Free Republic

U.S. Senate primary runner-up Sam Clovis plans to accept a nomination for state treasurer at this Saturday’s Iowa’s GOP convention, TheIowaRepublican.com has learned. Clovis, a professor and the chairperson of the Department of Business Administration and Economics at Morningside College in Sioux City, confirmed the news Thursday evening. “This all developed in the last 24 hours or so,” he said. Clovis has received a lot of encouragement to run over the past couple of days, which at first he shrugged off, but after hearing how serious people were about him running, the former Air Force pilot started giving the idea...

The IRS on Thursday settled two lawsuits alleging the agency illegally targeted conservative groups under the Obama administration. One of the settlements stipulated the IRS issue a formal apology for illegally singling out conservative and tea party groups due to their political beliefs dating back to 2013. The other settlement, a class-action lawsuit brought by the NorCal Tea Party with 428 members, includes a “generous” multi-million dollar payout, according to a lawyer involved. “There is no excuse for this conduct,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an...

Agreement specifically blames Lois Lerner by name for failures The IRS admitted in court Wednesday that it wrongly targeted tea party and other conservative groups for intrusive scrutiny, placing specific blame on former senior executive Lois G. Lerner, and entered into a settlement designed to make sure that kind of political targeting never takes place again. The filing, made in federal court in Washington, D.C., amounts to a stunning apology from the Trump administration for actions taken under President Barack Obama, when hundreds of tea party and conservative groups were singled out for intrusive screening, forced to wait years for...

Four hundred sixty nine different plaintiffs in two class-action lawsuits over Obama-era IRS harassment settled with the Department of Justice Thursday, bringing to a close a dark chapter in the IRS’s history. In 2010 and 2011, the IRS under Lois Lerner, particularly out of the Cincinnati field office, launched what many contended were politically motivated investigations and audits of “Tea Party” and other conservative groups. While no criminal prosecutions ever resulted, hundreds of victims assembled in class-action lawsuits against the federal government. Attorney General Sessions appears to have largely acknowledged the plaintiffs’ claims. In a DOJ press release on the...

We’ve all read the stories, heard anecdotes, and seen it spewed over the media—that Trump voters are all the same. They all have the same motivations, right? Not really. In fact, the Trump coalition’s views on economics and government are quite diverse. You notice GOP consternation about Trump bashing congressional Republicans from time to time—that’s not by accident. Most voters view Trump as an independent rather than the head of a major party. In fact, new polling shows that Trump is actually more popular than the GOP leadership in some key counties for the 2018 midterms. Not really a shocker...

With the dust still settling, many Washington Republicans are mystified—and alarmed—by the fact that not even Donald “Drain the Swamp” Trump had enough populist cred to swing a primary race to his candidate in deep-red Alabama. While the GOP’s class of professional strategists are generally ambivalent at best when it comes to the president, they had taken a certain comfort in believing that he was fully in command of his base. The assumption allowed them to draw conclusions about what his voters wanted, how to cater to them—and how to avoid drawing their wrath. But Alabama fully punctured the illusion...

“Promise made, promise broken. Once again, Senate Republican ‘leadership’ has demonstrated that its promises are meaningless. Today’s announcement that Republican Senators will quit before voting on a plan to repeal even SOME portions of ObamaCare is just the latest in a string of failures. When ObamaCare was enacted in 2010, Republicans on both sides of Capitol Hill vowed to repeal every word of President Obama’s government takeover of our healthcare system. It became their rallying cry in election cycle after election cycle. When the American people gave Republicans the House majority after winning the 2010 midterms on the promise of...

Many of the National Football League players who participated in the protests against the national anthem and American flag on Sunday have had past run-ins with the law themselves.

Becky Gerritson, the president of the Wetumpka Tea Party in Wetumpka, Alabama, just outside Montgomery here, has a message for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s PAC Senate Leadership Fund: Stop deceptively editing videos to attack conservative Judge Roy Moore. Last week, Senate Leadership Fund was caught splicing together videos from two separate events in an out of context manner—in other words deceptively editing videos—to make it appear as though Judge Moore does not support President Donald Trump’s planned border wall. Not just Breitbart News, but PolitiFact too, has called out the McConnell-affiliated organization for the attack ads. Of course, such...

Tom MacArthur’s town-hall meeting should have been uneventful. It was May and MacArthur, a Republican congressman, had come home to New Jersey to talk to constituents, having won re-election with a hefty majority less than a year earlier. Normally, at such an event, he might have expected to field a couple of dozen idiosyncratic questions, trot out some polite replies, wrap up after an hour or so, and go home for an easy night’s sleep. But it didn’t quite pan out like that. Six days earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to pass the American Health Care Act, which...

(snip) But the September 8 letter from the Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department said it would not even reopen the investigation because officials require “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a government employee intentionally discriminated against an applicant for a tax-exempt status based on viewpoint.” (snip)

The Justice Department says it will not prosecute former IRS executive Lois Lerner for targeting conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections. In a letter to top Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, Assistant Attorney General Kevin Brady said that after a careful review of the case, DOJ will not pursue charges against Lerner, who oversaw the IRS division that reviewed tax exempt organizations. “After this process, the Department determined that reopening the investigation would not be appropriate based on the available evidence,” Boyd wrote Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the chairman of the House Ways and Means...

Soak this in: It's now possible that Trump's biggest legislative wins this year will be more spending and raising the debt cap — the exact opposite of what Tea Party Republicans came to D.C. to do. Trump "brazenly rolled his own party's leaders," as AP put it. Plus his own Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin — in front of leaders of both parties. Why it matters: Tax reform is now less likely, with trust ruptured between Trump and Republican Hill leaders. Democrats are more likely to flip the House in 2018: Republicans have less than ever to show their voters. A...

TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after- ward resumes its liberty. – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass It is funny that the Left is only infatuated with ‘resistance’ when they are not in power. Then resistance is a beautiful thing, no matter how ugly it gets. When they are in power resistance is, of course, racist:While the Tea Party was a grass-roots group with no funding and no formal leadership, Antifa is...

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

Abuse Of Power: The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups. But Walton didn't stop there....

One of the groups that sued the Internal Revenue Service over its targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups believes there has been a breakthrough that will help them draw a more complete picture of what went on behind the scenes at the agency, four years after it took its case to court. In a lawsuit involving True the Vote, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the IRS last week to release the names of employees involved in targeting conservative and Tea Party groups. Walton also told the IRS to explain...

Various media sources have reported that federal District Court Judge Reggie Walton has ordered the IRS to finally respond to various legal requests for information and documents made by the conservative tea party organizations that sued the agency. But the question that no one is asking is why that order was even necessary, and why the Justice Department, which is now supposedly under the control and authority of the new administration, hasn’t reversed its obstinate, inflexible, and stubborn defense of the IRS. It was over four years ago that the inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department released...

If the U.S. electorate were ever to grasp the full scope of what took place in the IRS, FBI and DOJ weaponization of government to specifically target people, no-one in Washington DC would ever be safe from the backlash. There’s enough material inside the IRS story for multiple Pulitzer prizes, in addition to severe and jaw-dropping revelations as to republican politicians who aided the overall scheme.  Start by finding out who in the IRS specifically sent 21 CD-ROM’s to the FBI, and find out who specifically received them inside the FBI, and what they did with them.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to name the specific employees the agency blames for targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and said the government must prove it has ceased the targeting. Judge Reggie B. Walton also said the IRS must explain the reasons for the delays for 38 groups that are part of a lawsuit in the District of Columbia, where they are still looking for a full accounting of their treatment. Judge - Walton - Round - Discovery - Case Judge Walton approved another round of limited discovery in the case and laid out six...