Free Republic

Full title: Report: ‘Within IRS, Union Exerts Extreme Influence on Employees;’ ‘Makes It Difficult for Agency to Remain Apolitical’ (CNSNews.com) - When the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday released a bipartisan report on its investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s treatment of Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status, Sen. Orrin Hatch, the committee’s chairman, released a companion report prepared by the committee's majority staff that presented Hatch's additional views on the investigation. In these additional views, Hatch was highly critical of the influence that the National Treasury Employees Union has on the IRS and the ability of...

Embattled ex-IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner inquired abouot auditing a pro-abstinance group with ties to Brisol Palin, the daughter of former Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, according to a Senate report released on Wednesday.

Well, as long as it wasn’t partisan I guess. All of those miraculously recovered IRS emails – 1.5 million pages at least – have been under the microscope at the Senate Finance Committee. They released a new preliminary report this week which has more bad news for Lois Lerner and company, including a few eye openers which were highlighted by Orin Hatch. One in particular should really catch the attention of those who, for some reason, still aren’t completely convinced of Ms. Lerner’s unbiased, bipartisan credentials. In it, she indicates that she considered opening an investigation into a charity who...

The IRS Conservative Targeting Scandal involved: â—¾Hundreds of conservative groups were targeted â—¾At least 5 pro-Israel groups â—¾Constitutional groups â—¾Groups that criticized Obama administration â—¾At least two pro-life groups â—¾An 83 year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor â—¾A 180 year-old Baptist paper â—¾A Texas voting-rights group â—¾A Hollywood conservative group was targeted and harassed â—¾Conservative activists and businesses â—¾At least one conservative Hispanic group â—¾IRS continued to target groups even after the scandal was exposed â—¾10% of Tea Party donors were audited by the IRS â—¾AndÂ… 100% of the 501(c)(4) Groups Audited by IRS Were Conservative Now thisÂ… IRS official Lois...

Well, as long as it wasn’t partisan I guess.All of those miraculously recovered IRS emails – 1.5 million pages at least – have been under the microscope at the Senate Finance Committee. They released a new preliminary report this week which has more bad news for Lois Lerner and company, including a few eye openers which were highlighted by Orin Hatch. One in particular should really catch the attention of those who, for some reason, still aren’t completely convinced of Ms. Lerner’s unbiased, bipartisan credentials. In it, she indicates that she considered opening an investigation into a charity who...

The IRS severely mismanaged the applications of Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status, a long-awaited and bipartisan Senate report said Wednesday.But Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee couldn't find common ground on perhaps the central IRS issues of the last 27 months: whether the agency intentionally targeted conservative groups because of their politics, and whether there was White House or Treasury involvement.The new report did find that Lois Lerner, the central figure in the controversy, "failed to adequately manage" her staff that were processing the tax-exempt applications. More broadly, the committee, led by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and...

The questions don’t come much bigger.In essence, it was: Is this last chance to save America as we know it?Some might find the answer chilling.WND asked Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas: If the Democrats win the White House again in 2016, will it be too late to prevent the country from turning into a permanent social-welfare state, and will it be the end of American exceptionalism?“I do believe, with this election – it’s now or never,” was his succinct and foreboding response.Why?“The threats to our liberty have never been greater,” Cruz began to explain.First, he addressed the immediate...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Management flaws at the IRS contributed to a "dysfunctional culture" that allowed agents to mistreat conservative political groups when they applied for tax-exempt status, according to the results of a bipartisan congressional investigation released Wednesday. The report by the Senate Finance Committee lays much of the blame for the scandal on former IRS official Lois Lerner, who used to head the division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The report says Lerner waited nearly two years before informing her supervisors about long delays in the processing of applications.

After the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, religious leaders feared that religious universities, nonprofits and other institutions could lose their tax-exempt status. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has promised the Senate Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee that his agency would not go after the tax-exempt status of religious colleges and universities that oppose gay marriage. During a hearing Wednesday conducted by the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked Koskinen whether the IRS would “not, in the absence of a directive by Congress or by the courts,” take action to remove religious schools’...

The final lineup for Thursday’s debate is nearly set, as well as the five o’clock &#F8220;pregame show” with the poorly performing candidates, and Mark Everson is objecting to the fact that he doesn’t seem to be included at all. In fact, he has written a letter to Fox News to complain about it. Wait a minute… Mark who?Yes, he’s a declared candidate for the presidency who has filed all the required paperwork. But just to be fully honest here, I do this for a living and I had to Google the guy. He declared back in March and has...

The Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service vowed in a Senate hearing this week that the federal agency will not strip Christian colleges and universities of their tax-exempt statuses should those institutions refuse to update school policies to be more accommodating toward gay marriages. Following the Supreme Court decision in June that nationally legalized same-sex marriages, fears have dramatically risen that Christian colleges and institutions could be stripped of their tax-exempt statuses if they don't compromise their biblical beliefs on the subject of same-sex marriage. But IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen, told Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in a Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee...

Federal Judge Threatens To Hold IRS Commissioner, Justice Attorneys In Contempt Over Lerner Emails. Judicial Watch Exposes Key Document in Government-Funded Race-Based Hawaii Separatist Vote Judicial Watch Partners with TheBlaze On Documentary On Border Narco-Terror Threat: “The Sun City Cell” Federal Judge Threatens To Hold IRS Commissioner, Justice Attorneys In Contempt Over Lerner Emails. This was quite the week for those of us demanding that the Obama IRS be held accountable to the rule of law for its abuse of innocent taxpayers. We received more documents that expose more Obama administration misconduct and lies in the IRS scandal. And...

Backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 Lois Lerner emails were destroyed by an IRS entity officially known as the “Media Management Midnight Unit” located in Martinsburg, West Virginia, according to documentation released this week by the House Oversight Committee. In all, 422 backup tapes holding the emails were magnetically “degaussed” despite an agency-wide preservation order and congressional subpoena. Degaussing is a process whereby powerful magnets are used to erase data on a storage tape. The preservation order came from IRS Chief Technology Officer Terence Millholland in response to Congressional subpoenas over Lois Lerner’s emails. However, the agency completely failed to ensure...

There have been dozens of questions surrounding the disappearance of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Some of Lerner's emails have been recovered, after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said under oath they were lost forever. Thousands are still missing. But perhaps the most compelling questions that have been asked since the IRS targeting scandal broke in May 2013 are 1) Exactly where were Lerner's emails and backup tapes destroyed? 2) Who destroyed them? Now, we have an answer. According to Americans for Tax Reform,Lerner's hard drive was...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal, as of July 31, 2015 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...

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has had a bad week. Thanks to his efforts to obstruct a Congressional investigation into the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exempt status, House Republicans have demanded his dismissal by Barack Obama, and have threatened to impeach Koskinen if Obama does nothing. On top of that, a federal judge yesterday got fed up with the IRS’ attempts to obstruct a FOIA demand that he threatened to haul Koskinen into court in order to charge him with contempt. It might be a bad week for the IRS’ attorneys, too: During the a status hearing today, Sullivan...

Chalk up a win for Team Judicial Watch. Because they dare go where no man has gone before, they are, so far, the only team that’s managed to score against Team Obama. “These recovered Lois Lerner emails had to be dragged out of the Obama IRS, which is still resisting a federal court order requiring disclosure of Lerner’s ‘lost’ emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “This material shows that the IRS’ cover-up began years ago.  We now have smoking-gun proof that top officials in the Obama IRS unlawfully harassed taxpayers just to keep them from complaining to Congress about...

New ( documentation) released by the House Oversight Committee this week again raises questions on how Lois Lerner’s hard drive was physically damaged and whether there was some kind of deliberate act to destroy data on it. The House Oversight Committee report cites an officially transcribed interview with John Minsek, senior investigative analyst with the IRS Criminal Investigations (CI) unit. Minsek examined the Lerner hard drive in 2011. In the transcribed interview, he notes Lerner's hard drive contained “well-defined scoring creating a concentric circle in the proximity of the center of the disk.” The Oversight Committee report states: "Using the...

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...