Free Republic

While IRS officials were targeting Tea Party groups for special scrutiny of their 501(c)3 tax exempt applications, the IRS also hired a policeman who had been prosecuted by the Justice Department — and convicted in federal court — of using his access to the FBI’s NCIC system to tip off a terror suspect about the bureau’s surveillance. The leak wrecked a major terror investigation.He is still at the IRS. Weiss Russell (he has changed his name from “Weiss Rasool,” the name under which he was convicted), is currently employed as a financial management analyst in the IRS Deputy Chief...

While President Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, faces a possible perjury charge and increased calls for his resignation over the Justice Department's outrageous spying on the media -- elsewhere, another scandal is taking another kind of toll. A new Quinnpiac poll shows that the public is far from satisfied that the IRS matter is settled. A full 76% want a special prosecutor named; that includes 63% of Democrats. Well, Obama did promise to bring us together. Let's just hope he was wrong about the oceans rising. Quinnipiac also shows that the confluence of three scandals (the two listed above and...

Yesterday brought a bombshell finding in the IRS scandal. Of the groups targeted for inspection by the IRS, 83% were right-leaning. Of the groups selected for audit, 100% were conservative. That's right. 100%. Less than two weeks after President Obama insisted that there wasn't even a "smidgen of corruption" involved in the IRS targeting scandal, it appears that the scope of that scandal is widening. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, revealed yesterday that the committee's investigation had found that it wasn't only conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status that came in for IRS targeting and...

Today Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, confirmed that 100% of the established 501(c)(4) groups the IRS selected for audit were conservative. But Obama says their was not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS. The Wall Street Journal reported: A Republican House committee chairman said the Internal Revenue Service targeted tax-exempt conservative groups for audits, widening the scope of GOP ire over the agency’s oversight of political activities. House Democrats pushed back, saying Republicans were seeking to use the IRS controversy to score political points with their conservative base in an election...

The latest round of the IRS scandal, in which Tea Party and conservative groups have been selectively targeted for harassment by our tax collection agency, is now unfolding. This comes in the form of proposed new rules from the IRS regarding the operation of organizations falling under the 501(c)(4) provision of the tax code. These are organizations whose purpose is to promote “social welfare” and therefore their income is tax-free. Because promoting a cause or agenda in our free and democratic country cannot be isolated from political activity associated with that agenda, such activity is permitted by 501(c)(4) organizations, as...

This afternoon True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Elijah Cummings alleging the Congressmen intimidated her and and her group. Rep. Elijah Cummings on three separate occasions sent letters from the House Oversight and Government Reform, stating that he had concerns and felt it necessary to open an investigation on True the Vote. The Congressman also smeared True the Vote in several cable news interviews in 2012. In the hearing today, Cummings accused True the Vote of racism saying that they were trying to suppress the vote. Catherine Engelbrecht was on with Megyn Kelly tonight:...

The IRS scandal is so bad that Democrats are unleashing total war in an attempt to beat back a full airing of the abuse. The old adage, "The best defense is a good offense," is all the more valid when the major media outlets are on their side. It is not necessary to have any actual facts to use as rebuttal for the indefensible; it is enough to simply throw a cloud of dust, so as to discredit any charges - in the eyes of supporters and media sycophants. President Obama's absurd contention to Bill O'Reilly that there was "not...

FEBRUARY 6, 2014 3:00 PM The IRS Secret Police? Proposed rules seek to curb the free speech of Obama’s political opponents. By L. Brent Bozell III The Internal Revenue Service was already an organization rightly looked on with scorn and fear by most Americans, heightened by the recent arrival of our W-2 forms. Since the early years of our country, when Chief Justice John Marshall in the Supreme Court’s landmark case McCulloch v. Maryland wrote that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” countless Americans have felt the heavy hand of the IRS.Then came Barack Obama. Today, the...

The Obama administration’s Treasury Department and former IRS official Lois Lerner conspired to draft new 501(c)(4) regulations to restrict the activity of conservative groups in a way that would not be disclosed publicly, according to the House Committee on Ways and Means. The Treasury Department and Lerner started devising the new rules “off-plan,” meaning that their plans would not be published on the public schedule. They planned the new rules in 2012, while the IRS targeting of conservative groups was in full swing, and not after the scandal broke in order to clarify regulations as the administration has suggested. The...

Newsmax IRS Sets Sights on Secret Hollywood Conservative Group Thursday, January 23, 2014 09:28 AM By: Drew MacKenzie A conservative group in Hollywood, shrouded in secrecy for fear of a backlash from powerful movie industry liberals, is being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service after applying for tax-exempt status. Friends of Abe has attempted to stay under the radar and is fiercely determined to protect the identity of its 1,500 members, The New York Times reports. But now the group has come under the scrutiny of the IRS after the federal agency requested information about its meetings with politicians including...

Dear Dave, My husband has his own business installing windows. As a result, we now have IRS and state tax debt. We’re managing the payments, but where should these debts be placed in the debt snowball plan? Olivia Dear Olivia, I don’t usually cheat on the smallest to largest progression of the debt snowball, but I’d recommend moving these debts to the top of the list. Both state and federal taxes come with ridiculous penalties and interest rates, and the authorities at either level have virtually unlimited power at their disposal to screw with your life if something bad...

In criminal court, you are innocent until proven guilty. It's a different matter altogether in civil forfeiture, where prosecutors can and do seize the assets of anyone on phony charges. Given there is no recourse or fine, the best the innocent victims can do is get their property back, most likely with a huge delay, if at all. Consider the plight of Terry Dehko and his daughter Sandy Thomas. They run a small grocery store in Fraser, Michigan. Because their insurance only covers a cash limit of $10,000, they frequently make smaller deposits. One day last January, the government seized...

United States v. $35,651.11 (The cash in the account of Schott's Supermarket) Feds Seize Family Grocery Store’s Entire Bank Account Can the government use civil forfeiture to take your money when you have done nothing wrong—and then pocket the proceeds? The IRS thinks so. For over 30 years, Terry Dehko has successfully run a grocery store in Fraser, Mich., with his daughter Sandy. In January 2013, without warning, the federal government used civil forfeiture to seize all of the money from the Dehkos’ store bank account (more than $35,000) even though they’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. Their American Dream is...

I’ve always paid my taxes and have never been arrested or charged with any crime in my life. I am a successful small-business man. But in January of this year, I woke up to find that my business’ entire bank account — more than $35,000 — had been wrongly seized. Later that same day, I was writing checks to my vendors. A federal agent strolls in. She tells me my hard-earned cash was taken by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I was shocked. I’ve broken no law, committed no crime and was never warned my store could be in trouble....

The IRS official in charge of the exempt organizations office in the Cincinnati branch at the time conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were unfairly targeted just got a promotion. Cindy Thomas has been appointed to the senior technical adviser team for the Director of Exempt Organizations. Thomas, a 35-year IRS veteran, will fill the spot vacated by Sharon Light. Light, a one-time close adviser to Lois Lerner, is the sixth senior IRS official to leave the agency. Lerner is the employee at the center of the political storm that hit the nation earlier this year. She was the first...

More than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O’Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached. The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat. “Ms. O’Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax...

IRS Sent $46 Million in Tax Refunds to 23,994 ‘Unauthorized’ Aliens — All at the SAME Address in Atlanta The IRS sent more than $46 million in tax refunds to 23,994 “unauthorized” alien workers who all listed the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to an audit report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). However, the Atlanta address that received millions of dollars in refunds was not the only address apparently housing thousands of “unauthorized” aliens. In fact, it wasn’t even the only address in Atlanta that was claiming such a situation. The TIGTA audit...

Obamacare Funded big IRS Data - By October 2010, the Internal Revenue Service had the capability to sift through emailing patterns associated with millions of individual internet addresses and have already established 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique “attributes.” The IRS continues to collect tax data, but they also are now acquiring huge volumes of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records. Dean Silverman, who led the IBM zEnterprise™ 196 systems upgrade bragged: “Private industry would be envious if they knew...

U.S. News and World Report noted yesterday: [The IRS] will use in robo-audits and data mining [and] it has told government and industry groups that its computers are capable of scanning multiple networks at the same time to collect “matching” comprehensive profiles for every taxpayer in America. Such profiles will likely include shopping records, travel, social interactions and information not available to the public, such as health records and files from other government investigators, according to IRS documents.

Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas. In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters....