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WASHINGTON (AP) — Management flaws at the IRS contributed to a "dysfunctional culture" that allowed agents to mistreat conservative political groups when they applied for tax-exempt status, according to the results of a bipartisan congressional investigation released Wednesday. The report by the Senate Finance Committee lays much of the blame for the scandal on former IRS official Lois Lerner, who used to head the division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The report says Lerner waited nearly two years before informing her supervisors about long delays in the processing of applications.

After the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage, religious leaders feared that religious universities, nonprofits and other institutions could lose their tax-exempt status. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has promised the Senate Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee that his agency would not go after the tax-exempt status of religious colleges and universities that oppose gay marriage. During a hearing Wednesday conducted by the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) asked Koskinen whether the IRS would “not, in the absence of a directive by Congress or by the courts,” take action to remove religious schools’...

Federal Judge Threatens To Hold IRS Commissioner, Justice Attorneys In Contempt Over Lerner Emails. Judicial Watch Exposes Key Document in Government-Funded Race-Based Hawaii Separatist Vote Judicial Watch Partners with TheBlaze On Documentary On Border Narco-Terror Threat: “The Sun City Cell” Federal Judge Threatens To Hold IRS Commissioner, Justice Attorneys In Contempt Over Lerner Emails. This was quite the week for those of us demanding that the Obama IRS be held accountable to the rule of law for its abuse of innocent taxpayers. We received more documents that expose more Obama administration misconduct and lies in the IRS scandal. And...

Backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 Lois Lerner emails were destroyed by an IRS entity officially known as the “Media Management Midnight Unit” located in Martinsburg, West Virginia, according to documentation released this week by the House Oversight Committee. In all, 422 backup tapes holding the emails were magnetically “degaussed” despite an agency-wide preservation order and congressional subpoena. Degaussing is a process whereby powerful magnets are used to erase data on a storage tape. The preservation order came from IRS Chief Technology Officer Terence Millholland in response to Congressional subpoenas over Lois Lerner’s emails. However, the agency completely failed to ensure...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Summary of Obama’s IRS scandal, as of July 31, 2015 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...

There have been dozens of questions surrounding the disappearance of emails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Some of Lerner's emails have been recovered, after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said under oath they were lost forever. Thousands are still missing. But perhaps the most compelling questions that have been asked since the IRS targeting scandal broke in May 2013 are 1) Exactly where were Lerner's emails and backup tapes destroyed? 2) Who destroyed them? Now, we have an answer. According to Americans for Tax Reform,Lerner's hard drive was...

Chalk up a win for Team Judicial Watch. Because they dare go where no man has gone before, they are, so far, the only team that’s managed to score against Team Obama. “These recovered Lois Lerner emails had to be dragged out of the Obama IRS, which is still resisting a federal court order requiring disclosure of Lerner’s ‘lost’ emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “This material shows that the IRS’ cover-up began years ago.  We now have smoking-gun proof that top officials in the Obama IRS unlawfully harassed taxpayers just to keep them from complaining to Congress about...

At a hearing Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, asked IRS Commissioner John Koskinen why the tax agency would demand that an Iowa prolife group tell them about the content of their prayers. Koskinen admitted the request was "totally inappropriate," saying he has apologized for the IRS. The agency also made every member of that Iowa group promise not to picket Planned Parenthood. "We should not have a federal government agency that becomes an intimidator, going after citizens, going after citizen groups, violating their First Amendment rights," Cruz said. Overall, the IRS targeted dozens of conservative and Tea Party groups, blocking...

New ( documentation) released by the House Oversight Committee this week again raises questions on how Lois Lerner’s hard drive was physically damaged and whether there was some kind of deliberate act to destroy data on it. The House Oversight Committee report cites an officially transcribed interview with John Minsek, senior investigative analyst with the IRS Criminal Investigations (CI) unit. Minsek examined the Lerner hard drive in 2011. In the transcribed interview, he notes Lerner's hard drive contained “well-defined scoring creating a concentric circle in the proximity of the center of the disk.” The Oversight Committee report states: "Using the...

A federal judge rebuked the Obama administration’s IRS Wednesday for refusing to divulge documents, including Lois G. Lerner emails, and warned he would hold those who break his orders in contempt. Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called the administration’s defense “nonsensical” and said the IRS must release documents every Monday to Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that requested the documents under open-records laws, and then sued after the IRS didn’t comply. “Officers of the court who fail to comply with court orders will be held in contempt,” Judge Sullivan said in a published order. On July 1, at...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch released 906 pages of newly recovered Lois Lerner emails from the IRS that are believed to recently have been recovered by the IRS’ internal watchdog – the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).  The IRS released the emails under a court order by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan.  The new documents show that Lois Lerner and other top officials in the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), including soon-to-be Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller, closely monitored and approved the controversial handling of tax-exempt applications by Tea Party organizations.  The documents also show that...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) used an instant-messaging system that did not automatically save the messages they sent, according to newly released emails obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Disgraced former IRS official Lois Lerner loved the agency’s “Office Communication Server” (OCS) specifically because it left no record of her messages during the period in which her department was targeting conservative and tea party groups. “I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so...

SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of...

The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny. The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner. As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what...

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

The IRS failed to search five of six possible sources of electronic media for Lois Lerner’s emails, according to a documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Over the course of investigations into the Lois Lerner targeting scandal, Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress that he would provide all of Lois Lerner’s emails. But based on testimony from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), this did not occur. The agency’s ineptness -- or corruption -- resulted in 24,000 Lerner emails being lost when they were “accidently” destroyed. According to TIGTA official Timothy Camus, the IRS had...

Accuse Koskinen of obstructing investigation of agency Tea-Party targetingRepublicans on House Oversight Committee on Monday called on President Obama to oust Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen for obstructing the committee’s investigation into the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups. House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said the committee was actively considering contempt charges and impeachment proceedings against Mr. Koskinen in the event the president does not remove him from office. “Mr. Koskinen should no longer be the IRS Commissioner. We have asked the president to remove Mr. Koskinen from office,” Mr. Chaffetz said at a Capitol Hill press conference,...

Even the normally restrained if not downright tepid National Review has reached the obvious conclusion — Obama must be impeached for facilitating the acquisition of nuclear weapons by America’s worst enemy. Andrew McCarthy notes that in the time of the Founding Fathers, it was regarded as an impeachable offense for a president to withhold information from Congress regarding a treaty, or to use unscrupulous tactics to acquire Senate approval. Compare that to what Obama has done:

On The Daily Show, President Obama blamed Republicans for the IRS scandal: “You’ve got this back office, and they’re going after the Tea Party. Well, it turned out, no, Congress had passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what it was they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly. The truth of the matter is that there was not some big conspiracy there. They were trying to sort out these conflicting demands. You don’t want all this money pouring through non-for- profits, but you also want to make sure everybody is being...

Corruption: A new batch of IRS documents shows an agency that's more political than practical. Besides harassing groups applying for nonprofit status, it went after donors of existing groups. Documents produced by the IRS confirm that being on the wrong side of this administration is a dangerous place to be. Judicial Watch, which used the Freedom of Information Act to pry the documents from the government's grasp, said Wednesday they "confirm that the IRS used donor lists to tax-exempt organizations to target those donors for audits." Among these groups was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That organization "may find itself...