Posted on 08/02/2013 5:56:21 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
When Obama condemns “phony scandals,” we can assume investigators are getting warm.
Back on May 13, President Obama reacted heatedly to news that the IRS had delayed and harassed conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. “I have got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” he told reporters.
How is the president living up to that pledge? At best, meh. At worst, we are seeing a slow-motion cover-up. In a speech he made last week, he railed against an “endless parade” of “phony scandals” that are slowing down the nation’s business. In other words, nothing to see here, it’s time to “move on.”
Last Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew appeared on Fox News Sunday and backed up the president. He did damage control on recent congressional testimony by IRS lawyer Carter Hull that implicated the office of William Wilkins, the IRS’s chief counsel and an Obama political appointee — Wilkins is by no means the “rogue” low-level bureaucrat the administration first blamed for the scandal. Also, consider this timeline of IRS activity in the spring of 2010, as midterm elections loomed and the tea-party groups targeted by the IRS began seeing their applications for nonprofit status slow-walked or put into deep freeze.
April 23, 2010: Wilkins visits President Obama in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. That room is traditionally the only part of the White House where a president discusses political matters.
April 24, 2010: IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visits the White House
April 25, 2010: Wilkins’s Office of Legal Counsel sends the IRS units that handle exempt organizations’ applications “additional comments on the draft guidance” that it had prepared for approving or denying applications from tea-party groups.
Even though President Obama personally assigned Lew the job of finding out “exactly what happened on this,” Lew proved evasive last Sunday in answering the questions that Fox’s Chris Wallace asked about the investigation.
It looks as if the investigations Lew is so detached from or unwilling to discuss will have to expand. National Review Online’s Eliana Johnson has reported that IRS official Lois Lerner, now on paid administrative leave over her role in the nonprofit scandal, apparently colluded with an official in the Federal Election Commission’s office to influence an FEC commissioner’s vote on the legality of actions by a conservative nonprofit group. Reporting on the e-mails she obtained (uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee), Johnson wrote this week:
To add to that, Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, sent a letter on July 29 to Russell George, the inspector general for the IRS. In it, he asked George to expand his audit of the IRS to include charges by 78 conservative groups and individuals that the IRS not only slow-walked and harassed new applicants for nonprofit status, but it also actively engaged in “deliberate targeting of existing conservative public-policy organizations.”
IRS employee Cindy Thomas told Issa’s investigators, as Issa lays out in the letter, that a memorandum prepared for a meeting with Lois Lerner in 2011 lists as a potential “next step” the referral of “the organizations that were granted exemptions to the [IRS’s Review of Operations unit] for follow-up.” Hillary Goehausen, another IRS employee, told Issa’s staff that the scrutiny of conservative nonprofits that already had tax-exempt status wasn’t based on any of their current activities but merely on the potential for future abuses.
Issa told George he is “troubled by evidence that IRS may have conducted unnecessary audits and systematic post hoc reviews of . . . certain groups that have long possessed tax-exempt status.”
The IRS scandal is growing, not shrinking. Perhaps that’s one reason the Obama administration is changing its tune. The White House has come a long way since Obama’s May statement that he wanted “to make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.”
Since then, Obama’s loyal troops in Congress have gone out of their way not to uncover the truth but to attack the integrity and competence of IRS Inspector General George. Obama’s admonition last month that we ignore the “phony scandals” has been picked up by many of his elite media supporters. As any journalist who has followed the trajectory of most Washington scandals knows, such behavior is a clue that those looking into the IRS scandal might be getting warm.
“I have got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this”
Think about it. What exactly did he mean by “IT”?
Yea...right?
Depends on what the meaning of it....is.
Sound familiar?
Everyone should find a copy of the testimony given by a Ms. Mahon from the Treasury Dept, to Rep. Issa’s committee earlier this week. It was simply staggering, because it is evident that the IRS, no doubt at Obama’s bidding, is writing whatever he wants into the implementation of ObamaCare, even though it is not in the 2200 page bill that Democrats passed. This is truly frightening,
Its like the O.J. Simpson car chase only with Obama at the wheel. We all know how that one turned out.
We’ll know when it’s tyranny, right?
Wow. What an article. And God bless John Fund. As long as he is alive we will know that there is at least one really competent investigative reporter digging into that corrupt society otherwise known as Washington D. C.
Everyone should find a copy of the testimony given by a Ms. Mahon from the Treasury Dept, to Rep. Issa’s committee earlier this week. It was simply staggering, because it is evident that the IRS, no doubt at Obama’s bidding, is writing whatever he wants into the implementation of ObamaCare, even though it is not in the 2200 page bill that Democrats passed. This is truly frightening,
++++++++++++
I’m having trouble digging this up but will continue trying. If you have a good link you should post it. This just has to be a subject of great interest to the Freepers.
I'm hideously underemployed, to the point it wouldn't be unfair to say unemployed, living off savings — recently, I spent more than a hundred and fifty dollars (almost $200; both of which are a lot when your income is, basically, $0) trying to get some [re]action in the States to block Amnesty before it arrives.
Almost entirely, the replies were of "form letter" nature (generic, and full of non-reply to the actual issues raised and arguments given [I spent a lot of time going through the various state constitutions in order to present my case that the States {particularly the governor} have the power to throw a monkey-wrench into the works
regarding Amnesty]).
Relevant quote floating around:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Well.... then you will really like this.
5.56mm
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It amazes me what a tough sell liberty is these days.
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