Free Republic

How might you feel if you had performed, with your bosses’ permission and direction, a project that they later blamed on you and publicly denounced as a rogue operation? That’s the situation in which some employees of the Cincinnati’s IRS office find themselves. The IRS and the Obama administration have repeatedly said that low-level, “rogue” employees in Cincinnati were to blame for the agency’s inappropriate targeting of conservative groups, despite an array of evidence to the contrary. As a result, those Cincinnati employees are understandably miffed. Several IRS employees in the Cincinnati field office acknowledge in recent interviews with the...

Letters from the IRS to tea party-related organizations in Oklahoma City and Albuquerque, New Mexico show that IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and two satellite offices in California, were directly involved with sending harassing letters to conservative organizations that sought tax-exempt status. The IRS has acknowledged only the involvement of its Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati, Ohio, which typically makes most decisions about granting or denying tax-exempt status to non-profit organizations. And Wednesday afternoon, CNN cited a congressional source in reporting that the acting IRS Commissioner – whom President Obama fired later in the day – had identified two 'rogue'...

Who is Gary Muthert? Well, he is the Internal Revenue Service officer in Cincinnati who gathered applications in 2010 — presumably from the tea party and other conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. He did it, he says, at the behest of a local Cincinnati IRS manager who incidentally remains unidentified. According to transcripts of Muthert’s testimony to the House investigative committee, the unidentified manager informed Muthert that “Washington, D.C. wanted some cases.” That is to say, tea party cases. Who is Elizabeth Hofacre? She too is an employee of the IRS in Cincinnati. She somehow received Muthert’s cases, and whether...

Fact: The IRS targeted conservative and tea party groups requesting tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. That’s a fact. Congress held hearings — embarrassing hearings. Three top Internal Revenue Service officials resigned. No heads rolled, but for the Obama administration, and the lawless Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that amounted to a major scandal. Even White House spokesman Jay “Circus” Carney called the IRS‘ actions “inappropriate.” Fact. But President Obama, in an interview last week with sycophant Chris Matthews, now says the entire scandal was made up by the media. “When we do things right,...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, it was just yesterday at the fundraiser in Harvey Weinstein's fashionable West Village home in Manhattan. Again, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel were in the audience. This morning on Good Morning America, here is portion of Jonathan Karl, the White House correspondent's report about the IRS scandal -- and, lo and behold, I end up being in this report. KARL: That's not good enough for some conservatives, who point to past references the president has made to Tea Party groups. OBAMA: I've been a little amused over the past couple of days where people are having...

The Obama administration's spin that only two rogue agents in Cincinnati, Ohio were behind the systematic harassment of conservative groups by the IRS, continues to unravel. NBC News reports that a number of targeted conservative groups received letters from IRS higher-ups from offices outside of Cincinnati -- including Washington DC. Moreover, one conservative group claims to have received a harassing IRS letter just three weeks ago. Jay Sekulow is a one-time trial lawyer who represented the IRS in tax-exempt cases. Today, though, he represents 27 conservative groups singled out by the IRS. The lawsuit he intends to file includes letters...

A tranche of new Internal Revenue Service e-mails refute the White House’s longtime defense of the agency’s actions in the IRS targeting scandal. The e-mails, uncovered by a Judicial Watch FOIA request, reveal there was direction coming from the Washington headquarters of the IRS and that the targeting of Tea Party groups was indeed political. The Washington Examiner‘s Mark Tapscott excerpts: In a July 2012 email, Holly Paz, who was then director of the IRS Rulings and Agreements division, asked IRS lawyer Steven Grodnitzky “to let Cindy and Sharon know how we have been handling Tea Party applications in...

New documents obtained and released through a Judicial Watch lawsuit show the targeting of tea party and conservative groups came directly out of Washington D.C., not a rogue IRS office in Cincinnati. On July 6, 2012, former Director of the IRS Rulings and Agreements Division and current Manager of Exempt Organizations Guidance Holly Paz sent an email to IRS Attorney Steven Grodnitzky asking for an explanation of how tea party group applications were being handled. Grodnitzky responded by confirming the cases were being handled in Washington. "EOT is working the Tea party applications in coordination with Cincy. We are developing...

‘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 e-mails 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 the...

With Lois Lerner facing a contempt of Congress vote Wednesday, and coming up on the one-year anniversary of the IRS conservative-targeting scandal (this Saturday all cocktails consumed in America will be a tax write-off, The Daily Caller has decided), it’s time to take a look at the pro-IRS case. What have we found? There isn’t one. Every defense put forth by the Obama administration and its allies in the Democratic Party and the media has now been disproved and discredited. No, we’re not talking about Jay Carney’s “fake scandal” line or Obama’s “not even a smidgen of corruption” talking points....

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal, as of November 22, 2014 In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had illegally targeted conservative groups for additional reviews. Organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” were singled out for harassment, such as requiring them to provide a list of donors, details about their internet postings on social networking websites, and information about their family members.When this was first reported by the media in May 2013, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that had conducted these illegal activities, claimed that only low level employees had...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal In May 2013, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had illegally targeted conservative groups for additional reviews. Organizations with the words “tea party” or “patriot” were singled out for harassment, such as requiring them to provide a list of donors, details about their internet postings on social networking websites, and information about their family members.When this was first reported by the media in May 2013, Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that had conducted these illegal activities, claimed that only low level employees had known about it, and that...

An Internal Revenue Service manager who described himself as a "conservative Republican" told congressional investigators that no one in the agency's Cincinnati office was trying to target tea party organizations for political reasons, according to an interview transcript released Tuesday. The manager, John Shafer, said he and an employee in his screening unit decided to pull applications for tax-exempt status filed by political groups and send them to managers in Washington. He said they were aware of the controversy over the groups and wanted to ensure they were treated uniformly. "Because of media attention that he had seen, he had...

There is a gal in DC named Holly Paz. she is also in the food chain according to a Cinc TV station http://www.fox19.com/story/22401447/rc-inspector-general-may-need-to-interview-irs-agents-again You can go to the FEC web site and see that she has been a bid donor to Obummer in 2008 about $4,000.00 Also here is a story from the Cincinnati Newspaper. http://news.cincinnati.com/interactive/article/20130522/NEWS01/305230035/IRS-emails-Who-knew-what-when- Another one from national Review.

On March 31, 2010, the day before the Inspector General's report says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began its scheme to target tea party and conservative groups, the White House Visitors Log reveals that President Barack Obama met with IRS union boss Colleen Kelley. In a notable feat of investigative journalism, American Spectator reporter Jeffrey Lord exposed what appears to be an unholy alliance among the White House, Democrat members of Congress and the thousands of IRS employees, who are members of the far-left, anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). The NTEU, which supported Obama in 2008 and 2012,...

A series of letters suggests that senior IRS official Lois Lerner was directly involved in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups as recently as April 2012, more than nine months after she first learned of the activity. Lerner, the director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Washington, D.C., signed cover letters to 15 conservative organizations currently represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) between in March and April of 2012. The letters, such as this one sent to the Ohio Liberty Council on March 16, 2012, informed the groups applying for tax-exempt status that the IRS...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status.

The short answer? The highest-ranking official in the Cincinnati office where, the IRS would have us believe, a few rogue employees initiated a scheme to target conservatives. SNIP When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved. Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted...

"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...

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...