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“Regardless of whatever else happens, I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for anything I did,” former IRS official Lois Lerner told POLITICO in an exclusive interview released today. In the piece, Lerner portrays herself as being unfairly attacked by the very groups she spent years inappropriately targeting. Lerner, for her part, assumes she is at the center of the storm because “I was the person who announced it. I assume the other part of it is because I declined to talk, and once I declined to talk, they could say anything they...

TribLIVE | Opinion/The Review A misdialed number suggests a criminal conspiracy in the IRS scandal By The Tribune-Review Friday, Sept. 12, 2014, 8:57 p.m. Had Brian Fallon, Attorney General Eric Holder's communications director, just said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up a week ago Friday, his apparent attempt to coordinate a document leak with staff for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, wouldn't be the IRS targeting scandal's latest twist. But Mr. Fallon didn't realize he had actually called staff for the committee's Republican majority before saying he wanted to leak documents...

Surprise! The IRS claims it has lost emails belonging to even more employees embroiled in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservatives. Guy covered the details of the newest revelations earlier today and the AP reported about the lost emails over the weekend. The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. The tax agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes...

This admission dropped late Friday in a classic news dump -- the purpose of which is to bury a damaging story over the course of a weekend.  There was zero chance we'd allow this update to the IRS scandal to slip our minds, however. The preposterous and insulting cover-up continues apace, reports the Associated Press: The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. The tax agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from...

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) the Obama administration violated the law by swapping Gitmo terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl. The administration is required by law to notify Congress 30 days before the release of Gitmo terrorists. In addition, the GAO believes the administration violated the Anti-deficiency Act because Congress did not appropriate any money for this transfer yet the administration spent money anyway. The act prohibits the President from spending more money than appropriated, which obviously Obama did in this case as no money was appropriated. The President violated two laws for this obscene transfer of terrorists for a...

After suffering through a striking number of rough grillings at the hands of Congress, State Department officials have approved a contract worth up to $545,000 to help train themselves for how to brief lawmakers and to testify at hearings. The contract with Orlando, Florida-based AMTIS, Inc. includes classes entitled “Communicating with Congress: Briefing and Testifying” and pays for one-on-one sessions to hold a mock hearing with questioners playing the role of lawmakers asking hard questions of the would-be witnesses. Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, said if officials were doing their jobs correctly, the money wouldn’t be needed....

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

That was startling. I asked to speak to someone in the office to register my thoughts on a congresswoman lying on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. From there, it got crazy but not as crazy, and then a little crazier. I was transferred to a gentleman on Lee’s staff. When I again asked him about the contradiction and stated that perhaps I was confused, the man said “Oh look it here, we have one of those right wing, tea-bagger nut jobs on the phone taking his cues from FOX News.” He then accused me of being un-American,...

A newly discovered email exchange from Lois Lerner´s official IRS email account "directly demonstrates Ms. Lerner´s deep animus towards conservatives, which she refers to as ´---holes,´" House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday. In that Nov. 9, 2012 email, Lerner further suggests that conservatives will ruin the country: "So we don´t need to worry about alien teRrorists (sic). It´s our own crazies that will take us down," she wrote.

On Thursday, with PJ Media's J. Christian Adams as her guest, Fox News's Megyn Kelly recited a list of assertions (under oath, she reminded us) made by Internal Revenue Service officials which have later been shown to be lies or cause for agency flip-flops after "new" facts have been revealed. It's a significant list. By implication, it's an indictment of the vast majority of the establishment press, which has refused to give the IRS scandal the attention it deserves. Video and a transcript follow the jump. ... The establishment press has been almost completely uninterested in telling their readers, listeners,...

Scandal: The tangled web of IRS deceit unravels a bit more with news recycled backup tapes of lost emails still exist and statements before a federal judge that Lois Lerner's hard drive was irreparably damaged were untrue. Deliberately destroying evidence pertaining to the investigation of possible criminal activity is a crime. So is lying about it to Congress and the courts as part of a cover-up of that activity. On July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by the targeted conservative group True the Vote, told Obama administration lawyers he...

Scandal: An internationally accredited information-technology asset-management firm says the IRS has some explaining to do as our patience is taxed with tales of even more convenient computer crashes. Private-sector organizations as vast as the Internal Revenue Service typically have redundancy built into their information technology systems, as secure record keeping is the key to managing their businesses and staying in business. Such records, if nothing else, are often required to be kept by law, and often by the IRS itself. As we have noted, Lois Lerner's lost emails from the critical period when the IRS was serving as a political...

In some sense, there’s nothing remotely funny about the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party organizations. It is disgusting that a powerful arm of the government became a corrupt vehicle for illegal partisan politics. But it’s better to laugh rather than cry, so let’s enjoy this new video from Remy at Reason TV.

If ever a federal agency has made ineptitude into an art form, it has to be the IRS. After months of stonewalling and grandstanding and Fifth Amendment privilege-pleading before congressional committees, Lois Lerner and the IRS are now the subject of a federal lawsuit. In response to charges that they unfairly impeded the tax-exempt application of the organization "True the Vote," for political reasons, the IRS is invoking "the dog ate my homework" defense In sworn affidavits filed in court by top IRS muckety-mucks, the IRS maintains that Lois Lerner's computer was sent out to be fixed by a private...

Judge Susan Dlott may not be a household name among conservatives; but the federal judge’s decision last week allowing a lawsuit against the IRS to move forward might make her one. By rejecting the demand from federal government attorneys that the case be dismissed, thereby allowing some of the charges to continue to trial, Dlott has struck a meaningful blow in support of those of us in America still committed to the pursuit of the truth and the rule of law. Her ruling is by no means a slam-dunk for the Tea Party groups involved in the lawsuit; but it...

The IRS is running but cannot hide due to citizens; citizens who obtained two important victories this week. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the watchdog group Judicial Watch has taken the government to federal court seeking answers to the IRS missing emails; emails that are important in determining the extent and guilt of the IRS targeting the political opinions of ordinary Americans. This past week, the US Federal District Court for the District of Columbia has mandated two important rulings taking effect on Friday July 18, and no later than August 11, forcing the “most transparent administration in...

IRS head touts “efficiencies" but some groups fear fraud.Amid ongoing controversy over its scrutiny of non-profits, the Internal Revenue Service has decided it will no longer screen approximately 80% of the organizations seeking tax-exempt charitable status each year, a change that will ease the creation of small charities while doing away with a review intended to counter fraud and prevent political and other non-charitable groups from misusing the tax code. As of July 1, any group that pays a $400 fee and declares on a three-page online form that it has annual income of less than $50,000, total assets of...

The Oscar-winning actor aired grievances on Fox News, framing them as a message to the American public. "The Democrat party has become a very negative force," he said. In remarks framed as a message to the American public, actor Jon Voight emotionally aired his political grievances for several minutes in a televised statement on Saturday. Those grievances range from (but are not limited to) Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the "targeting" of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, illegal immigration, the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case, the treatment of war veterans, the chaos in Iraq and deep reservations about President Obama.

Attorney General Eric Holder slammed former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin Sunday, saying she is neither a very good legal scholar nor an effective vice presidential candidate. He also said he believed that some critics of the president attack him because he is the nation's first black president. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/eric-holder-palin-obama/2014/07/13/id/582335#ixzz37Mo2GJX3 Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

People who are not distraught about Lois Lerner and the IRS must have never actually dealt with the organization. As someone who has for 36 years, it is clear that at best we are dealing with fabrications and at worst outright lies and criminal actions. The fact that any American --let alone the national press, Congressional Democrats, and the White House – might not be agitated is dangerous for our society. First, let us be clear: despite billions of dollars of taxpayer money being spent on improving their computer system, it is still rank. Second, the Internal Revenue has gradually...