Why Are Trump’s Justice Department Appointees Protecting the IRS?

The Daily Signal ^ | August 23, 2017 | Hans Spakovsky

[Twotone]

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 a report detailing that the IRS had targeted conservative nonprofit organizations seeking tax-exempt status, and that then-IRS employee Lois Lerner admitted what had been happening at an American Bar Association meeting in Washington.

The inspector general report found that officials were delaying the processing of applications and requesting voluminous, unnecessary, and irrelevant information, due to the perceived opposition of the nonprofits to liberal policies being promulgated by President Barack Obama and their association with the tea party movement.

[reasonisfaith]

Maybe there’s something going on that we can’t see.

[YogicCowboy]

I think Sessions will confine himself to Little People crime, and ignore all his Big People pals in the District of Criminals.

Is he a swamp creature?

Is he being bribed or blackmailed, or flatly threatened?

Is he after all just another elitist?

Is he an all-trees-and-no-forest cookie-cutter conservative?

I have not been so disappointed in a supposed conservative in many years. (Most do not fool me into expecting much.)

[4Liberty]

Such a good point, cannot BELIEVE this guy still heads the IRS:

https://www.irs.gov/uac/the-commissioners-section

[Chgogal]

Or what the IRS has on Trump?

[Chgogal]

I wonder what the ITS has on Trump? Obama’s IRS audited him for years and found nothing. That doesn’t mean that the IRS can’t make a fuss, though. The MSM would love all those false headlines that only CPAs and tax lawyers could explain.

[A strike]

If the DOJ had any integrity Koskinen and Lerner would have been convicted and imprisoned years ago .

[BruceS]

You are correct! Most of the higher ups in all these departments are full-time staff who don't change. They will not relinquish power without being forced to do so - and the information they have is their power. The number of actual political appointees in each of these departments is very small and they are dependent on the experience of the permanent bureaucracy.

Of course, something the Demoncrats discovered how to do with Clinton and now with Obama is to get their political friends permanent, senior-level civil-service jobs that don't get replaced when the administration changes. The jobs pay less than working in the private sector (at least for them), but committed leftists are willing to take less of a salary in order to advance the cause (this is a large part of why most teachers are liberal).

[straps]

The reason Sessions has not cleaned it out is simple ? WAY TOO MANY YEARS IN THE SENATE better known as the do nothing branch of the government.....They act like a private world. Example they did not vote on Kerry by ballot they stood up as a group and did a voice vote including all of the crooks there now.....

[upchuck]

I suspect fear of blackmail has the Justice Department frozen.