Free Republic

In 2010 millions of American tea-party constitutionalists, to include the GOP’s Christian base, united in a remarkable grass-roots effort to rein in our unbridled federal government and return it to its expressly limited constitutional confines. As a result, an unprecedented number of counter-constitutionalist lawmakers (read: liberal Democrats) were swept from office. The Obama administration wasn’t going to take this lying down. Whether it was by tacit approval or via direct order remains largely immaterial. The president quickly and unlawfully politicized the Internal Revenue Service, using it as a weapon against his political enemies. In an explosive scandal that continues to...

In a blatant move, the fix is apparently in by the Obama administration. In recent days, Obama has two connections to controversial people in key positions that have a blatant conflict of interest. The first is for the attorney who is leading the investigation of the IRS targeting conservative groups such as the Tea Party. The other individual is the nomination to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In the biggest display of cronyism seen in a long time, Obama is making sure that no matter what happens, the final report will have him smelling like...

In less than 24 hours, the big three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they've allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama's Internal Revenue Service controversy. Since the story broke on Wednesday that aides to the New Jersey governor punished a local mayor's lack of endorsement with a massive traffic jam, ABC, CBS and NBC have responded with 34 minutes and 28 seconds of coverage. Since July 1, these same networks managed a scant two minutes and eight seconds for the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. In contrast,...

The Justice Department put an avowed political supporter of President Obama in charge of the criminal probe into the IRS’s targeting of tea party groups, according to top Republicans who said Wednesday that the move has ruined the entire investigation. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan said they’ve discovered the head of the probe is Barbara Kay Bosserman, a trial lawyer in the Justice Department who donated more than $6,000 to Mr. Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, as well as several hundred dollars to the national Democratic Party. “The department has created a startling conflict...

In what would be an astounding coincidence if it isn't evidence of IRS targeting those who embarrass ObamaCare, two people suddenly find themselves being audited by the IRS. Bill Elliott, a cancer patient who lost his insurance thanks to ObamaCare and was unable to pay the new rates, appeared on Megyn Kelley's Fox News show, telling her he was going to just pay the fine and "let nature take its course."

Monday, December 02, 2013 IRS goes after ObamaCare critic C. Steven Tucker, and South Carolina cancer patient CHICAGO - One afternoon a few weeks ago, Chicago insurance broker and ObamaCare critic C. Steven Tucker happened to see a cancer patient tell Fox News' Megyn Kelly about losing his health care insurance policy. Tucker looked up the South Carolina resident on Facebook and offered to help him find health care coverage immediately, so his badly-needed cancer treatments could continue. Tucker and cancer patient Bill Elliott connected and Tucker was able to find Elliott the help he needed. Elliott publicly thanked Tucker...

The problem with the IRS abuse scandal, in which the government agency was found to be systematically discriminating against conservative non-profits, is that a complex and vague campaign finance law system gives the government powers it shouldn’t have to decide which citizens are worthy of organizing for political speech and which are not. Lois Lerner, whose boss is an ideological president who was constantly saying Tea Party groups were doing shady things with their money, was in a position to make value judgments about what kind of political speech should be allowed the favor of the federal government. That’s a...

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is giving a jolt to the congressional probe of the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups with a new subpoena that was issued late Thursday night. Issa and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) have for months sought documents from the Treasury Department that they say would detail a wide range of interactions with the IRS well before the public learned that conservative groups were singled out for extra scrutiny. The subpoena, the second that Issa has issued since the controversy broke, came as House Republicans are struggling to find any officials outside of the IRS...

The Internal Revenue Service issued $4 billion in fraudulent tax refunds last year to people using stolen identities, with some of the money going to addresses in Bulgaria, Lithuania and Ireland, according to an inspector general's report released Thursday. The IRS sent a total of 655 tax refunds to a single address in Lithuania, and 343 refunds went to a lone address in Shanghai. In the U.S., more fraudulent returns went to Miami than any other city. Other top destinations were Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston.

October 31, 2013 IRS' Lois Lerner gave confidential Tea Party tax info to FEC, violating law Paul Bedard The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails. The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project. The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax...

Recently Mortimer Caplin announced his retirement at the age of 96. Caplin may have been the only IRS chief to appear on the cover of Time Magazine back when he was targeting JFK’s political enemies with audits as part of Kennedy’s “Ideological Organizations Project.” “I remember that the president made a speech and I got a call from the White House again,” Caplin would later write. “The right-wing organizations were believed to be overstepping their tax-exemption bounds.

WASHINGTON — In March 2012, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading homosexual-rights group, posted the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) confidential 2008 tax returns, including the names of donors. The disclosure of tax returns without permission is a felony, and NOM quickly cited evidence that allegedly pointed to an Internal Revenue Service official as the likely source of the confidential data. But a year and a half later, after repeated inquiries elicited no satisfactory response from the IRS, NOM has filed a lawsuit demanding answers and damages. “Our confidential tax returns were disclosed to the Human Rights Campaign, which...

Maybe now we know why Lois Lerner took the Fifth this summer.  Rep. Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, demanded answers from now-IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel as to why IRS agents, including Lerner, transmitted confidential taxpayer data through personal e-mail accounts: Senior Internal Revenue Service officials—including one at the heart of the IRS “targeting” scandal—violated agency policies and possibly federal records laws by using private email to send confidential taxpayer information, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a letter.In a Sept. 30 letter to IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel obtained by the Free Beacon, Oversight Chairman...

This week, Ben Carson said that shortly after he gave a much-publicized speech criticizing ObamaCare at the National Prayer Breakfast, he found himself audited by the Internal Revenue Service. It makes him suspicious. There was a day when we might have written off a claim like this. But given what we’ve learned about the IRS and its targeting of right-of-center organizations, the burden of proof has shifted. Though the scandal is no longer making headlines, the questions about what was going on with IRS official Lois Lerner and her pals have never been answered. Meanwhile, the storyline fed keeps changing.

Just months after he gave a speech earlier this year that challenged America’s leadership in President Obama’s presence, Dr. Ben Carson was targeted by IRS agents who requested to review his real estate holdings and then conducted a full audit without finding any wrongdoing. “I guess it could be a coincidence, but I never had been audited before and never really had any encounters with the IRS,” Dr. Carson said in an interview Thursday with The Washington Times. “But it certainly would make one suspicious because we know now the IRS has been used for political purposes and therefore actions...

At an event in Birmingham, Ala. Monday night, former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson revealed that he had received a visit from the Internal Revenue Service following his much-noted remarks at a National Prayer Breakfast earlier this year. “I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the prayer breakfast,” Carson told an audience that at the annual Business Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner, according to a report from Cliff Sims of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Yellowhammer News Carson’s February speech February made him a conservative darling for criticizing President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care reform law, while...

Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS officials advised black ministers on how to engage in political activity during the 2012 election without violating their tax-exempt status. Holder, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, and Peter Lorenzetti, a senior official in the scandal-plagued agency’s exempt organizations division, participated in a May 2012 training session for black ministers from the Conference of National Black Churches at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Holder spoke at the event. “We’re going to, first of all, equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they...

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats. This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president. But that same year, top officials with both the IRS...

The IRS outrages just continue. During the 2012 election season -- when conservative groups were being targeted and GOP donors were being audited and just being a GOP donor meant heightened scrutiny from the IRS -- Obama-friendly nonprofits, including black churches and black nonprofits, were regaled with special advice from the agency on how far they could participate in politics campaigning for the President and other Democrats, according to Paul Sperry writing in IBD. What's more, it wasn't just top officials at the IRS who were meeting, for example, with black churches -- it was also top officials at Eric Holder's...

America can handle the truth. Even if that truth could include a coverup at the powerful IRS. The IRS mission statement pledges to "enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all." But public scrutiny has revealed details indicating a level of politicization totally at odds with that. Look at the two eye-opening developments that have happened at the IRS since May: An acting IRS commissioner resigned, and another powerful IRS official refused to answer questions before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. Whatever is going on, there is only one way to proceed, and that is a professional and thorough...