Free Republic

The “phony scandal” at the IRS keeps growing. E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now,...

“If you thought the IRS targeting — scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it — was forgotten, think again,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper, introducing Dana Bash’s report last night on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa’s expansion of the probe. Issa requested information from the Federal Election Commission after leaked e-mails suggested that coordination may have taken place between the two agencies in pursuit of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. That may increase the focus on one particular figure in the scandal, as well as potentially add more to it: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO House Oversight Committee...

The IRS targeting scandal is best understood as part of a larger effort to limit the political speech of conservatives and business groups. That became clearer last week regarding the Federal Election Commission, and now evidence is spreading to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Senior Republicans on the House Oversight Committee recently wrote to new SEC Chairman Mary Jo White to report on disturbing events that occurred under her predecessor, and to request agency documents. As at the IRS, there's an emerging pattern at the SEC of senior officials rolling over career staff to politicize the work of a powerful...

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team. In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic. In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against...