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Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS scandal, is breaking her silence in an unapologetic interview where she says she's not sorry and maintains she “didn’t do anything wrong” -- despite widely documented evidence that her division targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny. The former head of the tax-exempt unit, speaking with Politico, gave her first media interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. She has twice refused to answer questions before Congress, but used the interview to publicly assert her innocence. "I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for...

Yet another indication of the endemic corruption that infests the Obama administration, their Democrat colleagues and a willfully somnambulant mainstream media In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

IRS: An aide to the attorney general accidentally calls the office of the House Oversight Committee chairman, asking for help in spinning the defense of the agency whose head just said they obey the law when they can. We have commented many times of the all-too-cozy relationship between the IRS and Democratic members of the House and Senate, with members writing to the agency demanding that specific conservative groups and political action committees they find particularly irritating be subject to the "special scrutiny" that the Tea Party and other conservative and religious groups were subjected to in the ongoing scandal....

A remarkable conversation about the IRSÂ’s illegal targeting of conservative groups took place on Friday in Washington. According to Rep. Darrell IssaÂ’s office, at 5:01 Friday Brian Fallon, a former aide to Chuck Schumer and currently a communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder, called IssaÂ’s office. By mistake. And itÂ’s quite a mistake.The purpose of the call, according to a letter Issa wrote to Holder, was to work with the intended recipient of the call to strategically leak damaging information to selected, friendly reporters and to coordinate a damage-control plan. The intended recipient of the call was apparently Rep....

IRS: As the 2014 midterms approach, what has become a political arm of the Obama administration has targeted — as it targeted the Tea Party — a leading conservative truth-teller that has exposed so many of its lies. Even as the IRS races to cover up a prior abuse of power, it ruthlessly engages in another, using its power to tax in an attempt to destroy the vast truth-gathering enterprise launched by the late Andrew Breitbart, which the administration apparently ranks right alongside the Tea Party atop its enemies list. Last Friday, the IRS stretched credulity beyond the breaking point...

In responding to a question from the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said he and his department follow the law “wherever we can.” (Video) House Ways and Means Committee Chair Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) asked Koskinen “Will you be following the law,” in collecting money for a certain type of healthcare subsidy. After Koskinen ducked the question, Brady asked again. Koskinen then admitted: “Yes, wherever we can, we follow the law.” A discouraged Brady chuckled while admonishing the commissioner saying, “I encourage you to follow the law in all instances.” I’m sure

During another grueling hearing on the ObamaCare rollout, the head of the Internal Revenue Service tried to offer lawmakers an assurance about the soon-to-open enrollment period. “Whenever we can, we follow the law,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health on Wednesday. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), who leads the subcommittee, immediately expressed his concern with the remarks. “I encourage you to follow the law in all instances,” Brady said. Koskinen, who was confirmed as head of IRS last December, has repeatedly faced lawmakers' ire over the agency's targeting of conservative groups. Lawmakers spent a...

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa's staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder. The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes...

The company that runs the conservative Breitbart.com news site says the IRS has selected the network for an audit, in a move company executives suggest is politically motivated. Breitbart News Network, a California-based company which runs several conservative websites, says the IRS recently audited its 2012 financial information.

In what many could only expect to read in a fiction novel, it has been discovered that the emails of more IRS agents have gone missing. The IRS blamed “routinely experienced” computer crashes for all the lost emails, and said that all the crashes happened well before Congress launched its investigations. On Friday, Mark Levin suggested that “[t]hey must be working overtime over at the Internal Revenue Service, or as I call it, the IRSS. And over there at the IRSS, they’re busy issuing press releases and other information, I thought, when the government’s closed.” According to the Associated Press,...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released a new batch of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Later, in her May 10, 2013, remarks in which Lerner first revealed in response to question she planted about the IRS targeting of conservative groups, she conceded that the requests...

President Barack Obama on Friday blamed dysfunction in Congress on a Republican Party he said is captive to an ideologically rigid, unproductive and cynical faction, urging like-minded Democrats to show up for November's midterm elections. Addressing Democratic donors at a fundraiser in Rhode Island and another in New York, Obama said Republicans had realized that blocking all progress led Americans to become cynical about government. Republicans consider that "a pretty good thing" because they don't believe in government to begin with, Obama said. "It doesn't have to be that way," Obama said during a barbecue in Purchase, New York. "There...

<p>Scandal: Talk of crashed and recycled hard drives, like that Benghazi video, was a distraction from the truth, which is that the missing emails detailing IRS perfidy exist on a system intended for government wide catastrophe.</p> <p>It would make sense that such a system would exist in the event that, say, the Islamic State or some other terrorist entity managed a nuclear attack on Washington D.C.</p>

A lawyer in the IRS ethics office is facing the possibility of being disbarred, according to records that accuse her of lying to a court-appointed board and hiding what she’d done with money from a settlement that was supposed to go to two medical providers who had treated her client. The disciplinary arm of the D.C. Court of Appeals has recommended that Takisha McGee, a section manager in the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility, lose her law license over the charge, which stems from a personal injury case she worked about a year before she joined the tax agency. Ms....

The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner’s hard drive. We all know by now that Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in June 2011 and was destroyed by IRS. The emails of up to twenty other related IRS officials were missing in remarkably similar “crashes,” leading many to speculate...

Shannon Bream ?@ShannonBream · 8s BREAKING: #TomFitton of @JudicialWatch just told us on @FoxNews DOJ atty told JW atty that IRS/Lerner emails DO EXIST in backup somewhere

Judicial Watch: DOJ Admits Lois Lerner’s Emails Exist By Joel Gehrke August 25, 2014 3:11 PM A Justice Department official admitted that former IRS official Lois Lerner’s apparently missing emails actually exist on a backup server, but the government doesn’t plan to retrieve them. “A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News’ Shannon Bream. “But it would be too...

IRS contractors without background checks had access to sensitive information, potentially putting confidential taxpayer data at risk, according to a federal audit. The Treasury inspector general for tax administration found more than a dozen cases in which the IRS awarded contracts that required access to taxpayer information without background investigations or before those checks were completed. Under IRS policy, background checks are mandatory for contractors who work with that kind of data. "Allowing contractor employees access to taxpayer data without appropriate background investigations exposes taxpayers to increased risk of fraud and identity theft,” said J. Russell George, the inspector general....

Chalk up another victory for out of control government and its related rampant abuse of power. A lawsuit brought by the conservative group “True the Vote” asking to have a forensic expert of the court’s choosing attempt to recover the “lost” Lois Lerner emails has been denied. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said in his decision that the plaintiff failed to show “irreparable harm” as a result of the “lost” emails, which, since the contents of them is unknown to those who were not involved in the criminal activities, would likely be an impossible thing to prove before the...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) quietly changed regulations to allow more undocumented immigrants to keep their taxpayer status through a program that is rife with fraud and abuse, and to delay deactivation of immigrant taxpayer status until 2016. The IRS now prevents peoples’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from automatically expiring after five years as previously mandated. Now immigrants can keep their ITIN so long as they pay taxes at least once in a five-year period.