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The House Ways and Means Committee Hearing today shocked America. But it destroyed Democrats. No matter what the Democrats tried to do to deflect attention away from the scandal targeting conservatives, nothing worked. They don’t have an answer. The Democrats on the panel looked sad and despondent by the end of the hearing today.

If you’re going to step in the ring with your government, you should expect to get punched in the face. And by “step in the ring,” I of course mean “avail yourself of the same perfectly legal tax strategies that are routinely permitted to liberal nonprofits.” I confess, while I expected some stupid and predictable Democratic scandal spin this week, I didn’t expect to watch a congressman indirectly defend government discrimination on grounds that the victims could have avoided it by simply not asserting their statutory rights in the first place. And yet here we are. That’s not the only...

The Treasury Inspector General who uncovered the improper targeting of Tea Party groups by the Internal Revenue Service said Monday he was stunned by what his investigation uncovered. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), said the targeting at the IRS his probe discovered was "unprecedented," and the closest comparison that came to mind was the targeting of political enemies by the administration of Richard Nixon. "During the Nixon administration, there were attempts to use the Internal Revenue Services in manners that might be comparable in terms of misusing it. I'm not saying the actions taken here...

Did news coverage of a Tea Party group launching a 501(c)(4) in February 2010--including a story at NPR-- launch the two year scrutiny of Tea Party groups? It's impossible to tell for certain but the IG report does offer some clues that suggest this could be the case. Other news outlets have speculated about what might have prompted the scrutiny but no firm conclusion seems possible since the IG report redacts the event which initiated the scrutiny. However the report does offer clues. A detailed timeline included in the report indicates the whole affair began with a February 25, 2010...

An Internal Revenue Service employee based in the agency’s Cincinnati office told the House Oversight Committee that the targeting of tea-party groups for inappropriate scrutiny was intended also to extend to conservative and Republican groups more broadly. “Was it your understanding that the purpose of the Be On the Lookout list was to identify conservative groups?” committee inevestigators asked the employee, according to a partial transcript of their interview with the witness released by the Oversight Committee on Sunday. “Yes, it was,” the employee responded. The “Be On the Lookout” list helped IRS agents identify which applications for tax exemption...

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation. The IRS asked these employees to preserve all the "responsive documents" on their computers, and it has been in the process of collecting it all to comply with congressional requests for information. The IRS missed its May 21st deadline to turn over documents to the House Ways and Means Committee. The same source said the IRS argues it missed its deadline because...

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...

Scandal is the worst thing that can befall a president. Yet as debilitating as scandals always are, the ones Obama now faces are particularly so. They intimately and simultaneously strike at his public persona, which has been his strongest asset, while seemingly verifying his critics' worst accusations. Scandals leave a president weaker for four reasons. First, they are decidedly negative issues. No president, or politician for that matter, seeks out negative issues. All go after the overwhelmingly popular, which is why politicians so quickly and frequently embrace symbolic ones. When pressed, a president takes on "tough" substantive issues, which are...

The Internal Revenue Service unit under fire for its reviews of conservative organizations has a long history of targeting groups with extra scrutiny, including foreclosure-assistance charities, credit-counseling services and New York Jewish charities, interviews with current and former employees show. The scrutiny has included such tactics as listening to telephone calls between groups and their clients, according to one group's lawyer. In the case of tea-party organizations, IRS officials studied social-media postings to gauge political activity. Sometimes the tactic of extra scrutiny for particular kinds of groups seeking tax exemptions helped manage a flood of entities in areas where abuse...

What’s so bad about the IRS investigating nonprofit applications? That’s their job. The real scandal is that the ensuing hubbub will discourage them from doing it again, writes Ken Stern. Over the last week, commentators have expressed great outrage over the handling by the IRS of applications by Tea Party groups and others for 501(c)(4) status. In the haste to trigger the next administration-crippling “gate,” these analyses have largely ignored one of the most surprising aspects of this entire episode—that the IRS was actually trying to do its job. A little context is warranted. There are more than 1.5 million...

John Rich ✔ @johnrich Instead of paying taxes next year I'm going to not pay and #pleadthe5th then say "I don't recall what happened" just like they're doing. 3:18 PM - 23 May 2013 291 Retweets 131 favorites Of all the scandals the Obama administration is currently juggling, some theorize that the IRS’ targeting of its political enemies could do the most damage. After all, no other organization seems to have such unchecked power to intimidate and harass the average American, not to mention the arrogance to match. So if the IRS can plead ignorance and get away with it,...

They stole 60,000,000 medical records – And won’t give them back. Last week news broke that the IRS was facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. In a case involving solely a tax matter involving a former employee of the company, these agents stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans, including at least 1,000,000 Californians. The lawsuit by John Doe Company against 15 John Doe IRS agents is seeking punitive damages for constitutional violations,...

The president has a base of loyalists that won't quit and, at least for now, there's no evidence he was involved in any scandals. Another day, another poll showing that President Obama's job-approval rating is not collapsing under the weight of scandals and controversies. Why is he holding steady? Will it last? And will Republicans take any cues from his staying power? Given the noise level on Capitol Hill, cable TV, and social media, Obama's 50 percent-plus showings in recent polls from CNN, Pew, and ABC/Washington Post seem somewhat surprising. But two veteran political pollsters, one from each party, say...

You know you are a serious societal pestilence when even politicians can kick you around. Which is why the Senate Finance Committee called Steven Miller, former acting IRS commissioner, to testify about the agency’s scheme targeting conservatives for tax punishment. Right away, Mr. Miller got down to the business of reminding everyone why we all hate the IRS so much. “Unfortunately, given time considerations,” he began, “the IRS was unable to prepare written testimony.” Given time considerations? Unable to prepare? Are you kidding us? Have you ever heard of April 15? Can you imagine if we called up the IRS...

BREAKING: KMOV FIRES LARRY CONNORS In April 2012 St. Louis News 4’s Larry Conners grilled President Barack Obama on his extravagant vacation schedule and on bullying the Supreme Court. “The economy is a big concern for folks, I mean the unemployment, trying to make ends meet, gas prices, food prices going up. Some of our viewers are complaining that they get frustrated and angered when they see the first family jetting around different vacations and so forth…” It was one of the few hard-hitting interviews the president sat through last year. Last week Larry Connors revealed that after his interview...

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...

A new poll finds that a majority of Americans believes the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal was an intentional effort to harass conservative political groups. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday, 56 percent said the IRS use of higher scrutiny on Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status was a deliberate move, with 31 percent calling it an “administrative mistake.” A strong majority, 74 percent, said the IRS moves were inappropriate to 20 percent who said they were appropriate. Fifty-one percent also said they believe those actions were illegal to 44 who said they were inappropriate but not against...

The opening day excuse for the IRS targeting conservative groups requesting tax exempt status was that the IRS was facing an unusual influx of applicants. But that turns out not to have been the case. Applications for tax exempt 501 groups didn’t surge in 2010. In fact, the number of applicants was down in every category from 2009. The new line on the scandal is that it was a product of poor management, incompetence, and a struggling, understaffed agency. Here, for example, is The New York Times, in a reported piece from yesterday: “Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel...

President Obama believes in the public sector. He thinks it should be made ever more expansive and entrusted with ever more complicated tasks. Its unions should be powerful. It should be hailed by all the great and good, and attract the nation’s best and brightest. This is how the president portrays the public sector at a level of glittering generality. Then there’s the reality of all that government that is too big for him to monitor, the workings of which he learns about only when he reads the newspapers and watches TV. There’s the incompetence, the dishonesty and the self-justification....

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanded information about conservative groups’ college-aged interns, prompting outrage from one of the country’s top conservative activist organizations and leading one former intern to wonder whether his family’s pizza parlor would be endangered. The IRS requested, in an audit, the names of the conservative Leadership Institute’s 2008 interns, as well as specific information about their internship work and where the interns were employed in 2012, according to a document request the IRS sent to the Leadership Institute, dated February 14, 2012. The IRS requested: “Copies of applications for internships and summer programs; to include: lists...