Free Republic

Justice: IRS official Lois Lerner didn't merely target conservative groups to take away their tax-free status, as first suspected, but also handed over more than a million pages of tax returns to the Justice Department. That's a crime.

More than three years after it admitted to targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, the IRS has finally released a near-complete list of the organizations it snagged in a political dragnet. The tax agency filed the list last month as part of a court case after a series of federal judges, fed up with what they said was the agency’s stonewalling, ordered it to get a move on. The case is a class-action lawsuit, so the list of names is critical to knowing the scope of those who would have a claim against the IRS. But even as it...

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was a no show Tuesday for a House Judiciary hearing accusing him of misconduct. That didn't stop lawmakers from blasting Koskinen and calling for his impeachment. The hearing stems from a 2013 investigation into IRS official Lois Lerner. Lerner was accused of unfairly targeting conservative and tea party groups by delaying their requests for tax-exempt status. Koskinen, who was brought in by President Barack Obama after the scandal unfolded, promised to provide key evidence, including thousands of Lerner's emails to assist Congress in their investigation. Tapes obtaining those emails were destroyed. Although many of the emails...

RS Commissioner John Koskinen has declined to testify in his own defense at a congressional hearing Tuesday, but insisted in a statement that his bungling of a subpoena doesn’t rise to the level of “treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors” needed for him to be impeached. The Judiciary Committee hearing is being viewed by some House Republicans as the precursor to impeachment, with the House’s top investigator saying Mr. Koskinen defied a congressional subpoena that demanded all of former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner’s emails be preserved as part of the investigation into tea party targeting. But Mr. Koskinen,...

Cameron Lancaster The House Judiciary Committee will consider impeaching IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in upcoming hearings. The committee will look at Koskinen's alleged misconduct relating to Congress's investigation into the IRS's targeting of political groups. “Despite repeated congressional efforts to get to the bottom of this matter, Obama Administration officials, including the IRS Commissioner, have consistently undermined the investigation," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said. "Over the coming weeks, the House Judiciary Committee will closely examine Commissioner Koskinen’s misconduct and the implications of his actions.” At a Judiciary Committee hearing on May 24, witnesses will present the...

Tea party activists are heartened by a federal appeals court ruling that strengthens their legal push against the Internal Revenue Service for alleged targeting in past election cycles. A three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals chastised government foot-dragging while ordering the agency to give attorneys for tea party groups details on tax-exempt applicants. A U.S. district court judge in Cincinnati earlier this year certified the case as a class action. …

Gone are the days of sophisticated tax plans offered by international accounting and law firms to their wealthiest clients which the IRS, with the benefit of hindsight, categorized as “tax shelters”. So why is Commissioner Koskinen raising the flag upside-down in a signal of distress in March of 2016? Tax practitioners all around the country know exactly why. Too many taxpayers and a handful of unscrupulous “tax practitioners” are taking advantage of the almost absolute absence of tax enforcement by the IRS. Yes, “Joe the plumber” and other average taxpayers know that no-one is minding the store. What happens when...

Say, do you remember that whole flap over Lois Lerner and the IRS targeting conservative groups applying for tax exempt status a couple of years ago? Good times, my friends. Good times. I’m sure glad that’s all finally behind us, aren’t you?Well guess again. It’s not even close to being over. Some of the affected groups brought suit against the IRS over the matter and that process has been dragging out for years now. They haven’t made as much ground as they might, however, because every time the plaintiffs request certain documents from the IRS, they mysteriously find reasons...

In October 2015 the DOJ announced it was dropping the investigation into the IRS, Lois Lerner, and the unlawful sharing of taxpayer data in the IRS targeting investigation surrounding True The Vote et al.

Loretta Lynch has already broken the seal on her foray into the morass of prosecutorial discretion. She dismissed the IRS investigation. Justice Department officials used "prosecutorial discretion" to shelter former IRS official Lois Lerner from a grand jury after she was held in contempt of Congress. "I believe that in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, the matter was handled and was resolved," Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the House Judiciary Committee. Lerner is just the beginning. The IRS dismissal, large enough on its own scale and importance, will be but a side event in this attorney general's career. For the...

A heated argument erupted Thursday at a hearing on the IRS, with Democrats and Republicans trading charges about the work of the Oversight Committee. Two Democrats on the panel accused their GOP colleagues of repeatedly holding hearings on the IRS for political reasons. In his opening statement, Oversight Committee ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) complained that the hearing was the 23rd held about the IRS in recent years. "Unfortunately, Republicans have become obsessed with investigating any and every allegation relating to the IRS, no matter how small," he said. He said Republicans are frustrated that they have never found...

This seems to be one of the more popular phrases popping up in both the State Department and the Justice Department these days: prosecutorial discretion. Even though the phrase seems fairly self-explanatory, here’s a quick definition: Prosecutorial discretion refers to the fact that under American law, government prosecuting attorneys have nearly absolute powers. A prosecuting attorney has power on various matters including those relating to choosing whether or not to bring criminal charges, deciding the nature of charges, plea bargaining and sentence recommendation. This discretion of the prosecuting attorney is called prosecutorial discretion. The reason the term is important...

The introduction of a resolution to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen should comes as no surprise considering the lawlessness of the Obama administration and its use of the IRS to bludgeon its political opponents and the refusal by the DOJ to prosecute Lois Lerner for her political targeting of the Tea Party and other conservative political groups, as well as her destruction of evidence. The resolution, introduced by .House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Rep. James Jordan (R-OH) and 18 other committee members, accuses Koskinen of making false statements under oath, failing to comply with a subpoena, and failing to...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity. The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress. Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing...

Part 271 of 269 in the series Wisconsin's Secret War MADISON, Wisconsin — The authors of a bill reforming Wisconsin’s controversial John Doe law want answers from state Government Accountability Board director Kevin Kennedy about his conversations with the Internal Revenue Service regarding a now-dead, political John Doe probe. State Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, and state Rep. Dave Craig, R-Town of Vernon, are particularly interested in an email from former GAB staff counsel Shane Falk to Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney David Robles. In the Feb. 28, 2013, communication, Falk tells Robles: “As you may know, things are really heating...

ABC, CBS, and NBC's evening newscasts on Friday all failed to cover the Justice Department announcing that it would be ending its investigation into the IRS's targeting of conservative groups. The Big Three networks' news program did find time to air reporting on the top Google searches for Halloween costumes, the fewer number of turkeys available for upcoming Thanksgiving dinners, and the controversy over the first bear hunt in Florida in 20 years. By contrast, PBS NewsHour did air a 20-second news brief on the DOJ closing its probe into the scandal [video below]:

Let’s start with Hillary: it would seem that all that yoga training finally paid off.H/T OlegIt kept Hillary so calm and reined in during the Bengazi hearings that she was declared, hands-down, the victor in the MSM’s much hyped “Hilz v. GOP” matchup.So as a nod to all the little people who helped her lie, deceive and obfuscate her way out of the Benghazi/email mine field, Hilz threw them a little party at her house. And as an acknowledgement of the role Yoga played in keeping her from coming across as the complete shrew she is behind the scene, she...

(Washington, DC ) – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the Obama Justice Department decision to close its investigation of the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups and other conservative opponents of President Obama’s policies: “President Obama’s IRS was used against his opponents to help him win reelection. So the Obama Justice Department’s decision to shut down its IRS abuse investigation with no prosecutions is as unsurprising as it is corrupt. Judicial Watch’s independent litigation proved the Obama IRS obstructed justice and destroyed evidence. And we uncovered that the IRS and Lois Lerner conspired with the...

USA Transnational Report for October 24, 2015. This week’s topics include: — DOJ’s decision not to prosecute Lois Lerner — The implications of the Canadian election of Justin Trudeau, and the involvement of the Obama gang — Special interview with Major General Paul E. Vallely (Ret.) on threats to national security and the state of the armed forces & more… You can listen to USA Transnational Report live on JJ McCartney’s Nightside Radio Studios and on Red State Talk Radio.

When the IRS scandal broke in the spring of 2013, President Obama accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner and said he was “angry” at the targeting of conservative groups. “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Mr. Obama said at the White House, calling the agency’s actions “inexcusable.” “It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is, the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity,” the president said.