Free Republic

Makes IRS Discrimination a Felony, Legislation Follows Revelation of IRS Targeting Organizations Based on their Political Beliefs Congressman Mike Turner (OH-10), today will introduce the Taxpayer Nondiscrimination & Protection Act of 2013. The bill would amend Title 18 of the U.S. Code to make it a crime for an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employee to discriminate against an individual or group on the basis of their protected rights. In addition, it expressly clarifies that political speech and political expression are protected rights. “Americans of all political beliefs have been rightly outraged by the revelation of the IRS’ efforts to target...

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

Suppose that the Environmental Protection Agency were to admit offhandedly that the fluoridation of water had only modest communist mind-control effects. Or the United Nations were to concede it had been running fleets of black helicopters over U.S. cities, but only in the course of conducting extensive goodwill tours. The Internal Revenue Service has managed a similar confirmation. For years, tea party and patriot groups have breathlessly alleged that federal bureaucrats were conspiring against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Then federal bureaucrats conspired to target conservative groups because their tax documents contained the words “tea party” or “patriot,”...

Steven Miller is breaking his silence about the scandal that’s engulfing the Internal Revenue Service. Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, is quickly emerging as the focus of fury in Washington after an agency official acknowledged last week that conservative groups seeking nonprofit status were targeted for extra screening if their applications included words such as “tea party” or “patriot.” In an op-ed published Tuesday in USA Today, he said the agency was simply trying to manage the explosive growth in applications for 501(c)(4) status that started pouring in to the IRS in 2010. "The Internal Revenue Service recognizes that we...

ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status. That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved. Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Jim Jordan...

Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea party-affiliated groups. IRS employees in Cincinnati also told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare”...

The House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a formal hearing Friday to probe the Internal Revenue Service for placing heavier scrutiny on conservative groups that applied for nonprofit status between 2010 and 2012. IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are expected to testify Friday morning during the hearing, which committee leaders said would examine the agency's "practice of targeting applicants for tax-exempt status based on political leanings." The IRS last week apologized for targeting groups that advocate for limited government by requiring them to fulfill onerous requirements before receiving tax-exempt status....

<p>Looks Like DOJ HAS BEEN TAPPING AP NEWS TELEPHONE LINES TO DISCOVER THEIR CONFIDENTIAL SOURCES IN CONGRESS!</p> <p>The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.</p>

“…statements in the [group’s] case file criticize how the country is being run.” -- One of the criteria used by IRS investigators to target small-government groups for special scrutiny, according to an agency audit provided to congressional investigators. Team Obama has always known how to make the most of critics in order to make the least of criticism. During the 2008 campaign, it was “Stop the Smears,” an Obama effort to single out those who made claims about the candidate’s nativity, faith or personal conduct, rounding up the most slanderous and paranoiac claims, publicizing and then refuting them. Then when...

Kevin Drum outlines what I take to be the emerging case for the defense of the IRS agents who applied special scrutiny to tax-exemption applications from Tea Party groups: Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that's legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that...

To understand the moral context of the IRS' admission that it improperly targeted conservative Tea Party and Patriot nonprofits during the 2012 presidential campaign, it helps to know that Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have something in common besides twice being elected to the Oval Office: All three appear to have been quite willing to use the most intrusive powers of the federal government against their political opposition. Nixon was especially craven about it. He made clear to aides that they were to use the IRS against Democratic nominee George McGovern, senior members of McGovern's campaign staff and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP....

Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made two points Monday on “Morning Joe” that Americans should hear and heed. Referring to the still developing IRS scandal involving its targeting of tea party-like, conservative political groups, Gingrich asked, “How can you put Obamacare under the Internal Revenue Service?” Gingrich said President Obama “has a huge problem because Obamacare relies very heavily on the IRS.” Although not in the segment of the video below, Politico reported Gingrich also said during the interview: Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health if you can’t trust the bureaucracy with your politics?...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted on May 10 that “low level” staff in its Cincinnati office, supposedly “not motivated by political bias,” targeted 75 conservative tax-exempt organizations, including many Tea Party organizations applying for exemption under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code. The groups were singled out for audit and investigation because they used the names “Tea Party” and “Patriot.” Yet in July 2011, the IRS had warned employees to drop audits of donors to similar 501(c)4 organizations.

<p>House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Monday that the IRS should be condemned for targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny in the run-up to last year’s elections, but she also blamed the Supreme Court for opening the door to broader political activity.</p>

No need to be quite so modest here, White House — as to the most ‘recent media reports,’ we already learned this weekend that high-up agency leaders knew this tea-party targeting had been going on was going on for at least a couple of years now and certainly didn’t bother to stop it, and the fact that this was all performed by a relatively small number of employees in the workforce-hugeness of the IRS is really not a mitigating factor. Via ABC: In a statement this morning White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that the president is “concerned” the...

Tea party groups on Monday are threatening to sue the Internal Revenue Service after the agency admitted last week that it wrongly targeted conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. “We are looking at it pretty seriously,” said Dan Backer, a lawyer who represents a half dozen conservative groups targeted by the IRS, including Combat Veterans Training Group and TheTeaParty.net. “Given the sheer scope of maleficence at the IRS, there may be a legal recourse.” Backer said the IRS asked some of his clients for donor lists and extensive information from their Facebook pages. The IRS said on Friday that it...

On March 22, 2012, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee, which was inquiring as to whether the agency was targeting tea-party groups and other conservative organizations filing for tax-exempt status. He firmly and repeatedly denied that any such thing was happening. “There’s absolutely no targeting,” he said. A little over a year later, the IRS confirmed that it was in fact improperly targeting not only tea-party groups but also Jewish religious nonprofits and organizations inspired by Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. Lori Lerner, the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt organizations, told reporters on Friday...

An IRS campaign to apply additional scrutiny to conservative groups went beyond targeting "Tea Party" and "patriot" groups to include those focused on government spending, the Constitution and several other broad areas. The additional guidelines created by the agency were part of a timeline, obtained by Fox News, from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which is looking into the controversial IRS practice. IRS officials apologized Friday for the scrutiny, but new information suggests senior leaders were apprised of the effort as early as 2011 despite public denials from the top.