Free Republic

In the wake of one of the worst abuses of government power in recent history, many are rushing to frame the Internal Revenue Service scandal as simply an attack on conservative activists. That view risks creating a partisan political football and misses a fundamentally scarier abuse that exceeds the scandals of Watergate or any other prior government abuse. The IRS has admitted that since May 2010 it targeted grassroots-conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, unfairly subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny due to their political leanings. Such groups were told they were required to comply with IRS requests, no...

Treasury has not one, but at least two departments tasked with keeping an eye on the IRS. We’ve heard from Treasury’s Inspector General already in his report released this week. Now, the IRS Oversight Board has chimed in. The Oversight Board is a nine-member independent body charged to oversee the IRS in its administration, management, conduct, direction, and supervision of the execution and application of the internal revenue laws. The Secretary of Treasury and the Commissioner of Internal Revenue are members of the Board. Today the IRS Oversight Board released this statement: The IRS Oversight Board is deeply troubled by...

With each passing hour, it becomes more and more clear that the truth was concealed from the American public prior to the election about two major Obama administration scandals. Benghazi was very much in the news prior to the election. The concealment went to the culpability of the Obama administration in failing to heed warnings about security at the Benghazi consulate, the nature of the pre-planned al-Qaeda attack, the scrubbing of the talking points used by Susan Rice, the failure to go to the aid of Americans in trouble, and the claim that the attack was a result of a...

You consider yourself a law abiding citizen, and you are not starting a nonprofit organization with conservative ties. Even so, you may be a candidate for a tax audit—and you may have no clue what you have done to warrant the attention of the IRS. The nation's tax collectors have long made it a practice to look for discrepancies, omissions and suspicious activity to uncover tax evasion and fraud. And lately, the IRS has expanded its monitoring to include social media. The agency now keeps an eye out for online discussions about nonpayment or underpayment of taxes, and even sale...

So says Ezra Klein, who may turn out to be one of the stupidest people ever to be given column inches in a printed medium of any variety. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) After reading Klein’s desperate attempt to map onto reality his own desires, written in the form of a serious news piece, I’m tempted to say something like “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” But then, the movie that comes from is, like, 35-years old. And back then, slave owners were still running things, and men in tri-cornered hats were acting all pissy and dumping perfectly...

No one can deny that Barack Obama is a highly skilled politician, at least by the measure of election outcomes. His record is undefeated, save for an ill-advised 2000 primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent congressman. His 2008 presidential victory, after a fraction of a term in the U.S. Senate, was especially dazzling. It disproved those who said that Hillary Clinton was invincible, that a left-wing Democrat couldn't win, and that America wasn't ready for a black president. No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their...

Speaking at Ohio State University this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who "incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity." Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists, with a straight face, that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he "learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this." Like you, all he knows is...

Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller and J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified today at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing. Top IRS official Steven Miller told the committee, “I cannot reply to a specific case.” Miller wouldn’t say who was responsible in targeting conservative individuals. Commissioner Miller just dropped this line, “I don’t think targeting is wrong.”(VIDEO-AT-LINK) UPDATE: Later in his testimony Miller admitted that progressive groups were not targeted.

Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving "extra scrutiny" to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear - if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that...

The Internal Revenue Service official who sparked a firestorm last week with her admission that the agency targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status signed two letters sent last year to the Richmond Tea Party requesting additional information from the group. Lois Lerner, the director of exempt organizations for the IRS , apologized Friday for the improper scrutiny of tea party groups, describing it as the work of low-level staffers in the agency's Cincinnati office. But the letters signed by Lerner and provided by the Richmond Tea Party place her in the position of pursuing additional information in the same vein...

New allegations claim the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) not only delayed the applications of new conservative groups, but also targeted a Christian group, Family Talk Action, and a well-established group, the Leadership Institute. In September 2011, well-known family advocate Dr. James Dobson's newest Christian ministry, Family Talk Action Corporation, filed a Form 1024 with the IRS requesting 501(c)(4) status. The attorney in charge had 26 years experience of filing these forms. "The Family Talk application was every bit as compliant as the ones he'd filled out in the past," said Alex McFarland, the group's Director of Apologetics. McFarland told The...

Inspired by ABC News, a drama in three acts. April 25, 2009: IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman has selected Sarah Hall Ingram to succeed Steven T. Miller (who will become Commissioner, LMSB, which oversees tax administrations for the largest corporations and partnerships in the U.S.) as the commissioner of the Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division of the IRS. From May 14, 2013: Joseph Grant, the acting commissioner of tax exempt and government entities, wrote in response to the report that the decisions were made in an attempt to increase efficiency, not to target groups with a particular political view. "The mistakes outlined...

A second senior IRS official -- who has only been in the position for eight days -- is leaving the troubled agency, in the latest move by the Obama administration to try and clean up the scandal over the selective targeting of conservative groups. President Obama insisted Thursday he was not aware of the internal investigation into the practice until it was made public last week. Meanwhile, he appointed a new acting commissioner after the prior IRS chief announced his resignation. That official, Steven Miller, will be in the hot seat Friday when he is scheduled to testify before the...

I never thought that I would be saying this, but it’s time we started addressing Joe Biden as “Mr. President.” The U.S. Constitution stipulation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is vast, but abuse of power and serious misconduct in office certainly fits this category. Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was impeached for challenging the Tenure of Office Act (1867) which prohibited the president from dismissing office holders without the Senate’s approval. Johnson tested this federal law by acting alone and firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, thus his action was the basis for impeachment. However, the...

Why was the IRS interested in efforts to ensure the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was legitimate? As the Obama Administration seeks to pivot to a new explanation for their activist Internal Revenue Service (IRS), we find out they took particular interest in the Verify the Recall effort which took place in Wisconsin during 2012. Two of the three groups involved in Verify the Recall experienced delays in receiving their non-profit status. More ominously, the IRS asked at least one other conservative organization, in another state, about their relationship with the effort. The North East Tarrant Texas Tea Party...

In Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles. True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration -- the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney -- all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the "spontaneous...

It's rigorous work keeping pace with all of these scandals, as House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer discovered earlier this week, but we're doing our best nonetheless. On the IRS targeting issue, we covered a lot of ground yesterday and earlier, but the "fun" never ceases. It will come as a surprise to no one that IRS employees lean heavily Democratic. Their livelihoods depend on the existence of big, complicated government, so of course they'd vote blue. In the 2012 cycle, during which their agency's abusive methods were in place, IRS employees donated to Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by more...

Jon Stewart mercilessly tore into the Obama administration tonight over the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service specifically targeted Tea Party groups for scrutiny. Stewart slammed the government’s lack of “managerial competence” and said that thanks to this scandal, conspiracy theorists how have a level of vindication they’ve never had before. After briefly responding to Bill O’Reilly going after him, Stewart mockingly opined that there is no possible justification for all the wild claims conservatives have made about government overreach, only to be caught up with the IRS scandal. Stewart said the whole tax-exempt status thing is “bullsh*t,” but it’s...

Jay Leno did not waste anytime before digging into President Obama for his sudden barrage of scandals during his Tonight Show monologue last night. The host tied together the controversies over Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservatives and the Justice Department wiretapping the AP into one larger narrative, asking, “Remember the old days when President Obama’s biggest embarrassment was Joe Biden?” “They’re warning this could be a long, hot summer,” Leno began, supposedly referring to the California heat wave. “They’re telling everyone to cover up. And believe me, you don’t have to tell the Obama White House twice. They know about...

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'...