Free Republic

SHUT IT DOWN The Mueller investigation is so out of control that the IRS clashed with the Special Counsel’s team all summer over the broad scope and the Manafort raid according to a new report by CNN. The IRS is now sharing information with Mueller’s team about Trump campaign associates. Mueller’s team is looking at everything tax related which includes real estate and banking. The IRS is concerned because Mueller is going back 11 years in his search. ELEVEN YEARS. After being at odds for months, the two camps came to an agreement after consultation from officials at the Treasury...

The Internal Revenue Service has begun to share information on key Trump campaign officials with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The sharing comes after months of stand-off between the two entities, CNN reports. That clash was prompted by concerns about how far-reaching and broad Mueller's requests to the IRS were. But, one source told CNN, the IRS's criminal division is now sharing information with Mueller's investigation. A number of Trump campaign staff have been the focus of the records requests, most notably former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The information...

The Trump Justice Department has once again cleared former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner of criminal liability stemming from the tea party targeting. In a letter to top Republicans, Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd said they re-reviewed the case and concluded there isn’t enough evidence to charge Ms. Lerner, who was at the center of the targeting. Mr. Boyd said the new review included lawyers who only recently joined the department and weren’t part of the Obama administration’s earlier decision. “After this process, the Department determined that reopening the investigation would not be appropriate based on the available...

One of President Trump’s major campaign promises was to Drain the Swamp. It appealed to voters, long worn and tired of the almost constant corruption and misuse of government powers and public money. And the president really did start off well. His Executive Orders on lobbying were seen as a sweeping move that should have been done a long time ago. But as more cases of corruption are being allowed to slip by, it begs two questions: Is the President serious about this? And is it even possible to do? The latest disappointment is the former IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit...

Assistant Attorney General Kevin Boyd announced that the Trump Administration will not be pursuing charges against former IRS executive Lois Lerner for discriminating against conservative organizations seeking tax-free status from the Agency. While conceding that Lerner's refusal to testify on the grounds it would be self-incriminating was, in effect a "smoking gun," Boyd insisted that "the prosecution of a government functionary for carrying out the wishes of the president would be excessively punitive and set a dangerous precedent. A person entering the ranks of an administration shouldn't have to be second-guessing every decision—is it right, is it wrong, is it...

(snip) But the September 8 letter from the Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department said it would not even reopen the investigation because officials require “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a government employee intentionally discriminated against an applicant for a tax-exempt status based on viewpoint.” (snip)

The Justice Department says it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois Lerner for targeting conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections. In a letter to top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, Assistant Attorney General Kevin Brady said that after a careful review of the case, DOJ will not pursue charges against Lerner, who oversaw the IRS division that reviewed tax exempt organizations. “After this process, the Department determined that reopening the investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence,” Boyd wrote Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means...

The Trump administration has no plans to charge former IRS official Lois Lerner over her role in the Tea Party targeting scandal, the Justice Department said Friday in response to calls by Republican lawmakers to revisit the case. In a letter to the lawmakers, the Justice Department said that "reopening the criminal investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence." This past April, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., had asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take a "fresh look" at the case. Despite numerous hearings and inquiries into the...

The Justice Department says it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois Lerner for targeting conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections. In a letter to top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, Assistant Attorney General Kevin Brady said that after a careful review of the case, DOJ will not pursue charges against Lerner, who oversaw the IRS division that reviewed tax exempt organizations. “After this process, the Department determined that reopening the investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence,” Boyd wrote Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means...

The left denigrates religion and those who worship... except for Muslims. They demean almost all who believe in something greater than themselves. Churches are of no value to the left unless they can get something from them for either free or a greatly reduced rate. If they need somewhere to use as a staging area for a protest that can also house participants, churches are just fine. If a Democrat needs to reach a loyal constituency, churches are a no-brainer. U.S. Senator Kamala Harris of California is hardly an exception when it comes to Democrats using the church for political...

Washington, D.C. (WTHR) - Two years after WTHR exposed the Internal Revenue Service ignoring millions of cases of identity theft, the federal agency’s own inspector general says the problem is even larger than expected – and the IRS is unwilling to take steps to protect hundreds of thousands of victims. The U.S. Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reviewed millions of tax returns filed by undocumented workers in 2015. The inspector general released a formal audit report this summer showing those tax returns include an estimated 1.5 million cases of identity theft. (That’s for a single year reviewed.) After...

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

Lost emails, destroyed hard drives, foot dragging, stonewalling, and a smirking, sneering IRS commissioner doing his best to obscure the truth -- this has largely been the response by the Internal Revenue Service to investigations by Congress and FOIA requests from conservative groups trying to discover the truth about the IRS targeting scandal. But one federal judge appears to be just as curious as the rest of us about what exactly the IRS was up to when it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny in approving their tax-exempt status. Washington Examiner: Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court...

Would you hire someone who had falsified documents or been convicted of theft? Probably not. But then again, you're not the IRS.

One of the groups that sued the Internal Revenue Service over its targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups believes there has been a breakthrough that will help them draw a more complete picture of what went on behind the scenes at the agency, four years after it took its case to court. In a lawsuit involving True the Vote, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the IRS last week to release the names of employees involved in targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Walton also told the IRS to explain...

Various media sources have reported that federal District Court Judge Reggie Walton has ordered the IRS to finally respond to various legal requests for information and documents made by the conservative tea party organizations that sued the agency. But the question that no one is asking is why that order was even necessary, and why the Justice Department, which is now supposedly under the control and authority of the new administration, hasn’t reversed its obstinate, inflexible, and stubborn defense of the IRS. It was over four years ago that the inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department released...

The IRS was at the center of the deepest scandals of the Obama administration. Bill Henck gave us a look from his perspective inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel, where he has worked as an attorney for 30 years. In 2014 we posted Bill’s personal account of a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him in “Inside the IRS.” We followed up with subsequent posts by Bill including, most recently, “Inside the IRS, part 8,” in which Bill argued that “[t]he rule of law at the IRS died” had died following a lengthy illness and that “[t]he...

Four million people paid Affordable Care Act penalties averaging $708 for not having insurance in 2016, according to preliminary figures released by the Internal Revenue Service. The average is just over the base penalty of $695 imposed for a whole year without coverage; those with higher incomes paid more. Overall, that's about $2.8 billion. The agency noted that those numbers are subject to change as processing continues. The penalty started in 2014 with a base penalty of $95. The IRS reported that 7.9 million people paid an average of $210 that year, for a total of $1.6 billion. In 2015...

Approximately 6.5 million taxpayers paid $3 billion in Obamacare penalties for not having health insurance in 2016, according to preliminary data from the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen. Beginning in 2014, the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate required that Americans purchase health care coverage or pay a penalty to the Internal Revenue Service. While the number of taxpayers paying the penalty has declined since 2014, the total amount in penalties paid to the IRS has increased since then. In 2014, individuals without insurance had to pay the greater penalty of either a flat fee of $95 or 1 percent...