officials rolling over career staff to politicize the work of a powerful...

One big question raised by IRS political targeting is whether Obama officials or their bureaucratic allies unleashed the power of the administrative state for partisan ends. Now evidence is emerging that officials at another agency, the Federal Election Commission, used their enforcement power as an anti-conservative sword. The House Ways and Means Committee this week released emails showing that, in 2008 and 2009, the FEC's general counsel staff sought tax information about conservative political groups from Lois Lerner of the IRS. Ms. Lerner is the IRS official who took the Fifth before Congress rather than tell her side of the...

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team. In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic. In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against...

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....