Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Internal Revenue Service revoked the nonprofit status of the veterans benefit organization that hosted and sold tickets to a foreign policy speech by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump aboard a retired U.S. battleship

It could have been the first general election rally of a Trump-Cruz 2016 ticket. In front of a crowd of more than a thousand on a blisteringly hot Wednesday outside the U.S. Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas fired up the crowd for Donald Trump, who brought them to frenzy status at a rally in opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed nuclear deal with Iran. It is certainly too far off to say it could happen, but not too far off to envision a similar scenario playing out a little less than a year from now on the larger stage...

It has been widely reported that Hillary Clinton’s faltering presidential campaign has started the fall season with “new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.” To test this new effort, here are some new questions pertaining to an old issue about the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the all-important IRS Form 990. There is no doubt that just asking these questions will make Hillary squirm — because the answers have the potential to derail her efforts to become our nation’s first female president. If you recall, back in April of this...

Do you remember Lewis "Scooter" Libby? In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell's subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier. In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime...

A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge ruled that agreements signed by employees of Oklahoma-based arts and crafts company Hobby Lobby requiring them to submit to arbitration rather than go to court in work disputes are unenforceable. The ruling by the government's labor enforcement agency, announced Wednesday, could potentially undermine a common practice used by employers to avoid litigation under federal labor laws. "This is a dramatic decision," said David Rosenfeld, attorney for the Committee to Preserve the Religious Right to Organize, the group that brought the charges against Hobby Lobby. "If the board affirms it and the courts...

I'm upset that the presidential candidates, all of them, rarely mention a huge problem: the quiet cancer that kills opportunity -- regulation. The accumulated burden of it is the reason that America is stuck in the slowest economic recovery since the Depression. I understand why candidates don't talk about it: Regulation is boring. But it's important.The founders of this republic were willing to die rather than be subject to other people's rules. Today we are so accustomed to bureaucracy that we've forgotten what it means to be free.We now have a million rules -- many so complex that even legal...

U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz told an East Texas crowd the current political climate reminds him of another time in American history - the late 1970s. “We had the same failed economic policies, the same malaise,” he said during a brief campaign stop on Thursday at Smith’s Lone Star Event Center in Tyler. “We had the same failed foreign policies - with the same countries, Russia and Iran.” But the parallels give him hope, Cruz said. “Because we know how that story ends,” he said. “The American people rose up and gave us the Reagan Revolution. … We...

Markings on no fewer than four emails contained on Hillary Clinton’s private system were changed to a category that blocks Congress and the public from viewing their contents ... One of the lawyers present during the review by State’s legal office was government attorney Catherine Duval, who was a key player in the controversy surrounding ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s missing emails related to the investigation of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups. Duval, who is now spearheading the release of materials related to the 2012 attack in Benghazi, formerly worked for the same law firm as the Clintons’ private attorney...

More taxpaying residents left New York than any other state in the nation, IRS migration data from 2013 shows. During that year, around 115,000 New Yorkers left the state and packed up $5.65 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) as well. Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) notes, “This new data shows that New York will remain America’s ‘Biggest Loser,’ having lost nearly 1.6 million taxpayers between 1985 and 2013. Those residents took with them more than $80.8 billion in annual AGI.” “The phenomenal failure of New York to retain taxpayers and businesses is directly related to its uncompetitive tax and...

A federal judge has ordered the IRS to reveal all requests the White House made for private taxpayer data. It is a potentially explosive line of inquiry, and the IRS fought the court ruling hard. But now, the IRS must hand them over. It could mean another bombshell in the long simmering IRS scandal that has dogged the Obama administration for over two years. Recently, the IRS revealed–two years late–that firebrand Lois Lerner had a secret email account under her dog’s name for IRS business. There have been multiple federal investigations for several years, and Ms. Lerner has refused to...

Man, the IRS just can’t catch a break, can it? Some days I actually start to feel bad for them. (Okay… that was a lie, but I reflexively want to say it for some reason.) One aspect of the Lois Lerner fiasco which has gotten slightly less attention than Lerner herself and her mysteriously disappearing and reappearing emails is the allegation that the White House had been requesting the tax information of certain conservative groups as well. Up until now any and all FOIA requests for such correspondence with the White House has been refused, citing the privacy of...

The Internal Revenue Service must turn over any White House requests for taxpayers' private information, a federal judge ruled Friday. The IRS cannot cite taxpayer confidentiality laws to avoid turning over the information requested by Cause of Action, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled. Cause of Action has waged a two-year battle to discover whether Obama administration officials had any hand in the IRS' targeting of conservative non-profits. The IRS cannot cite privacy protection "to shield the very misconduct it was enacted to prohibit," the judge said Friday, according to the Washington Times. "This court questions whether section 6103 [of the...

At least Campbell Brown of CNN (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/campbell.brown/) has mentioned it today. A.I.G. Reveals Biggest Beneficiaries of Its Rescue March 15, 2009, 5:16 pm E-mail This Update | 8:49 p.m. The American International Group on Sunday released the names of financial institutions that benefited last fall when the Federal Reserve saved it from collapse with an $85 billion rescue loan and then three subsequent bailouts. The disclosure included counterparties to both its credit default swap operations and its securities lending businesses, both of which contributed heavily to A.I.G.’s troubles, as well as to muncipalities who participated in certain investment programs. All...

A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot refuse by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws. “This court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate confidential taxpayer information was misused, or that government officials made an improper attempt to access that information,” the judge wrote. The ruling marks yet another federal judge who has ordered the Obama administration to be more transparent when responding to open-records records. The State Department is facing...

It was particularly revealing when David Axelrod explained that, of all his accomplishments in Barack Obama’s White House, he was proudest of the fact that “there hasn’t been a major scandal.” The qualifier “major” lays the burden on shoulders of the press to define what constitutes a serious scandal, and political media had thus far reliably covered the administration’s ethical lapses as merely the peculiar obsessions of addlebrained conservatives. Surely, much of the political establishment in Washington nodded along with Axelrod as he patted himself on the back. A mere seven months later, though, and it is clear now that...

A federal judge ordered the IRS to turn over any documents that indicated White House requests for private taxpayer information. Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued the order, eliminating the IRS argument that they couldn't comply because taxpayer information is private. Washington Times: “This court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate confidential taxpayer information was misused, or that government officials made improper attempts to access that information,” the judge wrote in denying the IRS’s request to close out the case. The ruling marks yet another federal judge who has ordered the Obama administration to be more...

IRS Must Say If White House Sought Taxpayers’ Information: Judge Stephen Dinan - August 28. A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose. It’s not clear that there were any such requests — but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code. “This court questions...

A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose. It’s not clear that there were any such requests — but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code. “This court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate confidential taxpayer information was misused,...

The most disturbing aspect of the scandal around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server during her tenure as secretary of state is not the former first lady’s penchant for secrecy. What’s truly unsettling is that it has been widely taken as read among both the media and the general public that Mrs. Clinton will likely avoid serious legal consequences for her behavior because the Justice Department is ultimately answerable to President Obama – and Democrats will not use the instruments of government to destroy one of their own. Whether that eventually proves true, the sentiment itself reveals a...

(Washington, DC ) – Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton issued the following statement today regarding the recent court filing by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealing the existence of an alias email address used by Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS: It is remarkable that the Obama IRS and Justice Department waited two years to tell a federal court that Lois Lerner had a separate email account that contains documents at issue in the IRS scandal. Especially since both agencies knew about this account since April of last year. It could be a crime...