Free Republic

The IRS scandal is not much in the news these days, but it is not going away. The more Obama’s minions stonewall this scandal, the more congressional Democrats discount the scandal, the more the leftist establishment media ignores this scandal, the more toxic it will be for the left. In late November we learned that 30,000 of Lois Lerner’s lost e-mails have been found, but these e-mails have not yet been converted into readable form. The utter contempt the Obama administration shows toward the oversight powers of Congress, toward the millions of information technology-savvy Americans who grasp the lying and...

In a shocking revelation, the Treasury Inspector General has identified some 2,500 documents that “potentially” show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.

Treasury Department investigators completed but never released a 2011 law enforcement probe of White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, The Washington Examiner has learned. The investigation by the Treasury Department Inspector-General for Tax Administration was sparked by Goolsbee's remarks during an Aug. 27, 2010, White House news briefing in which he appeared to possess confidential tax information on Koch Industries, the private conglomerate controlled by the Koch brothers, Charles and David. "So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal, as of November 22, 2014 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 had...

Many of Lois Lerner’s missing e-mails may no longer be missing. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration told several congressional committees on Friday that it has recovered as many as 30,000 of the ex-Internal Revenue Service official’s messages from disaster recovery tapes, according to congressional aides who participated in a briefing on the matter. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified in June that the e-mails were lost after Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011. He said the agency tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the records with help from agency IT and forensic experts. Koskinen acknowledged the existence of disaster recovery tapes...

I was intrigued by an article posted by Dan Mitchell from Cato here over the weekend that in part said that how Republicans treat reform at the Joint Committee on Taxation (and the CBO) as a kind of an IQ test. As Mitchell notes “when JCT does revenue estimates, the bureaucrats grease the skids for anti-growth tax policy by overstating revenue losses from lower tax rates and overstating revenue gains from higher tax rates.”And indeed they do. In fact, both the CBO and the JTC act as giant Ways and Means committees for higher taxes and bigger government. But that’s...

Speaking to a mostly white college audience: "“This progress has been hard but it has been steady and it has been real,” Obama said at Northwestern University on Oct. 2. “And it’s the direct result of the American people’s drive and their determination and their resilience, and it’s also the result of sound decisions made by my administration. So it is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office.” Obama griped to party donors several days later that his accomplishments are a mystery even to his most loyal supporters. “Most of you don’t know the statistics...

You might think that with the scandal surrounding the IRS and the resulting budget cuts that have hampered their activities that the organization might become more aware of its procedures and adjust them to appear more customer friendly. If what happened this past week is any indication then they are still living somewhere in the ozone. Most Americans think of April 15th as the final day for filing their personal income tax return. That is so for most people, but a large part of the population files an extension that allows them to file their return by October 15th as...

Republican Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts said Friday that he thinks the IRS targeting scandal was driven by Valerie Jarrett’s office in the White House, according to information that he saw that Democrats tried to “whitewash.” Roberts told talk radio host Hugh Hewitt that he participated in a Senate Finance Committee investigation into the IRS scandal but “the effort was made by the majority, by the Democrats in the Congress, to simply end that investigation,” which he called a “whitewash.” “I’m convinced that even Valerie Jarrett was involved,” Roberts said.

Politico obviously had no problem finding Lois Lerner for an exclusive interview that it published on Monday. So why can’t the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., find Lois Lerner so that a federal grand jury can interview her? Perhaps the Obama administration doesn’t want Lerner answering any real questions about what happened at the IRS when it was targeting conservative organizations. While Lois Lerner gave a lengthy interview to Politico in the presence of her legal defense team, including her husband, who is also a lawyer and a partner at a major law firm,...

“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,...