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After a “long, lonely and expensive seven year struggle,” one that she alone, on behalf of Z STREET bore, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the founder of Z STREET has just won a significant legal victory which grants her organization tax-exempt status and definitively exposes Obama’s IRS as obsessively anti-Israel. There was a repeated effort during the Obama administration to bar organizations that support Judea and Samaria from being eligible for tax-exempt status. Ironically, Marcus founded Z STREET in 2009 in order to “educate Americans about the Middle East and Israel’s defense against terror.” The Z Street application was at first delayed,...

A pro-Israel organization that found its nonprofit status subjected to undue scrutiny by the Obama administration's IRS as a result of its advocacy on the Jewish state's behalf reached a settlement Thursday with the Department of Justice that included a formal apology from the U.S. government for subjecting the group to unfair treatment, according to an announcement.The Trump administration's DOJ announced Tuesday that it had reached a settlement with Z Street, a conservative pro-Israel advocacy group that sued the government over allegations the Obama administration subjected the organization to unfair scrutiny as a result of its pro-Israel views. Z Street...

The first IRS viewpoint discrimination case to be filed, Z Street v. IRS, has been settled, with disturbing revelations about how the Internal Revenue Service treated pro-Israel organizations applying for tax-exempt status. I founded Z Street in 2009 to educate Americans about the Middle East and Israel’s defense against terror. We applied for tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code in December 2009—a process that usually takes three to six months. Instead, the application languished. In late July 2010, an IRS agent truthfully responded to our lawyer’s query about why processing was taking so long: Z Street’s application...

Tick, tick, tick. A day of reckoning for the IRS gets closer with a unanimous opinion from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Z Street case. Z Street explains: The pro-Israel organization Z STREET was today, once again, vindicated in a court of law in its now nearly five year effort to redress the violation of its Constitutional rights by the Internal Revenue Service. The judges in their Opinion were far more restrained than their reactions to the IRS arguments during the oral argument which took place on May 4, see http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-goes-to-court-1430953480, but their...

Chief Judge Garland to the IRS's lawyer: 'Go back and ask your superiors whether they want us to represent that the government's position in this case is that the government is free to unconstitutionally discriminate against its citizens for 270 days." In a highly unusual public thrashing of a government lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service by the second highest U.S. court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked: “You don’t really mean that the IRS is free to discriminate against its citizens, do you?” The judges asked this question several times in several different ways of the Department of...

The IRS scandal has just gained another dimension, and it is more than a "smidgen." Emails uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee show that the State Department was involved in the IRS’s attempt to deny tax-exempt status to Z-Street, the pro-Israel organization founded and run by AT contributor Lori Lowenthal Marcus, based on Z-Street’s pro-Israel positions that conflicted with Obama administration policy. This is known as “viewpoint discrimination,” and is strictly illegal.The Wall Street Journal explains what has been uncovered:  …emails uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee show that the IRS and State Department were conferring...

In the absence of a special prosecutor, the best opportunity for piercing the veil of secrecy and evasion that surrounds the IRS handling of groups perceived as enemies of the Obama administration lies in civil litigation. The National Organization for Marriage has just obtained a $50,000 settlement from the IRS for its criminal release of confidential donor information to an opposition group. ~snip~ The absence of any official judicial inquiry into the inner workings of the IRS processes is why it is so important to note that yesterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street...

Z Street representative Lori Lowenthal Marcus spoke out in March 2013 about the harassment the pro-Israel group received from the Obama IRS: “They told us terrorism happens in Israel. Therefore, they had to look into our organization because they thought we might be funding terrorism. We’re a purely educational entity. We didn’t fund anybody. We barely funded ourselves.” Remember: This is the same administration that wouldn’t call the Benghazi massacre a terrorist attack but accused a pro-Israel group of supporting terror.

The IRS insists that there is no legal remedy for determining whether an applicant's constitutional rights have been violated, and that offended parties must be satisfied with a "good enough" remedy, even if it is not perfect. The IRS is doing everything it can to prevent accusers from determining whether its decision making processes violated the constitutional rights of applicants for tax exempt status On Friday, July 19, in federal district court in Washington, D.C., Department of Justice lawyers who have the misfortune of having to represent the Internal Revenue Service were forced to reveal exactly how desperate the IRS...

The IRS has admitted targeting groups that wanted to speak on issues during the 2012 election season. But did the agency also target tax-exempt groups that opposed Administration policy priorities? At a House oversight hearing last week, Treasury Inspector General Russell George opened the door on the possibility of more IRS political targeting. Asked by Chairman Darrell Issa whether there were other political criteria that IRS workers had been told to "be on the lookout" for, Mr. George said he could "not give you a definitive answer, sir, at this time. But I certainly will." [snip] Asked about the slow...

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...

A little over a year ago, I reported that, ”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.”

“Whoa: Did the IRS also target Jewish groups for ‘extra-special attention’?,” Twitchy asks: The IRS admits to targeting conservative groups for additional review and laughably claims the witch hunt wasn’t “motivated by political bias.” What will its math-challenged spokeswoman Lois Lerner say about allegations that the IRS gave “extra-special attention to the tax-exempt status of some Jewish groups for political reason”? * * * * * The pro-Israel group Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, claiming an IRS agent said the organization would come under extra scrutiny because it’s “connected to Israel.” In addition, the IRS...

American Jews who defend Israel, it seems, have much to not be happy about this Thanksgiving Day. In a major Politico article, writer Ben Smith writes that Z Street, a hawkish pro-Israel group that consciously bills itself as an alternative to the leftist J Street, reveals that the IRS may be targeting pro-Israel groups for seeking a tax exemption, solely on the grounds of their position. Writes Smith about the proposed query of an unnamed religious group that has no expressed position on Israel: “Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel?” IRS agent Tracy Dornette wrote...

A pro-Israel education group called Z Street is claiming that Obama's IRS has violated its Constitutional rights by denying it tax exempt status solely because it supports Israel, support that apparently runs counter to Obama's stance on Israel. Z Street reports that Obama's IRS asked a telling question of the group as it sought the tax exemption earlier this year. In August, Z Street filed a lawsuit claiming that the IRS was delaying the consideration because the group is a vocal supporter of the State of Israel and that support apparently runs counter to the Obama's administration's position. According to...

A Pennsylvania Jewish group that has claimed the Internal Revenue Service is targeting pro-Israel groups introduced in federal court today a letter from an IRS agent to another, unnamed organization that tax experts said was likely outside the usual or appropriate scope of an IRS inquiry. "Does your organization support the existence of the land of Israel?" IRS agent Tracy Dornette wrote the organization, according to this week's court filing, as part of its consideration of the organizations application for tax exempt status. "Describe your organization's religious belief sytem toward the land of Israel." The document emerged in the course...

Z STREET, a pro-Israel non-profit corporation, filed a lawsuit in federal court today charging that the IRS violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. The suit was filed after Z STREET was told by an IRS official that its application for tax-exempt status has been delayed because an IRS policy requires consideration of whether a group’s views on Israel differ from those of the current Administration.

IRS SUED FOR DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ORGANIZATIONS THAT DON’T SHARE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITIONS ON ISRAEL Z STREET, a pro-Israel non-profit corporation, filed a lawsuit in federal court today charging that the IRS violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. The suit was filed after Z STREET was told by an IRS official that its application for tax-exempt status has been delayed because an IRS policy requires consideration of whether a group’s views on Israel differ from those of the current Administration. “Not only is it patently un-American but it is also a clear violation of the First Amendment for a government agency to...

November 05, 2009 At the J Street meeting By Lori Lowenthal Marcus The Washington conference of the new organization "J Street" took place on October 25-28. It was a fascinating but scary cultural experience. For three days I watched hundreds of intensely pious people sitting under an awning that reads "pro-Israel, pro-peace." But by far the dearest hopes of the folks on J Street were for the well-being, and especially the sovereignty, of a people whose leadership has stated repeatedly that its goal is to destroy Israel and murder Jews. I saw two overarching themes defining this conference: one, Iran...