Free Republic

Video of the hearing on Bret Baier's Special ReportTed Cruz grilled IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and assailed the agency he leads at a heated hearing Wednesday where he likened claims that emails from controversial ex-official Lois Lerner were lost to a Richard Nixon cover-up.

At a hearing Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked IRS Commissioner John Koskinen why the tax agency would demand that an Iowa prolife group tell them about the content of their prayers. Koskinen admitted the request was "totally inappropriate," saying he has apologized for the IRS. The agency also made every member of that Iowa group promise not to picket Planned Parenthood. "We should not have a federal government agency that becomes an intimidator, going after citizens, going after citizen groups, violating their First Amendment rights," Cruz said. Overall, the IRS targeted dozens of conservative and Tea Party groups, blocking...

Cruz Compares Actual Abuse by IRS in Targeting Obama’s Political Opposition to Nixon’s Attempted Abuse of IRS At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the IRS scandal today, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), in his capacity as chairman of the relevant subcommittee, gave a hard-hitting opening statement, comparing the revenue agency’s actual abuses of political opponents during the Obama presidency to Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful attempt to use the agency to target political adversaries. The video is here; the transcript follows: We are here today convening this hearing for two unfortunate reasons. The main reason we are here is because we...

Running for president while simultaneously serving in the Senate has its shortfalls. You have to go on the record taking tough votes. You have a day job, which pulls you away from the campaign trail. But there’s also the perks not afforded to the other candidates. Namely, you can lob red meat at your base in the name of your official job. Exhibit A: Sen. Ted Cruz’s hearing Wednesday afternoon. He sat in the chairman’s seat, gavel in hand, to proceed over the Congress’ umpteenth hearing on the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status....

WASHINGTON, D.C. — While chairing a Judiciary Subcommittee hearing yesterday, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen and delivered a powerful statement on the IRS’ illegal targeting of conservative groups. Fox News: Cruz on Lost IRS Emails: ‘Nixon’s Ghost Must Have Been Smiling’…Ted Cruz grilled IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and assailed the agency he leads at a heated hearing Wednesday where he likened claims that emails from controversial ex-official Lois Lerner were lost to a Richard Nixon cover-up. View video coverage of the hearing here.  Washington Post: Ted Cruz Beats Up on IRS, Obama White House, Comparing It to...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused the IRS on Wednesday of purposefully targeting conservative groups for political reasons, and failing years later to have cleaned up the problem. But Cruz, who’s running for president in 2016, made sure that a comparison of two White House occupants — President Obama and Richard Nixon — were part of his case as well. Cruz, who’s made abolishing the IRS a part of his presidential pitch, noted that Nixon had tried to use the agency to target his political opponents some four decades ago. The difference during Obama’s tenure, Cruz suggested, is that the IRS...

Fed up with stalling and failure to follow orders he issued regarding the disclosure of status reports and recovered emails of Lois Lerner, US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday threatened to hold the IRS Commissioner and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court. Ordinarily, this would mean jail for the officials. Judicial Watch reports:

WASHINGTON–It’s been two years since the IRS targeting scandal broke, but Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, said on Thursday they’re still looking for answers.The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, chaired by Cruz, on Wednesday questioned IRS Commissioner John Koskinen about the agency’s cooperation with investigations, and rehashed accusations of a White House conspiracy to target conservative groups.“The American people have a right to be angry when an instrument of the american government is used a partisan cudgel,” said Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate running on abolishing the IRS. “I have to...

No government agency should intimidate Americans for exercising their God-given right to free speech Video of Ted Cruz opening statement at 'IRS targeting of conservative groups' hearing WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today held a hearing on the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) targeting of conservative groups.In his opening statement, Sen. Cruz remarked, "If the IRS has become a partisan arm of the Democratic National Committee, there can be no stronger argument for ending the IRS as we know it, so that no Administration, Democrat or Republican, can use the IRS to target its political opponents. If a...

A federal judge rebuked the Obama administration’s IRS Wednesday for refusing to divulge documents, including Lois G. Lerner emails, and warned he would hold those who break his orders in contempt. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called the administration’s defense “nonsensical” and said the IRS must release documents every Monday to Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that requested the documents under open-records laws, and then sued after the IRS didn’t comply. “Officers of the court who fail to comply with court orders will be held in contempt,” Judge Sullivan said in a published order. On July 1, at...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch released 906 pages of newly recovered Lois Lerner emails from the IRS that are believed to recently have been recovered by the IRS’ internal watchdog – the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).  The IRS released the emails under a court order by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan.  The new documents show that Lois Lerner and other top officials in the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), including soon-to-be Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller, closely monitored and approved the controversial handling of tax-exempt applications by Tea Party organizations.  The documents also show that...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) used an instant-messaging system that did not automatically save the messages they sent, according to newly released emails obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner loved the agency’s “Office Communication Server” (OCS) specifically because it left no record of her messages during the period in which her department was targeting conservative and tea party groups. “I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so...

For more than two years, President Obama has denied there is an IRS problem, quipping that there is not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS. He has long claimed that any missteps were innocent, entirely the fault of bonehead decisions in local offices. On his recent Daily Show appearance, President Obama was at it again:

SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of...

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Over the course of investigations into the Lois Lerner targeting scandal, Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress that he would provide all of Lois Lerner’s emails. But based on testimony from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), this did not occur. The agency’s ineptness -- or corruption -- resulted in 24,000 Lerner emails being lost when they were “accidently” destroyed. According to TIGTA official Timothy Camus, the IRS had...

The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny. The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner. As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what...

In addition to harassing conservative activist groups it also was discovered that the IRS has been using these groups’ donor lists to select which taxpayers will be subjected to audits. President Obama blamed the Republican Congress for this outcome, saying that “if they weren’t so stingy with the agency’s budget this might not have had to happen. Ideally, the IRS should audit everybody’s tax returns, but this would require more employees and a bigger budget. Faced with the necessity to limit the number of returns it audits, the IRS made a reasonable decision to narrow the scope of its efforts.”...

A group of House Republican lawmakers called for the ouster of IRS commissioner John Koskinen on Monday, and expressed a willingness to impeach him if he couldn’t be forced from office by other means. The call for Koskinen’s removal comes in the midst of an ongoing investigation into the IRS’s inappropriate targeting of Tea Party groups — an investigation in which Koskinen and other officials at the tax-collecting agency have been accused of stonewalling Congress. “Mr. Koskinen should no longer be the IRS Commissioner,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) said in a statement. “At...

SOROS NAILED: Liberal Sugar Daddy George Soros May Face A ‘Monster’ Named, “Tax Evasion.” Which will Eat Away his Political Power. [ Full title]. George Soros is one of the left’s most powerful money men. In January of this year, Western Journalism reported on the millions of dollars that liberal billionaire George Soros and his politically involved foundations gave to help various groups of Ferguson protesters. “Buses of activists from a litany of organizations — all funded in part by Mr. Soros” showed up in the Missouri city scorched by riots related to the police-involved death of Michael Brown. Soros,...