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"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn't be...

So says a low-level IRS whistleblower who will testify on Capitol Hill tomorrow morning.  The Washington Post reports: The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity. Previous accounts from IRS employees had shown...

Ahead of new hearings on the IRS abuse scandal, the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has released transcripts of depositions it has taken with IRS employees. The employees directly contradict IRS honcho Lois Lerner’s claim that the targeting was merely the work of “rogue” employees in the IRS Cincinnati office. Q: So is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the IG are not in the Cincinnati office? A: I don’t know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn’t do anything wrong. We followed...

Documents also Reveal Unusual Pressure from Key Democrat Senator to Target Conservatives (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents revealing that its handling of Tea Party applications was directed out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. The documents also show extensive pressure on the IRS by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) to shut down conservative-leaning tax-exempt organizations. The IRS’ emails by Lois Lerner detail her misleading explanations to investigators about the targeting of Tea Party organizations. The documents came in response to an October 2013 Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act...

In his first Congressional appearance since news of the lost Lois Lerner emails, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was alternately attacked by Republicans and praised by Democrats who apologized to him for his treatment and called the investigation an “endless conspiracy theory” by Republicans. Under oath before the House Ways and Means Committee, Koskinen restated what Congress had been told privately: that emails of Lerner and six other relevant IRS officials have been irretrievably lost because of crashes of their hard drives and servers. Koskinen defended not telling Congress in numerous previous appearances about the email losses. In those appearances, he...

. June 18, 2014 Newt Gingrich We are watching the most significant crisis of constitutional order since Watergate, the last time an administration broke the law deliberately and repeatedly. And none of the current cases look more Nixonian than what has been happening at the IRS. Thirteen months ago, President Obama stood before the American people, acknowledged that the IRS had “improperly screened conservative groups,” and promised to get to the bottom of the matter and to “hold the responsible parties accountable.” “It’s inexcusable,” he said, “and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about...

I lived through a nightmare but am here to talk about it. I was one of those victims of the IRS scandal. As an outspoken critic of President Obama and his socialist anti-business agenda, the IRS targeted me for intimidation and persecution–not once, but twice. The first IRS attack started in January of 2011. After I won a victory in tax court in the summer of 2012, I was audited again 5 days later. FIVE DAYS. Tax experts have never heard of this happening- EVER. But my nightmare is over. Just yesterday, I won again. My tax attorney just received...

Mitch McConnell delivered a speech today at the American Enterprise Institute to officially signal that the IRS scandal has entered its post-fact phase. When the IRS first revealed that its Cincinnati office had attempted to enforce its nonprofit laws using a search function that disproportionately impacted conservatives, Republicans were certain it must have come from the White House. They were going to follow the facts. But all of the facts point in the same direction, which is that the Obama administration had nothing to do with it at all. That was the conclusion of the agency’s inspector-general report, as well...

During the month of January 2014, IREHR will publish a multi-segment special report on the current status of the Tea Party movement. We will publish a track the membership of the principal organizations in the movement—a task undertaken by no organization or agency other than IREHR. We will look at geographic regions where this membership is concentrated. And we will look at some of the money that keeps this movement in the public eye. In the piece below, we follow the Tea Parties over the course of 2013. It was a year of countervailing winds and storms. A drive against...

Two senior White House aides knew weeks ago that a probe of the Internal Revenue Service had found that the U.S. tax agency had inappropriately targeted conservative groups, but did not tell President Barack Obama, a White House spokesman said on Monday. A Treasury Department official informed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler on April 24 about the preliminary findings of a report that would fuel the latest in a series of scandals to confront Obama at the start of his second term. The report was issued by a Treasury inspector general on May 14, four days after an IRS official...

President Obama and his administration would like us to believe that the scandal(s) surrounding the IRS are nothing more than a fabricated witch hunt designed to cause trouble for an administration distrusted by conservatives and Fox News. He said there wasn't a "smidgen of corruption" present in the IRS' targeting of conservative groups. Yes, that's what he really said to Bill O'Reilly. He as much as blamed the scandal on the reporting done by Fox News. He claims the investigation into the matter found the IRS and the agents involved did nothing wrong in their targeting of 501(c)(4) groups. What...

Obama-appointed IRS Chief Counsel is sued. IRS targeted Christine O’Donnell. So. Buckle in. True the Vote, the Tea Party-style group targeted by Internal Revenue Service officials who are now at the very heart of the IRS scandal, is suing William Wilkins. That would be the William Wilkins who is the IRS Chief Counsel. True the Vote, “the nation’s leading voters’ rights and election integrity organization,” is announcing today that it is adding Wilkins — one of only two Obama political appointees to the IRS — to its federal lawsuit against the IRS. The group is also adding five other ranking...

The other day I wrote that as investigators got closer and closer to the truth about Benghazi democrats would max out the volume on the shriek meter. It's begun. The are five stages to a scandal. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We have already passed Stage 1: DenialHouse Democrats Dismiss Existence Of Obama Scandals Rep. Gerry Connolly refuses to use the word “scandal.” After two weeks of brutal news cycles — with frenzied Republicans and a hyped up press corps aggressively covering every inch of three controversies surrounding the Obama administration — Connolly insists this too, shall...

"I don't think an apology is owed" -IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Note well the smirk on the face of the IRS Commissioner during this hearing. That smirk was on display all hearing long especially when he said no apology was owed to anyone because, well, they have lost anything in the last few months. Can we use that excuse during an audit? Today's hearing about the IRS scandal told us one thing for sure. The IRS and this Administration is hiding something. The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has long tried to do the "I know nutting!" song and dance...

Contrary to the White Houses explanation that a few rogue agents in Cincinnati lead the targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS, newly released emails obtained by Judicial Watch detail Democratic Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) pressuring the IRS to target conservative groups. On March 30, 2012 Levin wrote to then IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman about his concern with the political activity by conservative nonprofits. “Some entities claiming tax-exempt status as social welfare organizations under 26 U.S.C.&501(c)(4) appear to be engaged in political activities more appropriate for political organizations claiming tax-exempt status under 26 U.S.C.&527. Because of the urgency of...

"I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors." - Barack Obama Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisconover/2012/10/12/presidential-debates-highlight-what-the-health-care-debate-already-revealed/

The dam protecting the IRS scandal began to crack today when Lois Lerner, the IRS official who announced, and apologized for, the improper singling out of conservative-leaning organizations by IRS employees under her command, announced through her criminal defense lawyer that she will not testify as scheduled tomorrow before the House Oversight Committee. Rather, she will assert her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This marks a milestone in the IRS investigation. It can now be taken as more or less established that crimes were committed by Obama administration employees. LernerÂ’s lawyer tried to minimize the significance of her invoking the...

In a sign of liberal panic, NPR's Diane Rehm Show spent its first hour Monday questioning President Obama's management style. As their website elaborated on the Healthcare.gov fiasco and the NSA spying on world leaders, "the latest embarrassments have even some of the president’s supporters questioning his management style." To insure that their comments weren't too upsetting to Obama-loving NPR listeners, several journalists -- Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and David Gergen of CNN -- insisted the Obama administration has been "relatively scandal-free" in its operations: MARCUS: This is not a scandal in the traditional sense of scandal. And...

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010. In fact, applications were declining, data show. Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.” Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over...

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.