Free Republic

Just when you thought the Deep State swamp couldn't get any murkier and the stench any more repugnant, we are reminded by Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton in a Feb. 13 tweet of how Robert Mueller's FBI worked with Lois Lerner's IRS to target Tea Party and other groups in the run-up to the Obama re-election campaign: @JudicialWatch lawsuit uncovered how Mueller's FBI worked with Lois Lerner's IRS to try to prosecute the very groups Obama IRS was suppressing. Another reason I don't trust Mr. Mueller – or the FBI! @JudicialWatch lawsuit uncovered how Mueller's FBI worked with Lois Lerner's IRS...

NEW YORK - After 12 years advocating for abortion rights, Joe Solmonese might have opted for a less divisive field of work. Instead, he is taking over leadership of the largest national gay-rights group at a time when the same-sex marriage debate rivals abortion for volatility and virulence. "My challenge is to talk about why the equality we seek is not just important to our community, but should be important to everyone," Solmonese said. "I have to believe in the optimism and fair-mindedness of the American people." Solmonese was named last week as the new president of the Washington-based Human...

Scandal: The person who leaked the confidential data of a conservative group to its political foes has been identified by investigators. But he's protected by the very law he broke and an attorney general who doesn't care. In March 2012, someone at the Internal Revenue Service released the confidential donor lists of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which supports traditional marriage, to its political opponent, the liberal Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a supporter of gay marriage. At that time, Joe Solmonese, a left-wing activist and Huffington Post contributor, was the president of the HRC. Solmonese also became a 2012...

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....

Mr. Garfinkle of Garfinkle’s New Method Hebrew School in Milwaukee used to frequently echo King Solomon’s admonition; “There’s nothing new under the sun.” I was reminded of that this week when the rapidly unfolding “scandal” of Trump’s purported dealings with Russia hit the news. It has more than a few similarities with the Dan Rather faked-up story of GW Bush’s National Guard service where an anonymous, never-found source supposedly gave Bill Burkett a demonstrably fake report and Dan Rather ran with it. This time a Bush (Jeb) is involved but as an instigator of the story, not a victim. John...

May 16, 2013 Column One: Obama and the ‘official truth’ Caroline B. Glick Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been sitting in a US federal prison in Texas since his photographed midnight arrest by half a dozen deputy sheriffs at his home in California for violating the terms of his parole. As many reporters have noted, the parole violation in question would not generally lead to anything more than a court hearing. But in Nakoula’s case, it led to a year in a federal penitentiary. Because he wasn’t really arrested for violating the terms of his parole. Nakoula was arrested for producing...

Just months after being slimed by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, Mitt Romney supporter and businessman Frank VanderSloot was informed that he was going to be audited not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but by the Labor Department as well. VanderSloot’s saga was told by columnist Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal last July. In April 2012, VanderSloot, who served as the national co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential finance committee, was one of eight Romney backers to be defamed as ”wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” in a post on the Obama campaign’s website. The post, entitled “Behind the...

Democratic Senator Sought DOJ and IRS Prosecutions of Conservatives Days Before 9/11 DHS Secretary Says Islam is Religion of Peace, ISIS Isn’t Islamic Top State Officials Raised Questions about Clinton Emails Three Years Ago It’s Official! Clean House is New York Times Bestseller! Democratic Senator Sought DOJ and IRS Prosecutions of Conservatives It wasn’t just Obama’s Internal Revenue Service that sought to suppress conservative voices in order to help him retain the presidency in 2012. We learned further of a dangerous enterprise involving a key Democratic Senator and the Obama Justice Department from 72 pages of Justice documents we...

While speaking in Peru for an international summit, President Obama bragged that his administration has been, allegedly, scandal-free during his presidency. "I'm extremely proud of the fact that over 8 years we have not had the kinds of scandals that have plagued other administrations." He's actually serious about this. And it appears that it's a goal of the Obama administration to push this claim in an attempt to frame the outgoing president's legacy. During an interview with CNN which aired on Sunday, President Obama's top aide, Valerie Jarrett, claimed that Obama is proud of himself because his administration has been "scandal-free."...

Firefighters were called to the three-story brick rowhome in the 2000 block of Madison Ave. at 10:42 a.m., where they found smoke coming from the roof, said department spokesman Samuel Johnson Jr. They placed the one-alarm blaze under control by 11 a.m. Windows were broken out on the second and third floors, while debris was piled on the sidewalk beneath a first-floor window holding an Obama '08 poster.

Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he is confident the story behind the IRS’s targeting of tea-party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status will eventually come out. But patience will have to be a virtue. Issa’s staff acknowledged late last month that the IRS had handed over to the committee a little more than 10 percent of the documents the IRS itself has admitted are relevant to the committee’s investigation. Issa mentioned the case of “Susanne,” a lawyer whom he said had worked for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee until 2008....

A little publicized IRS decision should have conservatives who write about politics very alarmed. The IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative political organization, the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty (PHCIL), due to a handful of articles that founder Gary Aldrich wrote in his personal capacity. His decade-old articles simply criticized Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, which the IRS claimed constituted electioneering. The articles were linked to as "alerts" from the PHCIL website. The American Spectator noted, “Although the literature demands that those like Clinton and Kerry be kept out of power, it never specifically says, ‘Don’t vote...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested Thursday that he would be open to the appointment of an outside counsel to review actions taken by the Justice Department during the Obama administration. Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Sessions in an interview if the new attorney general would consider designating an outside counsel "not connected to politics" to take a second look at Justice Department actions that provoked Republican ire in the last eight years. Those include the Fast and Furious gun scandal and the decisions against bringing criminal charges over Hillary Clinton's email practices or the Internal Revenue...

WASHINGTON–It’s been two years since the IRS targeting scandal broke, but Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, said on Thursday they’re still looking for answers.The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts, chaired by Cruz, on Wednesday questioned IRS Commissioner John Koskinen about the agency’s cooperation with investigations, and rehashed accusations of a White House conspiracy to target conservative groups.“The American people have a right to be angry when an instrument of the american government is used a partisan cudgel,” said Cruz, a 2016 presidential candidate running on abolishing the IRS. “I have to...

Members of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday will question outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller on investigations of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, the Boston Marathon bombings, and recent leaks of classified government information. Mueller was to undergo questioning by the committee on these and other issues in what will be his final appearance before the panel. His last day on the job is Sept. 4. The Justice Department revealed last month that it had secretly gathered emails of Fox News correspondent James Rosen and phone records of The Associated Press in an effort to crack...

New documents obtained through a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show former IRS head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner met with the Department of Justice Election Crimes Division as early as October 2010, just one month before the historic 2010-midterm elections when Republicans regained control of the House and at the peak of the tea party movement.  From Judicial Watch: As result of a court order, the DOJ last month produced only two pages of heavily redacted emails (832 pages were withheld in entirety) that show the Obama Justice Department initiated an October 8, 2010, meeting between the...

“Regardless of whatever else happens, I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for anything I did,” former IRS official Lois Lerner told POLITICO in an exclusive interview released today. In the piece, Lerner portrays herself as being unfairly attacked by the very groups she spent years inappropriately targeting. Lerner, for her part, assumes she is at the center of the storm because “I was the person who announced it. I assume the other part of it is because I declined to talk, and once I declined to talk, they could say anything they...

Surprise! The IRS claims it has lost emails belonging to even more employees embroiled in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservatives. Guy covered the details of the newest revelations earlier today and the AP reported about the lost emails over the weekend. The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative groups that applied for tax exempt status. The tax agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...

At 74,000 pages, the IRS code is a mind-boggling ode to lobbying, pork-barrel spending and graft. These are the only good things that I can say about the IRS. Ode may be too friendly a word, however. Let’s instead call it an incantation for our country. Because the code holds a country in thrall like the winged monkeys in Dorothy’s Oz were held. And until the witch is dead, we monkeys must do her bidding. Politicians, economists and ordinary citizens can’t follow the tax code, which has tripped up cabinet nominees, majority leaders and others who ought to know...