Free Republic

July 4, 2014 Revenge: Republicans to Strip $341 Million From IRS in Response to Scandals Pete Kasperowicz After months of frustration with the IRS over the targeting scandal and lost emails, House Republicans will exact some revenge next week by passing legislation that cuts the IRS operating budget by $341 million compared to current levels. GOP leaders plan to call up a spending bill for fiscal year 2015 that funds the IRS and other agencies, but singles out the IRS for the targeting scandal and other problems that have surfaced over the last few years. “The committee remains troubled by...

Meet the Deep State. It’s embedded inside a massive remorseless bureaucracy with no conscience or restraint. Ex-Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner tried to audit Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley after Grassley blocked President Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Justice (DOJ) tax division, an executive branch insider told The Daily Caller.Grassley made it more difficult for the IRS and DOJ to work together to target conservative groups by blocking Obama’s political appointee Mary L. Smith from taking over the DOJ Tax Division, which prosecutes criminal cases for the IRS. Grassley held up the nomination in early 2010, just as...

Issa to IRS Commissioner: Want to Revise Your Testimony? Sharyl Attkisson Today, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asking if he wants to amend his earlier testimony about Lois Lerner. Koskinen testified on June 23 that Lerner, a former IRS official at the center of the controversy over the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups, followed terms of the Federal Records Act in her handling of public records and materials. When asked about emails that have been reported as lost when Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, Koskinen stated, “The responsibility is,...

Another federal judge tells IRS to explain itself on lost emails BY MARK TAPSCOTT | JULY 1, 2014 | 5:04 PM IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency. They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn't be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told...

There is “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” the Internal Revenue Service assured Americans during an internal investigation of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups. Few will find comfort in those words, and understandably so. Last week, while seeking to reassure Americans he has seen no evidence of a crime, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen acknowledged he had not even bothered to review any of the applicable laws. It seems like only yesterday that President Obama called the scandal “inexcusable” and pledged to work “hand in hand with Congress to get this thing fixed.” More recently, though, he dismissed it as a...

Five years ago, Sonasoft promoted its data-retention services by claiming that the IRS trusted the company to back up its servers, and the agency contracted with Sonasoft for something until 2011. Last week, however, Sonasoft backed away from its 2009 claims, and now says that the contract never included services that would have archived e-mail servers

Posted on June 28, 2014 by sundance WOAH – BOMBSHELL !! The plot thickens. We might just have found a biggie…. In a recent Politico interview (publish date 6/27/14) with the Lois Lerner’s attorney William Taylor III an interesting aspect is buried midway through page #2. During part of the interview Politico author Rachel Bade inquires about the 1.1 million pages of documents Lerner sent to the Department of Justice that became an issue when discovered by the House Oversight Committee on June 9th 2014. BACKSTORY HERE. The documents were sent from IRS to DOJ on a series of 4...

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday evening, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen revealed that a number of taxpayers are confused by his agency’s conduct. Like the IRS, they would also like to claim that corrupted or lost data prevents them from complying with the tax collection agency’s requests with for several-year-old documents. Koskinen told Blitzer that what may come to be known as “The Lerner Defense” is and has been acceptable to the IRS. During Thursday’s interview, an eager Twitter user submitted a question to Blitzer which he helpfully read on the air. “Why shouldn’t tax payers...

Judicial Watch today filed a Motion for Status Conference, and within hours was granted a hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to confer about the emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a lawsuit, and which the IRS now claims to have “lost” (Judicial Watch v. IRS(No. 1:13-cv–1559)). The hearing is scheduled for July 10. The emails Judicial Watch has sought since May 2013 cover portions of the same period for which the IRS on June 13, 2014,...

Here at SteynOnline every cutting-edge pop culture reference has to be at least three-quarters of a century old. So, watching the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, I found him a dead ringer for Guy Kibbee, the beaming befuddled sugar daddy who was a mainstay at Warner Brothers in the early Thirties. Mr Koskinen is a Democrat sugar daddy who has given generously to his party since the Seventies: He's not the kind of sober civil servant you'd appoint if you were looking to signal to America that King Barack's revenue collectors are cleaning house and returning, chastened, to their previous role...

<p>Congressional investigators have uncovered emails showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit of a Republican senator in December 2012.</p>

By the time Lois Lerner suggested auditing Sen. Chuck Grassley in a Dec. 4, 2012, email, the Iowa Republican had spent five years scrutinizing Lerner's IRS division. Grassley, during his tenure as top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, zeroed in on abuses by charities and other nonprofit groups improperly claiming tax-exempt status under Lerner, and he spearheaded a 2006 change in federal law making it harder for organizations to improperly claim the credit. Grassley and Lerner were no strangers to each other, and it’s one of the reasons Republicans fear Lerner’s push to audit Grassley might have been politically...

In the absence of a special prosecutor, the best opportunity for piercing the veil of secrecy and evasion that surrounds the IRS handling of groups perceived as enemies of the Obama administration lies in civil litigation. The National Organization for Marriage has just obtained a $50,000 settlement from the IRS for its criminal release of confidential donor information to an opposition group. ~snip~ The absence of any official judicial inquiry into the inner workings of the IRS processes is why it is so important to note that yesterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street...

A former White House counsel during the Clinton administration said Thursday that it’s time for an independent counsel to look into the growing IRS email scandal. Lanny Davis, a close adviser to Hillary Clinton and a frequent defender of the Obama Administration, appeared on my morning talk show in Washington, D.C., on WMAL. I asked him to comment on the latest hearings on the lost IRS emails conducted earlier this week in Congress: If this were a Republican administration I’d be saying when hard drives have been obliterated and this recent Lois Lerner—I think very inappropriate, maybe innocent but completely...

“It’s good to be King,” said Mel Brooks as Louis XVI in the director/actor’s “History of the World, Part 1.” No question Brooks was onto something as the Internal Revenue Service–one of the principle organs of Barack Hussein Obama’s 2012, Reelection Campaign—just paid $50,000 dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against the Service by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Of course the settlement was paid with taxpayer dollars. During the 2012 presidential campaign, NOM accused the IRS of leaking information concerning the group’s contributors to Joe Solomese, head of the far-left Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The Huffington Post then...

Unsurprisingly, 90 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independents are of a suspicious mind. What should have the Obama administration rethinking their strategy so far is that 63 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of self-identified liberals also believe the email destruction was no accident. Because that means, by a 3-to-1 margin, even Democrats and/or liberals believe a crime was committed somewhere in the IRS with the intentional destruction of government records.

The IRS will pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 to settle a lawsuit over claims the agency improperly disclosed confidential tax information, according to a consent judgment released this week. The lawsuit stemmed from information an IRS worker sent to an individual who identified himself as a member of the media who requested it in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, which he then sent to the pro-gay rights group Human Rights Campaign. The Huffington Post then ran a story noting a political action committee linked to Mitt Romney had been a donor to NOM. John Eastman, NOM’s...

This is how partisan and corrupt Lois Lerner is: Here is more from Rep. , chairman of Ways and Means committee: Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator. According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator (R-IA) referred for IRS examination. “We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS...

Lois Lerner targeted US Sen. Chuck Grassley for an audit- for having done nothing wrong. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional investigators say they uncovered emails Wednesday showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit involving a Republican senator in 2012. Now catch this: The emails show former IRS official Lois Lerner mistakenly received an invitation to an event that was meant to go to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley presumably received Lerner's invitation. She "mistakenly" received his invitation? Because G and L are next to each other in the alphabet?...

Chad Pergram works for Fox News, and has been covering the IRS scandal. On Twitter he just dropped a bombshell. #BREAKING: #IRS email dump to Congress reveal Lois Lerner sought to have Sen Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014 Sources tell Fox #IRS‘s Lerner came across invitation for Grassley to event. Lerner then referred Grassley for probe. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014 Camp: At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014