Free Republic

I’m a fan and regular reader. Thanks for your yeoman’s work on the IRS scandal. I’m also retired from a 35-year law enforcement career, 22 of which were at the IRS Criminal Investigation Division, so I have some insight into the Service and its workings (although I spent all but one year doing money laundering – narcotics, and organized crime cases – rather than tax.) I’m quite surprised that no one has mentioned Section 1203 of the Internal Revenue Code, which mandates terminations of IRS employees who commit any of what are known in the Service as the “10 Deadly...

APThe contention that the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups was limited to several low-level workers may not be holding up.Former IRS acting head Steven Miller testified last week that two “rogue” agents responsible have already been disciplined. But Fox Cincinnati affiliate WXIX-TV has identified six local employees that sent probing letters to Tea Party groups: Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman known only as Ms. Richards.According to WXIX, all of those workers have separate managers, and separate territory managers above them; the only supervisor they do have in common is Cindy...

Lois Lerner, the IRS official in charge of tax-exempt groups, took her too-clever-by-half act to Congress yesterday and may have waived her right to claim her Fifth Amendment privilege in the process. Appearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, she couldn’t resist citing a little history, bragging on her public service, instructing the committee as to the purpose of the Fifth Amendment, and proclaiming her innocence of everything the committee might be interested in — all before asserting her Fifth Amendment privilege. Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) was a bit taken aback. He had never seen anybody try...

When you get right down to it,the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the Tea Party. Rick Santelli,one of the Tea Party founders and my CNBC colleague,was the first to make this point. I’ve taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the Tea Party out of play for the 2012 election,as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another Tea Party landslide.… But there can be only one reason for the stalled-out approval process for conservative groups. The IRS was trying to put them out of business....

Tempers flared in a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, with members on both sides of the aisle castigating the Internal Revenue Service for targeting conservative groups with special scrutiny, and then hiding the practice from Congress.Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee's chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.But despite the IRS recognizing in May 2012 that its employees were treating right-wing groups differently from other organizations, Issa said, IRS personnel withheld those conclusions from legislators.'Just yesterday the committee interviewed...

WASHINGTON — Internal Revenue Service officials are not fully cooperating with efforts to learn who is responsible for targeting conservative groups, lawmakers learned Wednesday during the third and most tense, dramatic hearing on the scandal. First, the director of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations at the heart of the scandal invoked her constitutional Fifth Amendment right and refused to answer questions during an appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.Then, a Treasury Department inspector general told the committee that IRS employees in the Cincinnati office that handled applications for tax-exempt designations were not being fully...

Carol Platt Liebau and Eliana Johnson aren't exactly Woodward and Bernstein --yet. But if both reporters keep up their relentless focus on the details of the IRS scandal --"Targetcon," "Targetgate," "Senseless in Cincinnati" --their names will be far and widely known as the first two serious reporters to take the burgeoning scandal seriously. Liebau labors at Townhall.com, and most her work appears first there in its "Tipsheet" column and eventually ends up easy to find and comprehensively categorized at CarolLiebau.com. Johnson's work appears most frequently in "The Corner" at National Review Online, though her work on the IRS is getting...

Conservatives have alleged that progressives have been engaged in a callous attempt under this plutocratic administration in creating artificial crises so that the plutocracy can abridge citizens' rights. I mean further than they’ve already abridged them. And until now the press has ignored this vast right wing conspiracy theory time after time: Fast and Furious, Solyndra, TARP, HARP, Benghazi, the IRS, Gun Grabbing, Libya, Iran, Syria, Russia, stimulus spending, the Boston Bombing and the phony math on Obamacare. Wisconsin’s Jim Sensenbrenner summed it up during a House hearing on Fast and Furious when he said: "There is really no responsibility...

9:30am (ET) LIVE: HOUSE OVERSIGHT CMTE. HEARS ABOUT IRS AND CONSERVATIVE ORGANIZATIONS http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights and will be hauled back to appear before his panel again. The California Republican said Lerner’s Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination was voided when she gave an opening statement this morning denying any wrongdoing and professing pride in her government service. “When I asked her her questions from the very beginning, I did so so she could assert her rights prior to any statement,” Issa told POLITICO. “She chose not to do so — so she waived.” Lerner triggered...

ARMED DHS GUARDS GREETED TEA PARTY PROTESTERS TODAY AT THE ST. LOUIS IRS RALLY– No sign of the Light-Armored Tanks yet…

AP:A Treasury official says the department told the White House twice that the IRS was preparing to make public its targeting of conservative political groups. The official said Monday that Treasury told the White House in late April about a possible speech in which IRS official Lois Lerner would make a public apology... SNIPWaPo:SNIP The Treasury Department was informed on three separate occasions that the IRS planned to disclose that it targeted conservative groups for scrutiny, and on one occasion, Treasury expressed concern about the nature of the disclosure, a Treasury official said on Monday night. In all cases, the...

“For me, it’s about collaboration.” — National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley on the relationship between the anti-Tea Party IRS union and the Obama White House Is President Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal? Is the White House Visitors Log the trail to the smoking gun? The stunning questions are raised by the following set of new facts. March 31, 2010. According to the White House Visitors Log, provided here in searchable form by U.S. News and World Report, the president of the anti-Tea Party National Treasury Employees Union, Colleen Kelley, visited the White House at 12:30pm that...

It's rigorous work keeping pace with all of these scandals, as House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer discovered earlier this week, but we're doing our best nonetheless. On the IRS targeting issue, we covered a lot of ground yesterday and earlier, but the "fun" never ceases. It will come as a surprise to no one that IRS employees lean heavily Democratic. Their livelihoods depend on the existence of big, complicated government, so of course they'd vote blue. In the 2012 cycle, during which their agency's abusive methods were in place, IRS employees donated to Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by more...

On Tuesday night the report of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration on the great Tea Party purge was released. This is a terrible report. Just begin reading it and you will quickly realize that you are in the the swamp of obfuscation and CYA. On the "Highlights" page there are more questions raised than answered --questions such as who ordered "donor information received in response to a request destroyed" and who at the IRS, specifically, rejected some of the IG's recommendations and "alternative corrective actions?" Mixed into the first page of sanitized disclosures is the "request that social...

When the Ottawa County Patriots tried to register as a non-profit a few years ago, the Internal Revenue Service dragged its feet for over a year-and-a-half. The Michigan group now joins the ranks of those across the nation that were singled out for additional scrutiny because of their politics, said the group's leader. Jim Chiodo is the head of the organization out of the Holland-Zeeland area. The group worked with the company Biz Central USA, which helps people file as 501c(3) or 501c(4) non-profit organizations. Registering as a non-profit ensures a more formal structure and makes it easier to collect...

When Marion Bower decided to start her tea party organization in 2010, she didn’t know that it would take nearly two years for the Internal Revenue Service to approve her request for tax-exempt status. The Ohio woman also did not expect that providing information about the books her group read would be part of the application process. “I was trying to be very cordial, but they wanted copies of unbelievable things,” Bower told ABC News today. “They wanted to know what materials we had discussed at any of our book studies.” She ultimately sent one of the books, “The Five...

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.

Full title: Revealed: The 55 questions the IRS asked one tea party group after more than two years of waiting – including demands for names of all its donors and volunteers Link to 55-question inquisition (PDF)The Internal Revenue Service wrote to the Richmond Tea Party last year demanding to know the names of all its financial donors and volunteers, as part of a 55-question inquisition into its application for tax-exempt status, MailOnline has learned. The agency wanted to know 'the names of the donors, contributors, and grantors' for every year 'from inception to the present.' It also demanded 'the amounts...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know, folks, on this IRS business, I think the 2010 midterms really shocked the Democrats. I think they might have expected to maybe lose some seats, although, actually, my memory -- no, no, no, no, no, my memory is that they thought with the overwhelming popularity of Obama it might be the first time that a sitting president's party increased seats. Well, it wouldn't be the first time. I think Bush did it. But they were clearly hoping for at least a draw. In the 2010 midterms they got shellacked. It's one of the reasons I...