Free Republic

Original title:GOP Congressman: ‘We Just Filed a Resolution Directing the Sergeant-at-Arms to Arrest Lois Lerner for Contempt’ Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) announced on Thursday that he has filed a resolution directing the House sergeant-at-arms to “arrest Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress” over the IRS targeting scandal. Stockman said in a statement that asking the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute Lerner for “admittedly illegal activity” is a “joke.” Instead, the Republican said it is up to the U.S. House to “uphold the rule of law and hold accountable those who illegally targeted American citizens for simply having different ideas...

Democrats endorse arrest powers: “I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day” Pelosi said just days ago > CNN, New York Times also endorse the House’s power to arrest   WASHINGTON -- Congressman Steve Stockman Thursday filed a resolution directing the House Sergeant-At-Arms to arrest former IRS Director of the Exempt Organizations Unit Lois Lerner on charges of contempt of Congress. “Asking the Justice Department to prosecute Lois Lerner for admittedly illegal activity is a joke.  The Obama administration will not prosecute the Obama administration.  How much longer will the House allow itself to be mocked?  It is...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to explain under oath how it lost emails connected to Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the tea party targeting scandal. The action is the latest in conservative group Judicial Watch’s bid to discover more on the missing emails after the group won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS. The revelation last month that Lerner’s and potentially other tax officials’ emails are lost after computer crashes has revived the year-plus long controversy over added scrutiny the agency gave to tea party groups seeking nonprofit status....

A federal judge has ordered the IRS to explain "under oath" how the agency lost a trove of emails from the official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax agency 30 days to file a declaration by an "appropriate official" to address the computer issues with ex-official Lois Lerner. The decision came Thursday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which along with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has questioned how the IRS lost the emails and, in some cases, had...

WASHINGTON – WND has learned the House of Representatives is considering whether to send Lois Lerner to jail for contempt of Congress. Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, has just submitted a bill, HR 664, which finds Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before a congressional committee. Lerner, the former head of the IRS tax-exempt division, has admitted the IRS improperly targeted conservative groups seeking 501(c)(3) status. However, Lerner twice invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the House Oversight Committee. The bill only has to pass the House, not the Senate, in order...

One of the many damning emails sent by former IRS official Lois Lerner before her critical and potentially damning communications mysteriously vanished was what the press dubbed a “joke” about how the former head of the tax-exemption division wanted to join Team Obama’s political wing. She wasn’t the only IRS employee who apparently flirted with giving President Barack Obama a political boost from their position at the nation’s tax collection agency. According to a release from the United States Office of Special Counsel (OSC) regarding two recently resolved cases pertaining to violations of the Hatch Act, one IRS employee...

A federal judge ordered the IRS Thursday to explain under oath how it lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax agency a month to submit the explanation in writing. Sullivan said he is also appointing a federal magistrate to see if lost emails can be obtained from other sources. Sullivan issued the order as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group. He said the IRS declaration must be signed, under oath, by the...

An IRS employee was suspended for 100 days for using his job at the agency’s help line to try to convince callers to vote for President Obama, a government watchdog agency announced Thursday. The employee, whose name wasn’t mentioned in the announcement from the Office of Special Counsel, admitted to using his job for political purposes and agreed to the settlement that involved a 100-day suspension. “OSC’s complaint alleged that, when fielding taxpayers’ questions on an IRS customer service help line, the employee repeatedly urged taxpayers to re-elect President Obama in 2012 by delivering a chant based on the spelling...

Rep. Darrell Issa on Thursday called Lois Lerner’s recently surfaced emails a “smoking gun” in the IRS scandal. “[This is] a smoking gun, this is Lois Lerner clearly cautioning people not to say things on email and be delighted to find out that the local instant chat they have, this Microsoft product, wasn’t tracking what they said,” Issa, a California Republican said on Fox News.

The U.S. government is making roughly $100 billion in improper payments every year thanks to a combination of fraud, clerical errors and insufficient IRS enforcement, according to testimony at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. “The amounts here are absolutely staggering,” Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said. The problem of erroneous payments—largely from Medicare and other health care programs—is not a new one. But Mica said at the hearing of a House oversight subcommittee that federal agencies reported over $100 billion in improper payments during each of the last five years. That’s roughly what the Obama administration spent on the Afghanistan war...

[Some] Emails recovered ... show that [Lois Lerner] was wanting to make sure that the IRS’ internal messaging system ["OCS"] was set-up to make sure her info was not traceable, trackable or storeable. [Lerner 04/09/2013 e-mail cc to Nanette Downing, Director of Exempt Organizations Examinations:] "I was cautioning folks about e-mail and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for e-mails ... we need to be cautious about what we say..."

A newly released email from former IRS employee Lois G. Lerner, sent just as the tea party targeting scandal was erupting, warned colleagues to “be cautious” about what information they put in emails because it could be turned over to Congress. “I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress ask asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” Ms. Lerner wrote in an April 9, 2013, message. Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/9/gop-lerner-warned-irs-employees-hide-information/#ixzz370v3IPYJ Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter...

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testifed before a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today. During one exchange with Rep. Jim Jordan, Koskinen seemed to find nothing at all suspicious about Lois Lerner's interest in whether IRS instant messages were "searchable" and could be turned over to Congress.Rep. Jordan: [Lerner] says "perfect" when she learns that it is not traceable, not trackable, not stored...What I want to know is, why did it take us this long to get these emails? We've been after these for 6 months and you dump them on us on July 3rd. Have you...

The latest bombshell email revelation from former top IRS official Lois Lerner shows her actively trying to hide information from Congress just days after learning of the Investigator General report on the IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative groups. Lerner stated that she had been “cautioning” fellow IRS employees to be “cautious about what we say in emails” because “Congress has asked for emails”. She was also concerned with hiding information shared through an IRS internal messaging system known as OCS, previously unknown to congressional investigators and others. She asked another employee if “OCS conversations were also searchable.”

6 days before tax day liberal Christmas in 2013 Lois Lerner was emailing with one of her fellow cronies and warning them to be careful, “we need to be cautious about what we say in emails”.

In its latest liberal rant coming to the aid of the IRS – that poor defenseless government leviathan – it repeats the same tired leftist talking points about the root of all the IRS’s problems being that it doesn’t have enough money. Yet in doing so, it may have just stumbled across a new motive behind the targeting, good old-fashioned revenge. He’s what the New York Times calls the “real scandal”: There is a scandal going on at the Internal Revenue Service, but it has nothing to do with Lois Lerner or her missing emails. . . . No, the...

BIG BREAK IN IRS CASE WILL CHANGE SCANDAL’S COURSE New evidence about the actions of the IRS official at the center of the investigation into the agency’s systematic targeting of President Obama’s political adversaries is intensifying the firestorm over the alleged corruption. IRS executive Lois Lerner apparently pushed for an audit of one of the administration’s most outspoken critics in the Senate. In emails with a colleague, Lerner claims to have mistakenly received an invitation to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to give a speech to a non-profit group in 2012. Lerner wrote that the group offered to pay for Grassley’s...

Sarah Palin on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Obama, writing in a Breitbart op-ed that the influx of young illegal immigrants over the southern border "is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, 'no mas.' " Mixed/careless metaphors aside, this is nothing but bad news for Republicans — especially four months until the 2014 election. Palin is hardly the first GOP politician to raise the issue of impeachment over the past couple years. Others include Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.),...

Ed Klein’s new book, “Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas” has been making waves for its many salacious details — for example Klein’s assertion that there is a deep rift between Michelle Obama and the president such that they slept in separate bedrooms at Martha’s Vineyard (and continue to do so in the White House). However, the broader purpose of the book is to show that there is a heated battle going on — dating back to the brutal primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election cycle — that continues to manifest itself...

Even while my colleagues and I at the ACLJ are suing the IRS and its key officials on behalf of 41 conservative groups in 22 states, there’s still a need (now perhaps more than ever) for a bit of old-fashioned levity and mockery. Our outstanding video-production team put together this three-minute “ACLJ short” about IRS excuses. It’s called “Quick Lerner.” Enjoy!