1) This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect. We will perpetually have a progressive, liberal president, probably a Democrat, and we will probably see the House of Representatives go into Democrat hands and the Senate will stay in Democrat hands. – Michele Bachmann
2) The bill is worse than universal healthcare. Listen to me, it is worse than universal healthcare, and in the coming days as we get closer, we will explain why it’s worse than universal healthcare. It is the death knell of the country, there is no recovery from this one. None. No recovery. – Glenn Beck
3) If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”
Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.
So what are the Republicans doing?
Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. – Pat Buchanan
4) The nation’s plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio’s amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the “Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party” versus the “Chuck Schumer Republican Party.” – Ann Coulter
5) Instead of cracking down on the Administration’s abuse of power, S. 744 places unprecedented new restrictions on interior enforcement – making the current situation much worse and much more hazardous. It is as if S. 744 were explicitly written to handcuff law enforcement officials – binding their hands while giving virtually unchecked authority to executive branch officials to prevent future removals, including removals of criminal aliens. – ICE Council president Chris Crane
6) It doesn’t stop illegal immigration. If anything it makes the problem worse by not securing the border and by incentivizing future illegal immigration. – Ted Cruz
7) Creating more than 30 million new immigrants, including 11 million former illegals, and supplanting their numbers with another 20-odd million guest workers is from a sociological and demographic point of view quite radical: 30 million is roughly a tenth of the current population of the United States. How we handle immigration is of fundamental importance to questions ranging from national security to economic growth to the character of our nation itself. That we cannot get a couple of small-time performance benchmarks written into the bill suggests that this issue is not being treated with the intelligence and the prudence it deserves. – The Editors at National Review
8) This is the administration that has refused to enforce the law… they have created new law out of nothing. They’ve violated the law in a number of ways. And our guys are counting on the administration to all of a sudden actually keep their word on something like securing the border when they’ve never done it before and they believe it’s in their political interest to continue not to secure the border even if there’s a deal? I mean that’s crazy to think they’re going to start securing the border and until we secure the border everything else is completely meaningless. – Louie Gohmert
9) Should this be grounds to primary challenge every Republican who voted for this bill, and I mean every single one? I don’t care if they just got re-elected. Next time they’re up for re-election. Ann Coulter’s right. This is a single issue – this is a single-issue primary challenge. You know why? Because this is it. As Bill Kristol said on this show, as he said on this show, once you give this pathway to citizenship all these benefits, all this discretion to [Janet] Napolitano, it’s over. It’s too late to complain about it. It’s over. – Laura Ingraham
10) The federal judge in Crane v. Napolitano has ruled that the ICE agents are likely to prevail in their argument that the Obama administration is ordering them to violate federal law. Think about that: This administration is ordering career law enforcement personnel to break the law. Now, the administration is pushing for an amnesty bill that contains almost nothing to improve immigration enforcement. All that the American citizens will get in return for the amnesty is the promise from the Obama administration that they will try harder to enforce the law. The administration has already shattered that promise, doing exactly the opposite. This is a stark warning to Congress. I sincerely hope that they hear it. – Kris Kobach
11) Almost every requirement in this bill can be waived by Janet Napolitano: for instance, the time limits on when people can be legalized, the requirements on criminal activity or even the enforcement triggers. Those basically don’t mean anything if any of them is held up in court, still. …The litigation over the 1986 bill didn’t end until just a few years ago. The ACLU has been quite clear that it intends to sue to stop mandatory e-verify and probably sue to stop a bunch of other things. If, for instance, mandatory use of electronic verification is still in the courts 10 years after the bill passes, it’s entirely possible the Secretary of Homeland Security can just give everybody Green Cards on her own – and there are hundreds of other examples of that kind of discretion. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that this 1,000 page bill after all of the amendments could be boiled down to, “We trust you, Obama; just do the right thing.” – Mark Krikorian
12) The ‘Gang of Eight’ bill is not immigration reform. It is big government dysfunction. It is an immigration Obamacare. All advocates of true immigration reform – on the left and the right – should oppose it. – Mike Lee
13) Okay. So what does that mean, the republic is at stake? This is the ball game. I remember people saying that about Obamacare. Now they’re saying it about immigration reform. And they’re both right. In the case of immigration reform, it effectively wipes out the Republican Party. – Rush Limbaugh
14) Will they listen? Suicidal Republicans have supported illegal alien amnesties dating back to the Reagan era. They have paid a steep, lasting price. As bankrupt, multiculti-wracked California goes, so goes the nation. The progs’ plan has always been to exploit the massive population of illegal aliens to redraw the political map and secure a permanent ruling majority.
Now, in the wake of nonstop D.C. corruption eruptions, SchMcGRubio and Company want us to trust them with a thousand new pages of phony triggers, left-wing slush-fund spending and make-believe assimilation gestures. Trust them? Hell, no. There’s only one course for citizens who believe in upholding the Constitution and protecting the American dream: Stop them. – Michelle Malkin
15) On every major front, this legislation fails to deliver on its core promises. It delivers only for the special interest groups who helped write it. Should it pass, it would represent the ultimate triumph of the Washington elite over the everyday citizen to whom Congress properly owes its loyalty. – Jeff Sessions
Excerpt – Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.
I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days – except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.
Excerpt – One might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad-in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week.
And it’s not entirely surprising that the four leading members of Congress on intelligence matters would argue on behalf of these programs, known as “215″ and “702,” for the sections of the laws that authorize them.
Excerpt – One of the most common arguments for allowing more immigration is that there is a “need” for foreign workers to do “jobs that Americans won’t do,” especially in agriculture.
One of my most vivid memories of the late Armen Alchian, an internationally renowned economist at UCLA, involved a lunch at which one of the younger members of the economics department got up to go get some more coffee. Being a considerate sort, the young man asked, “Does anyone else need more coffee?”
“Need?” Alchian said loudly, in a cutting tone that clearly conveyed his dismay and disgust at hearing an economist using such a word.
Excerpt – We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups suffered? You don’t know the half of it.
Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady community-organizing pals. The Dems’ 2008 party platform proposed the creation of a “Social Investment Fund Network” to subsidize “social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities.”
Excerpt – Grutter v. Bollinger was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s racial admissions policy. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said the U.S. Constitution “does not prohibit the Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” But what are the educational benefits of a diverse student body?
Intellectuals argue that diversity is necessary for academic excellence, but what’s the evidence? For example, Japan is a nation bereft of diversity in any activity. Close to 99 percent of its population is of one race. Whose students do you think have higher academic achievement – theirs or ours?
Excerpt – “Why are there no libertarian countries?”
In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”
Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.
Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone.
Were you targeted by the IRS for your political beliefs? Did you receive extra scrutiny for promoting limited government, the constitution, and fiscal responsibility? If not, will you be next?
What: Audit the IRS Rally
When: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 from Noon – 2pm
Where: West Lawn of the US Capitol
Join us on Wednesday, June 19th at 12pm on the West Lawn of the US Capitol as we come together to rally against the IRS. It’s time that Washington sees first-hand just how outraged the American people are by these discriminatory acts.
In the spirit of what Becky Gerritson of Wetumpka Tea Party so elegantly said in her testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee:
“We are patriotic Americans. We peacefully assemble. We petition our government. We exercise our right to free speech and we don’t understand why our government tried to stop us. We aren’t here as serfs or vassals. We’re not begging our lords for mercy. We are born free American citizens and we’re telling our government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for our well being and monitor our speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. The post that you occupy exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty and you have faltered.”
The author of the Patriot Act said Thursday that a secret program under which the Obama administration was collecting phone records from millions of Americans is “excessive” and beyond the scope of the law.
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Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who wrote the 2001 law, was among a host of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who raised alarm over the practice.
The Guardian newspaper first reported the National Security Agency had been collecting records under a court order from millions of Verizon customers in the U.S. Defenders of the program tried to ease the furor by assuring the public this is “nothing new” – and in fact has been going on for seven years. But the acknowledgement that the program is long running only fueled the outrage from civil liberties groups and lawmakers who described it as a blatant overreach.
“This is a big deal, a really big deal,” Sensenbrenner told Fox News, adding that such a broad seizure was “never the intent” of the law. He floated the possibility of amending the Patriot Act before its 2015 expiration to stop this.
In a separate statement, he called the program “excessive and un-American.”
The Republican lawmaker also fired off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder – who would not comment on the program when asked about it Thursday – explaining why he thinks the records collection goes astray of the law. He noted that the key section of the law that allows the government to obtain business records requires the information to be relevant to an authorized investigation.
“How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation?” he asked in the letter.
He said the order “could not have been drafted more broadly,” and said he does not think it’s “consistent” with the law’s requirements.
A handful of in-the-know lawmakers lined up to defend the program, while acknowledging the need to protect privacy.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House intelligence committee, said the effort is not “data mining,” and has helped quash a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the past few years. He would not elaborate.
The leaders of the Senate intelligence committee also defended the program, saying it is “nothing new.” Republican Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss said it’s been going on for seven years.
Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said these orders are actually renewed every three months through the court. She said the records are there for investigators to access if there is suspicion of terrorist activity.
“The threat from terrorism remains very real and these lawful intelligence activities must continue, with the careful oversight of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government,” Feinstein and Chambliss said in a joint statement.
Speaking later in the day, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said “everyone should just calm down.”
Administration officials, while not directly acknowledging the order, defended their authority to collect records and stressed they’re not listening in on conversations.
However, civil liberties groups and some lawmakers sounded the alarm over the collection effort.
“The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said.
One civil liberties group called this the “broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued.”
“It requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S.,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has historically opposed the Patriot Act, said the effort “is not what democracy is about.”
The report in the Guardian newspaper follows revelations that the Justice Department was seizing the phone records of journalists, including at Fox News, in the course of leak probes.
The order, a copy of which apparently was obtained by The Guardian, reportedly was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19.
It requires Verizon, one of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies, on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.
The text of the order, as published by The Guardian, says that “the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the” the records in question.
The newspaper claims the document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.
The NSA and the FBI are mining the user data of nine major Internet companies, an expose by The Washington Post revealed Thursday evening.
The previously undisclosed program – called PRISM – allows intelligence analysts to directly tap the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.
The audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs of users are all available to be extracted and analyzed by intelligence analysts.
The names of the companies appear in the order of when they joined the “court-approved” program, which began in 2007. Dropbox is reportedly “coming soon.”
98 percent of PRISM’s product is derived from intelligence gathered from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.
The Guardian and NBC News also confirmed the existence of PRISM, whose analysis is used in out of seven NSA reports and was cited in 1,477 articles of the President’s Daily Brief in 2012.
“In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA,” wrote The Washington Post.
“In 2008,” the newspaper continued, “Congress gave the Justice Department authority for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”
The companies that responded to the Post’s requests for comment – including Google, Facebook and Apple – denied any participation in PRISM.
The government’s 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – dated April 2013 – and supporting materials describing the program were provided to The Washington Post by a career intelligence officer looking to expose a “gross intrusion of privacy.”
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said to The Washington Post.
Intelligence analysts are able to query the servers of the participating companies using “selectors” to determine with 51 percent confidence a target’s “foreignness.”
Information accidentally collected about innocent Americans by analysts is considered “incidental” and “nothing to worry about.”
PRISM is not a new thing for the government, despite the involvement of fairly modern technology.
“PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s,” wrote The Washington Post. These alliances are called Special Source Operations.
“PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority,” wrote The Washington Post.
A parallel program to PRISM described in The Washington Post expose called BLARNEY collects “metadata” – address packets, device signatures and the like – as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet.”
This type of effort by the NSA was first exposed when former AT&T technician Mark Klein went public about his knowledge of a secret room at a San Franciscio AT&T facility that intercepted all Internet traffic.
The Washington Post expose comes directly on the heels of a separate report by The Guardian, which revealed late Tuesday evening that Verizon was being secretly ordered on an ongoing basis to hand over the phone data of all communications inside the U.S.
The phone data includes phone numbers, when the call was made and for how long the call took place.
Randy Milch, Verizon’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, would not confirm the accuracy of The Guardian’s report, but said that if such an order were issued to Verizon, the company would be “required to comply.”
California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein affirmed that the court order was a routine three month renewal of a secret program that has been ongoing since the previous administration.
The NSA and the FBI both declined The Daily Caller’s request for comment.
The journalist who took part in breaking two attention-grabbing stories on government surveillance charged that the United States is interested in destroying privacy all over the world.
“There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal,” Greenwald said on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” on Thursday.
“And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world.”
Greenwald’s subsequent comments came just hours after The Guardian and The Washington Post both broke another bombshell report detailing a program dubbed as “PRISM.” According to the reports, the program involves the National Security Agency and FBI tapping into the servers of nine leading Internet companies to extract information.
“It’s well past time that we have a debate about whether that’s the kind of country and world in which we want to live,” Greenwald said on CNN. “We haven’t had that debate because it’s all done in secrecy and the Obama administration has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody who thinks about exposing it or writing about it or even doing journalism about it. It’s well past time that that come to an end.”
The Obama administration and some members of Congress have defended the use of the programs. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said the NSA’s collection of phone data has been going on for seven years. Feinstein said it’s about “protecting America.”
“People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing light to what it is they’re doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them,” Greenwald said in response.
“It’s well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve.”
It appears that along with online information, the U.S. government has tracked credit card purchases and, in some cases, shared phone data with the U.K., according to The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast.
It was revealed earlier this week that the feds have been monitoring Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and AT&T customers and that the National Security Administration had established a massive program, code-named PRISM, that indicates the monitoring of Americans.
Now the Wall Street Journal’s sources claim NSA operations also encompass purchase information from credit-card providers.
“It couldn’t be determined if any of the Internet or credit-card arrangements are ongoing, as are the phone company efforts, or one-shot collection efforts,” the WSJ notes.
What is known at this time, however, is that the NSA has established with credit-card companies the same type of relationship it has established with tech companies. That is, the NSA asks for the data and they get it.
Also, according to The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake, at least “one foreign government has gained access to sensitive data collected by the National Security Agency from U.S. telecommunications companies in dragnet court warrants demanding the secret transfer of U.S. customers’ calling records.”
The collected information, referred to as “metadata,” does not include conversation content or the names of people associated with accounts. It does, however, record when and where calls are made and for how long.
And in a few “discreet cases,” as Lake puts it, “the NSA has shared unedited analysis of these records with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.”
Furthermore, in 2010, GCHQ actually gained access to the NSA’s PRISM program, The Guardian reports.
“The documents showed the British generated 197 intelligence reports from access to the system in 2012,” Lake notes.
“With advances in computer science, intelligence services can now mine vast amounts of data collected by telecom companies, Internet service providers, and social-media sites for patterns that can illuminate terrorist networks and help solve crimes,” he adds, citing intelligence officers.
“These metadata … reside in vast hard drives that belong to the NSA. Analysts there can then take a phone number or email address and uncover suspected terrorists’ associates, find their locations, and even learn clues about their possible targets.”
A former senior U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast, “My understanding is if the British had a phone number, we might run the number through the database for them and provide them with the results.”
“I do not know of cases where the U.S. government has shared this kind of metadata with the United Kingdom, but I would be surprised if this never happened,” Peter Wood, the CEO of First Base Technologies, said in the same report. “Both countries cooperate very closely on counterterrorism.”
PRISM, the latest surveillance program leaked to the press, makes the collection of metadata from the three major phone companies seem quaintly old-fashioned. Its Big Brother implications are stunning from the standpoints of both technology and audacity.
I’ve written twice this week on how presidents routinely overstep the bounds when they are facing urgent security threats like war or al-Qaida, and how that should not be shocking, given the stakes. But PRISM, which reportedly allows the government to track people’s Internet activities as they occur, does come as a shock.
The metadata collected by the National Security Agency from Verizon and other phone companies is an aggregation of phone numbers and lengths of calls, and does not harvest the content of the calls. PRISM, first disclosed Thursday night by The Washington Post and The Guardian, is different. According to the intelligence official who leaked the information to The Post: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, says PRISM is “important and entirely legal” and “cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.” Obama himself said Friday that he was skeptical about NSA surveillance programs when he took office, but he and his team concluded after assessing them that “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.”
Both the phone and Internet programs are “under very strict supervision” by all three branches of government, Obama said, and added that he has put in place new safeguards and audits. He called the encroachment on privacy modest. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said, or reading the email of U.S. citizens.
Still, the stew of threats, technology, and government authority seems like a scandal waiting to happen. The potential for invasion of privacy is as enormous as the scale of the program. PRISM reportedly involves nine giant Internet companies: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Some are denying they participate.
PRISM dates from the George W. Bush administration and, according to Clapper, has been overseen by Congress and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That means some insiders wouldn’t have been surprised by the revelations and may explain why former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer stood by it last night when I asked him about it. “I support it, just as I support detecting patterns that can lead us to terrorists,” he told me on Twitter.
The leaked information makes clear that the PRISM program is central to U.S. intelligence gathering. Clapper called the unauthorized disclosure of its existence “reprehensible” and said it “risks important protections for the security of Americans.”
In fact the twin leaks of PRISM and the phone data-collection program appear more serious and consequential than the leaks that led the Justice Department to investigate the Associated Press and Fox News’ James Rosen.
Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have all but admitted overzealousness in those two investigations, in which Rosen was labeled a coconspirator and so many AP phone records were subpoenaed that one member of Congress called it a constitutionally questionable dragnet. Obama and Holder have been trying to dial back and reassure the media that reporters won’t be prosecuted for doing their jobs.
Investigations of these latest leaks will be a stiff test of their restraint, and their ability to explain why PRISM in particular is not something that should worry people who use the Internet. In other words, almost everyone in America.
In April of 2012, whistleblower William Binney went on the program Democracy Now to reveal that the NSA was lying to the American people about their actions. Binney is a former intelligence agent.
He stated that the NSA had “20 trillion transactions” on record. Specifically, transactions are phone calls, emails, internet searches, and credit card purchases made by average citizens.
When asked if he believed that the United States government had every single email American citizens had sent, Binney stated that, “I believe they have most of them.”
When asked about the difference between the Obama and Bush administrations, Binney cautioned, “Actually, I think the surveillance has increased, in fact I would suggest that they’ve assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens. 20 trillion.”
“They can target anyone they want,” he warned.
Yet it was only this week that the Main Stream Media officially reported on the NSA’s activities, and that was after the story was broken by the Guardian.
Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley told Megyn Kelly he is “astonished” at President Obama’s dismissive attitude toward criticism of NSA monitoring.
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…………………….Click on image above to watch video.
After hearing a thorough defense of the NSA’s monitoring of Americans’ phone calls, Megyn Kelly discussed it with constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley, who took particular issue with Obama referring to the program as a “modest encroachment” on privacy. He called that statement “laughable,” saying Obama did not address the questions that civil libertarians like himself have been asking since the Bush administration.
“Telephone companies were demanding every single phone call made by every single citizen. It’s the type of surveillance that once was though futuristic, that wasn’t even technically possible, but it is now… I’m really astonished by the dismissive attitude of the president,” said Turley, calling it a “major violation of privacy.”
Check out the full interview above, including why Turley believes Obama is “unconnected from reality.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Now with Alex Wagner, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said that he was never briefed on the National Security Agency’s sweeping PRISM program which databases electronic communications data. Merkley said that he had no idea about the program and he suspects that a small number of members of the congressional intelligence committees were the only individuals informed of the program.
Wagner recalled that the president said that he welcomes the debate over how much privacy Americans should expect to give up in order to ensure security. She asked Merkley if he thought it was even possible to have that debate.
“I think it is possible,” he replied. “Much more possible now that there is public examination.”
“When I sought information, the only information I got was related to that, ‘yes, there is a program sweeping up broad amounts of data through the Records Act,” Merkley continued.
“This second thing we’ve just learned about called PRISM, I had no idea about,” he said. “I don’t know how many people knew about it in Congress, but I suspect a very small number on the intelligence committees.”
Conservative radio host and best-selling author Mark Levin went on “Your World with Neil Cavuto” yesterday to discuss the recent revelations that the National Security Agency had been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
He said that the NSA news in addition to other openings for intrusion by the federal government are the makings of a “police state.”
“I tell you what I make of this – we have the elements of a police state here, and I’m not overstating it,” Levin said. “When you step back and realize the Supreme Court the other day ruled 5-to-4 that law enforcement can take DNA from you even if you’re arrested – by the way, you’re arrested even when you’re stopped for a speeding ticket, and Scalia was right, concerned about a national database. That goes way over the line of our traditions.”
“The Department of Homeland Security now is checking laptops and iPhones and other data, making copies of it and keeping it, and now we have this,” he continued. “And some of my brothers and sisters in law enforcement, prosecutors, are saying, ‘Look, look, this is permitted. We need to be able to go through and match -’ wait a minute. You don’t throw a whole net on the entire country and everybody’s phone numbers and check the duration and see if you can come up with some overlaps. That’s not law enforcement. That’s not how national security works. I don’t care what the hell the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizen.”
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BARACK (Wizard Of Uhs) OBAMA
DOUCHEBAG EXTRAORDINAIRE
Former U.S. Senator
President Of The United States
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HILLARY (Rotten) CLINTON
DOUCHEBAG EMERITUS
Former U.S. Senator
Former U.S. Secretary Of State
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ERIC (Fast & Furious) HOLDER
DOUCHEBAG CUM LAUDE
Former U.S. Superior Court Judge For The District Of Columbia
Attorney General Of The United States
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DOUGLAS (Egg Roller) SHULMAN
DOUCHEBAG SECOND CLASS
Former Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Vice Chairman
Former U.S. Internal Revenue Service Commissioner
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LOIS (Fifth Amendment) LERNER
DOUCHEBAG SECOND CLASS
Former Federal Elections Commission Director
U.S. Internal Revenue Service Tax Exempt & Government Entities Division Director
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SARAH (Tea Party Pooper) INGRAM
DOUCHEBAG THIRD CLASS
Former U.S. Internal Revenue Service Tax Exempt & Government Entities Division Director
U.S. Internal Revenue Service Affordable Care Act Office Director
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LISA (Greenie Meanie) JACKSON
DOUCHEBAG THIRD CLASS
Former New Jersey Department Of Environmental Protection Assistant Commissioner Of Compliance And Enforcement
Former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator
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JAY (Goebbels) CARNEY
DOUCHEBAG APPERTENANTI
Former Time Magazine Washington Bureau Chief
White House Press Secretary
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SUSAN (YouTube) RICE
DOUCHEBAG HONORARIUS
Former Assistant Secretary Of State For African Affairs
U.S. Ambassador To The United Nations
President Obama may have promised “to hold the responsible parties accountable” for the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative non-profit groups, but one of the agents at the center of the scandal was recently promoted, an IRS source tells The Washington Examiner.
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Through 2012, then-Exempt Organization Specialist Stephen Seok signed many of the intimidating letters sent to conservative nonprofits. For example, this January 2012 letter sent to the Richmond Tea Party demanded the date, time and location of all group events, as well as copies of all handouts provided at the events, and the names and credentials of all organizers. Seok also demanded the names of all speakers and the contents of the speeches they made.
According to WXIX-TV/Fox 19 in Cincinnati, Seok is no longer an exempt organization specialist. He has since been promoted to “supervisor IRS agent.”
Contacted for comment on when and why Seok was promoted, the Cincinnati IRS office had no comment and referred all inquiries to the Washington office. The Washington office, when contacted, also refused comment on Seok’s promotion, citing the Privacy Act of 1974.
It appears some of the “rogue agents” in the Cincinnati office are being rewarded for targeting conservatives, not punished.
It wasn’t just the Tea Party: it has been widely reported that the IRS also has harassed and discriminated against pro-Israel charities, in particular those that support settlements in Judea and Samaria. In the Free Beacon, Alana Goodman pursues the story:
A Washington Free Beacon investigation has identified at least five pro-Israel organizations that have been audited by the IRS in the wake of a coordinated campaign by White House-allied activist groups in 2009 and 2010.
These organizations, some of which are too afraid of government reprisals to speak publicly, say in interviews with the Free Beacon that they now believe the IRS actions may have been coordinated by the Obama administration.
I missed it at the time, but there was a campaign by anti-Israel forces to deprive these charities of their tax-exempt status because their aims conflicted with Obama administration policies:
The media scrutiny began as early as March 26, 2009, when the Washington Post’s David Ignatius published a column questioning the groups’ tax-exempt status.
Ignatius’s column is here. Ignatius displayed a remarkable obtuseness with regard to the First Amendment:
For many years, the United States has had a policy against spending aid money to fund Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which successive administrations have regarded as an obstacle to peace. Yet private organizations in the United States continue to raise tax-exempt contributions for the very activities that the government opposes.
But the tax laws do not depend, obviously, on whether a charitable organization supports or opposes the policies of the current U.S. administration. Groups like the Sierra Club and the ACLU have often promoted policies at odds with administration policies, but no one has suggested that they should therefore lose their tax-exempt status. And, of course, you can contribute to tax-exempt organizations like the Free Gaza Movement. But somehow the idea took hold that charities lending support to Israeli settlements are somehow different. This idea was promoted by pro-Palestinian groups, who encouraged IRS scrutiny of such organizations:
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) announced the [day after the Ignatius column appeared] that it would begin a campaign of filing legal complaints with the IRS and the Treasury Department to investigate groups “allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.”
ADC is closely tied to the Obama White House. The president recorded a video greeting to the group’s annual conference and sent two senior administration officials to attend.
The ADC announced in October 2009 that it had expanded its legal campaign against pro-Israel charities and was “working with a number of coalition partners, both nationally and internationally, in conducting this ongoing campaign.”
In July 2010, the New York Times chimed in with a long article titled Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank. The Times acknowledged that tax-exempt contributions to pro-Israel organizations are entirely legal, but advanced the idea that they are somehow suspect:
The use of charities to promote a foreign policy goal is neither new nor unique – Americans also take tax breaks in giving to pro-Palestinian groups. But the donations to the settler movement stand out because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government. The Internal Revenue Service declined to discuss donations for West Bank settlements. State Department officials would comment only generally, and on condition of anonymity.
“It’s a problem,” a senior State Department official said, adding, “It’s unhelpful to the efforts that we’re trying to make.”…
Palestinian officials expressed outrage at the tax breaks.
The IRS appears to have taken complaints about pro-Israel charities to heart. The Free Beacon reports:
One pro-Israel targets was HaYovel, which was featured prominently in the New York Times article. Six months after the article was published, the IRS audited the Nashville-based charity, which sends volunteers to work in vineyards across the Green Line.
“We bookend that [New York Times] story. We were the first [group mentioned]. They really kind of focused on us,” said HaYovel’s founder Tommy Waller. “Then six months later we had an audit.”…
Two other organizations – the American arm of an educational institution that operates across the Green Line and the American arm of a well-known Israeli charity that was mentioned in the New York Times article – say they were also audited.
Another organization that was criticized in multiple articles during 2009 and 2010 was audited last year. The organization, like many of the groups with whom the Free Beacon spoke, asked to remain anonymous out of fear of political retaliation and concern that exposure would harm fundraising efforts…
Concerns that the IRS was targeting pro-Israel groups were first raised publicly by Z Street, a pro-Israel organization run by Lori Lowenthal Marcus.
Z Street filed a lawsuit against the IRS in 2010, alleging its application for tax-exempt status was delayed because it disagreed with the Obama administration’s Israel policy.
The House committees that are looking into the IRS scandal should put this topic high on their agenda. Did President Obama or someone acting at his direction order the IRS to crack down on organizations that disagree with his Middle East policies? Was any similar scrutiny applied to pro-Palestinian groups? Or, perhaps, did IRS officials take their cue from the Washington Post, the New York Times and pro-Palestinian pressure groups and initiate discriminatory policies on their own initiative?
Possibly an investigation will show that audits and delays to which pro-Israel groups have been subjected are random, and not the result of political animus. But given the impressive record of lawlessness that the Obama administration has compiled, no one will take that conclusion for granted.
Could the situation at the IRS get any worse? McClatchy joins CBS News in postulating that the scandal may well expand to more than just applications for tax-exempt status. Both news agencies are starting to take complaints about predatory and punitive audits and other actions and put them into a very ugly pattern – and ask some very difficult questions of the Obama administration:
While the developing scandal over the targeting of conservatives by the tax agency has largely focused to date on its scrutiny of groups with words such as “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, these examples suggest the government was looking at a broader array of conservative groups and perhaps individuals. Their collective experiences at a minimum could spread skepticism about the fairness of a powerful agency that should be above reproach and at worst could point to a secret political vendetta within the government against conservatives.
The emerging stories from real people raise questions about whether the IRS scrutiny extended beyond applicants for tax-exempt status and whether individuals who donated to these tax-exempt organizations or to conservative causes also were targeted.
Former IRS leaders have apologized for inappropriate scrutiny of conservative organizations. They haven’t to date, however, divulged who developed the criteria, how they were developed or when and how they extended to groups associated with conservative causes that didn’t have “tea party,” “patriot” or similar catchwords in their names.
Widening congressional investigations and federal lawsuits are likely to reveal more about the scope and intent of the inappropriate treatment of conservative groups by the IRS. The House Ways and Means Committee plans a hearing Tuesday to allow victims to testify for the first time. In earlier hearings, one IRS official pleaded the Fifth to avoid answering questions.
McClatchy includes the case of Catherine Engelbrecht, which CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson co-reported yesterday. That case, of course, goes far beyond the IRS; Engelbrecht’s business got harassed by the FBI, ATF, and OSHA as well, which would mean coordination far above the Treasury Department. They also include the case of an anti-abortion group that was told they couldn’t picket Planned Parenthood locations if they wanted to keep their exemption, and a Nebraska veteran who got hassled in an IRS audit over his donations to his church once he began donating to conservative causes.
That may end up being the undercard next week, however. The House Oversight Committee will hold hearings over the next two weeks to take testimony from the low-level employees in Cincinnati that Lois Lerner and her former bosses Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller tried to turn into scapegoats:
House investigators will interview four Internal Revenue Service employees over the next two weeks, POLITICO has learned.
The House Ways and Means and Oversight committees hope the four front-line employees from the agency’s Cincinnati office will help lawmakers better understand how the IRS targeting of conservative groups first began.
A committee aide declined to name the employees to be interviewed. But House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said earlier this month he wants the IRS to make available five employees for transcribed interviews including John Shafer, a screening group manager, Gary Muthert, a screener in the tax-exempt division, Liz Hofacre, a former case coordinator from April to October 2010, and Joseph Herr, a former advocacy group manager.
What will be the likelihood that these five will fall on swords and swear that no one told them to target these groups? I’d put the odds on the low side for that outcome.
My organization was not the only conservative-linked political group or business that appears to have faced shady actions from IRS employees. ProPublica reported this week that the IRS handed over to them confidential documents of nine conservative organizations whose applications for non-profit status were still pending. Among them: Crossroads GPS, a key group backing Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Our case was particularly egregious because the IRS leak of confidential information fed directly into an ongoing political battle. For months before March 2012, the pro-gay marriage HRC had been demanding that my group, NOM, publicly identify its major donors, something that NOM and many other non-profits refuse to do. The reason is simple. In the past, gay marriage advocates have used such information to launch campaigns of intimidation against traditional marriage supporters…
At this stage, nobody is accusing the White House or the Obama re-election campaign of illegal activity. But there is a serious question about whether there was communication or possible collusion between the IRS and the HRC, and if there was, whether anyone at the White House or the Obama re-election campaign was involved.
It is imperative that congressional investigators get to the bottom of the issue. If the IRS can get away with leaking NOM’s confidential tax return to its chief political opponent, then no taxpayer is safe from political retribution by the federal government.
The retribution part has already been established. We need to know who ordered it, and how that information got networked.
As you probably know from interviews we’ve posted of Walid Shoebat, he has exposed the Islamic terrorist connections of Malik Obama, brother of President Obama, and how Malik Obama funds terrorism with his IRS-granted tax exempt organization, Barack H. Obama foundation, signed off on by none other than Lois Lerner.
President met with anti-Tea Party IRS union chief the day before agency targeted Tea Party.
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“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 Wednesday noon time of March 31st.
The White House lists the IRS union leader’s visit this way:
Kelley, Colleen Potus 03/31/2010 12:30
In White House language, “POTUS” stands for “President of the United States.”
The very next day after her White House meeting with the President, according to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General’s Report, IRS employees – the same employees who belong to the NTEU – set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America. The IG report wrote it up this way:
April 1-2, 2010: The new Acting Manager, Technical Unit, suggested the need for a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases. The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.
In short: the very day after the president of the quite publicly anti-Tea Party labor union – the union for IRS employees – met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.
The NTEU is the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies. Kelley herself is a 14-year IRS veteran agent. The union’s PAC endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.
Putting IRS employees in the position of actively financing anti-Tea Party candidates themselves, while in their official positions in the IRS blocking, auditing, or intimidating Tea Party and conservative groups around the country.
The IG report contained a timeline prepared by examining internal IRS e-mails. The IG report did not examine White House Visitor Logs, e-mails, or phone records relating to the relationship between the IRS union, the IRS, and the White House.
In fact, this record in the White House Visitors Log of a 12:30 Wednesday, March 31, 2010 meeting between President Obama and the IRS union’s Kelley was not unusual.
On yet another occasion, Kelley’s presence at the White House was followed shortly afterwards by the President issuing Executive Order 13522. A presidential directive that gave the anti-Tea Party NTEU – the IRS union – a greater role in the day-to-day operation of the IRS than it had already – which was considerable.
Kelley is recorded as visiting the White House over a year earlier, listed in this fashion:
Kelley, Colleen Potus/Flotus 12/03/2009 18:30
The inclusion of “FLOTUS” – First Lady Michelle Obama – and the 6:30 pm time of the December event on this entry in the Visitors Log indicates this was the White House Christmas Party held that evening and written up here in the Chicago Sun-Times. The Sun-Times focused on party guests from the President’s home state of Illinois and did not mention Kelley. Notably, the Illinois guests, who are reported to have attended the same party as Kelley, included what the paper described as four labor “activists”: Dennis Gannon of the Chicago Federation of Labor, Tom Balanoff of the Service Employees International Union, Henry Tamarin of UNITE, and Ron Powell of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Six days following Kelley’s attendance at the White House Christmas party with labor activists like herself, the President issued Executive Order 13522 (text found here, with an explanation here). The Executive Order, titled: “Creating Labor-Management Forums To Improve Delivery of Government Services” applied across the federal government and included the IRS. The directive was designed to:
Allow employees and unions to have pre-decisional involvement in all workplace matters…
However else this December 2009 Executive Order can be described, the directive was a serious grant of authority within the IRS to the powerful anti-Tea Party union. A union that by this time already had the clout to determine the rules for IRS employees, right down to who would be allowed a Blackberry or what size office the employee was entitled to. The same union that would shortly be doling out serious 2010 (and later 2012) campaign contributions to anti-Tea Party candidates with money supplied from IRS employees. The union, as noted last week here in this space, already has the authority to decide all manner of IRS matters, right down to who does and does not get a Blackberry.
It is the same union whose IRS employee-members were being urged in 2012 by Senate Democrats (Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, Max Baucus, and others) to target Tea Party and other conservative groups.
Which, as the IG records, they did.
Both Mr. Obama and the NTEU’s Kelley have been by turns evasive and tight-lipped about their roles in the blossoming IRS scandal.
Kelley refused to open up to the Washington Post. In an article titled ”IRS, union mum on employees held accountable in ‘sin’ of political targeting,” the Post quoted the following:
“NTEU is working to get the facts but does not have any specifics at this time. Moreover, IRS employees are not permitted to discuss taxpayer cases. We cannot comment further at this time,” NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said via e-mail.
A call to the NTEU office in Cincinnati resulted in a similar response: “We’ve been directed by national office. We have no comment.”
The President approached things in a more evasive manner.
Last Thursday at the President’s press conference with the Turkish prime minister, Julianna Goldman of Bloomberg News asked the following question:
“Mr. President, I want to ask you about the IRS. Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd? And when they did find out, do you think that you should have learned about it before you learned about it from news reports as you said last Friday? And also, are you opposed to there being a special counsel appointed to lead the Justice Department investigation?”
The President’s response?
“But let me make sure that I answer your specific question. I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press.”
Take note: Goldman’s question was:
“Can you assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions before your Counsel’s Office found out on April 22nd?”
The President evaded by answering:
“I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report…”
The question was not whether he knew about the IG report ahead of time. The question was whether he could “assure the American people that nobody in the White House knew about the agency’s actions.”
In response, the President ducked.
In other words, the IRS union chief went to the White House to meet personally with the president on March 31. The union already had Executive Order 13522 behind it, issued by the President barely three months earlier. An Executive Order directing that the IRS must “allow employees and unions to have pre-decisional involvement in all workplace matters…”.
The very next day after that March 31 meeting at the White House, the IRS, with the union involved in its decision-making, was setting up its “Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party.”
Which raises the famous question from Watergate: What did the President know and when did he know it?
While potentially explosive now, in fact the Obama Administration hadn’t been in office a month before Kelley was boasting of the IRS union’s influence in the White House.
In a February 15, 2009 interview given to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh is Kelley’s home town), there was this question from the PG reporter, with the now Washington-based Kelley boasting as below:
Q: Has the Obama staff been receptive?
A: Yes. We have worked with the transition team, given them suggestions; and throughout the campaign, President Obama talked about working with the federal employees and unions. He’s recognized the contributions federal employees make. I was just at the White House (Jan. 30) while he was signing some executive orders to undo some things the prior administration did.
Catch that?
The boast?
“I was just at the White House…”
Which is to say, the election of 2008, in which the union had endorsed Obama, was no sooner over than the head of the IRS union had “worked with the transition team” and “given them suggestions.” Literally ten days after the Obama January 20 inaugural in 2009 – January 30 the article notes – Kelley was boasting that “I was just at the White House while he (the President) was signing some executive orders to undo some things the prior administration did.”
And what did Kelley see as the IRS union’s relationship with the White House she had already visited ten days into the President’s first term?
Kelley responded candidly:
“We are looking for a return to what we used to call partnership. I don’t really care what it’s called. For me, it’s about collaboration.”
Catch those words?
Collaboration. Partnership.
In addition to Kelley’s three visits to see the President – in January of 2009, December of 2009, and March of 2010 – she is listed for three other visits, the contact names those of presidential aides:
“Kelley, Colleen Weiss, Margaret 11/04/2009 10:00”
“Kelley, Colleen Weiss, Margaret 12/01/2009 12:00”
“Kelley, Colleen Nelson, Greg 01/14/2010 13:40”
The obvious question instantly arises with the revelation that Kelley was meeting with the President personally – the day before the IRS kicked into high gear with its “Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party”.
Were the President of the United States and the President of the NTEU meeting in the White House at 12:30 on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 – and engaged in “collaboration” and “partnership”? A “collaboration” and “partnership” that was all about targeting the Tea Party?
And did that collaboration and partnership result in the IRS letting loose the hounds on the Tea Party and conservative groups – the very next day after the Obama-Kelley meeting?
To add to the administration’s IRS-NTEU woes is the fact that beyond the Inspector General, there is another IRS-connected agency in the Treasury Department: the IRS Oversight Board.
And on that board sits a presidential appointee named Robert M. Tobias. Tobias, oddly, was a Clinton appointee in 2005, confirmed by the Senate for a five-year term. He is still there. He is the longtime NTEU general counsel and Kelley’s predecessor as the union president. Here’s the statement, from the IRS Oversight Board, on all of this. It is headed:
IRS Oversight Board Deeply Troubled by Breakdown in IRS Process in Reviewing Tax-Exempt Applications.
There was no reference to the influence of the anti-Tea Party NTEU in the statement. Why would there be when the union’s ex-president sits on the Oversight Board itself?
Obama’s problem here is considerable.
By not forthrightly answering Goldman’s question, he seems to be evading the issue in the manner that brought so much trouble in the form of congressional investigations, special prosecutors, and impeachment threats to Presidents Nixon and Clinton, with Nixon being forced to resign the presidency and Clinton brought to a Senate trial.
The President’s too-clever-by half evasion added to Kelley’s silence leaves open the question of whether the union and the White House, not to mention the IRS Oversight Board, are collaborating – collaborating right now – on a cover-up.
Nixon looked the American people in the television eye and flatly lied about his personal involvement in the Watergate scandal, lies that came from a frantic attempt to conduct a cover-up.
Clinton looked the American people in the eye and famously wagged his finger as he lied that he “did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” In Clinton’s case this extended to lying to a federal grand jury.
For a good long while, the American people in fact believed both Nixon and Clinton. The stories are now legion of Nixon cabinet and staff believing their man, and Clinton’s cabinet and staff believing their man’s protestations of innocence as well.
Finally, in both cases, the truth was out.
As Washington and the country have long since twice-learned the hard way, the parsing of presidential words in cases like this, not to mention looking into the cameras and boldly lying on the prayer of getting away with the lie, always bodes ill for presidents. It leads inevitably to that simple question famously uttered by then-Tennessee GOP Senator Howard Baker and posed of Nixon at the Senate Watergate hearings: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
Twice in recent American history the answer to this question, once for Nixon and once for Clinton, has landed popular, powerful presidents in impeachment hot water. Ending Republican Nixon’s presidency altogether and coming close to doing the same with Democrat Clinton. Leaving the legacy of each permanently scarred.
The notion that the players in the IRS scandal did what they did to get past the 2012 election will only add to an Obama presidential reputation as borrowing the Nixon playbook on skirting scandal in a presidential election year.
Ironically re-casting the image of America’s first black president as the black Nixon.
With the examples of how Nixon and Clinton dodged, evaded, and lied, Obama’s non-answer to Juliana Goldman’s question at last week’s press conference comes in for much more scrutiny. Matched to the silence of Kelley it begins raising obvious questions. Such as:
• Did the President himself ever discuss the Tea Party with Kelley?
• Did the President ever communicate his thoughts on the Tea Party to Kelley — in any fashion other than a face-to-face conversation such as e-mail, text, or by phone?
• What was the subject of the Obama-Kelley March 31, 2010 meeting?
• Who was present at the Obama-Kelley March 31 meeting?
• Was the Tea Party or any other group opposing the President’s agenda discussed at the March 31 meeting, or before or after that meeting?
• Is the White House going to release any e-mails, text, or phone records that detail Kelley’s contacts with not only Mr. Obama but his staff?
• Will the IRS release all e-mail, text, or phone records between Kelley or any other leader of the NTEU with IRS employees?
• What role did Executive Order 13522 play in the IRS investigations of the Tea Party and all these other conservative groups?
Doubtless there are others, considerable others and the list of questions will grow.
Not to be lost sight of here is the role of the NTEU in raising money for Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles – the exact period when the IRS was busy going after the Tea Party and the others to curb any possible influence the groups could have in the elections of 2010 and 2012.
The NTEU, through its political action committee, raised $613,633 in the 2010 cycle, giving 98% of its contributions to anti-Tea Party Democrats. In 2012 the figure was $729,708, with 94% going to anti-Tea Party candidates. One NTEU candidate after another, as discussed last week in this space, campaigned vigorously against the Tea Party.
So the motivations here – defeating the Tea Party in 2010, and failing at that, making sure that the news of the metastasizing cancer in the IRS was kept quiet until after the 2012 presidential election was over – are clear.
What is particularly interesting here are the automatic assumptions of the mainstream media in all of this.
Like this “given” from the Washington Post’sDan Balz, bold print added for emphasis.
The most corrosive of the controversies is what happened at the IRS, which singled out tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny in their applications for tax-exempt status. That Obama knew nothing about it does little to quell concerns that one of the most-feared units in government was operating out of control.
But if in fact the President did know about it?
Here’s the Washington Post’s “Journolist” Ezra Klein:
The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions…
If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.
Exactly.
Which is why it will be a curious sight indeed to see the efforts the media will go to ignore/dismiss the tight, on-the-record connection between the President personally and a vociferously anti-Tea Party union. A union that has the literal run of the IRS – and whose union chief is recorded as having met with the President in the White House the day before the IRS launched “a Sensitive Case Report on the Tea Party cases.” A decision with which, according to the IG report: “The Determinations Unit Program Manager Agreed.” Check those words from Mr. Klein again:
If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal.
The question now is a simple one.
In 1974, “the smoking gun” was a tape recording that ended the Nixon presidency.
In 1998, the smoking gun was a blue dress – and it almost undid Bill Clinton’s White House.
Now the all-too-familiar pattern of scandal and its day-by-day drip-drip-drip nature has begun to set in. Newsmax is now quoting Washington attorney and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell as saying:
“There were nearly 100 groups across the country that got the very egregious set of letters from the IRS that were almost identical and they came from offices all over the country, so I know of at least 85 to 90, maybe more, organizations.”
Regular American all over the country are coming forward with their stories. Understanding the relationship between the Obama White House and the IRS union will be a must for congressional investigators.
President Obama is coming perilously closer to becoming the new Nixon. The next Bill Clinton.
And once again, as news of exactly what a president was doing in the Oval Office on a particular day and time goes public, yet again the old question becomes new.
What did the President know? And when did he know it?
The IRS scandal keeps getting closer and closer to the top of the White House food chain as Obama officials desperately try to spin their way out of mounting evidence and foul play. The Wall Street Journal is reporting President Obama’s top attorney knew about the IRS targeting weeks ago before news broke, but of course, Obama still didn’t know about it until he learned about it “from the news.”
The White House’s chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.
That disclosure has prompted a debate over whether the president should have been notified at that time.
In the week of April 22, the Office of the White House Counsel and its head, Kathryn Ruemmler, were told by Treasury Department attorneys that an inspector general’s report was nearing completion, the White House official said. In that conversation, Ms. Ruemmler learned that “a small number of line IRS employees had improperly scrutinized certain…organizations by using words like ‘tea party’ and ‘patriot,’ ” the official said.
President Barack Obama said last week he learned about the controversy at the same time as the public, on May 10, when an IRS official revealed it to a conference of lawyers.
The main question since this whole thing broke on May 10th is whether President Obama ordered the targeting, knew of targeting, or encouraged the targeting through his statements. Did this thing come from the top? Kim Strassel says of course it did.
Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.
President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.
But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.
Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.
In the days since the Internal Revenue Service first disclosed that it had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, new information has emerged from both the Treasury Inspector General’s report and congressional testimony Friday that calls into question key statements made by Lois G. Lerner, the IRS’s director of the exempt organizations division.
The clumsy way the IRS disclosed the issue as well as Lerner’s press briefing by phone were seen at the time as a public relations disaster. But even so, it is worth reviewing three key statements made by Lerner and comparing them to the facts that have since emerged.
“But between 2010 and 2012 we started seeing a very big uptick in the number of 501(c)(4) applications we were receiving and many of these organizations applying more than doubled, about 1500 in 2010 and over 3400 in 2012.”
Lerner made this comment while issuing a seemingly impromptu apology at an American Bar Association panel (it was later learned that this was a planted question – more on that below.) In her telling, the tax-exempt branch was simply overwhelmed by applications and so unfortunate shortcuts were taken.
But this claim of “more than doubled” appears to be a red herring. The targeting of groups began in early 2010, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United was announced on Jan. 21. The ruling paved the way for political groups to apply under a tax-exempt status known as 501(c)4. Most charities apply under 501(c)3, but under 501(c)4 nonprofit groups that engage in “social welfare” can also perform a limited amount of election activity.
At first glance, the Inspector General’s report appears to show that the number of 501(c)(4) applications actually went down that year, from 1,751 in 2009 to 1,735.
But it turns out that these are federal fiscal-year figures, meaning “2010” is actually Oct. 1, 2009 to Sept. 30, 2010, so the “2010” year includes more than three months before the Supreme Court decision was announced.
Astonishingly, despite Lerner’s public claim, an IRS spokeswoman was not able to provide the actual calendar year numbers. By allocating one-quarter of the fiscal year numbers to the prior year, we can get a very rough sense of the increase on a calendar-year basis.(Figures are rounded to avoid false precision; 2012 is not possible to calculate)
2009: 1745
2010: 1865
2011: 2540
In other words, while there was an increase in 2010, it was relatively small. The real jump did not come until 2011, long after the targeting of conservative groups had been implemented. Also, it appears Lerner significantly understated the number of applications in 2010 (“1500”) in order to make her claim of “more than doubled.”
“I think you guys were reading the paper as much as I was. So it was pretty much we started seeing information in the press that raised questions for us and we went back and took a look.”
Here, Lerner suggests that she only found out about this issue when news reports appeared in February and March 2012 about tea party groups complaining that they were being targeted. But the IG timeline shows this claim to be false.
According the IG, Lerner had a briefing on the issue on June 29, 2011, in which she was told about the BOLO (“Be On the Look Out”) criteria that included phrases such as “Tea Party” or “Patriots.” The report says she raised concerns about the wording and “instructed that the criteria be immediately revised.” She continued to be heavily involved in the issue in the months preceding the new reports, according to the timeline.
“I don’t believe anyone ever asked me that question before.”
This was Lerner’s excuse during the media call for why she had not publicly addressed the issue before.
But in congressional testimony Friday, former acting director Steven T. Miller said he had discussed with Lerner about arranging to make a statement at a May 10 conference sponsored by the American Bar Association, knowing that the IG report would soon be released.
Lerner then contacted a friend, Celia Roady, a tax attorney with the Washington firm Morgan Lewis, to ask a question about the targeting, according to a statement by Roady on Friday. (Roady had previously denied this was a planted question when asked directly by participants at the meeting.)
So Lerner was dissembling when she suggested that a simple well-aimed question prompted the disclosure.
In fact, just two days before the ABA conference, Lerner appeared before Congress and was asked about the status of investigations into 501(c)(4) companies by Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.). She provided a bland answer about a questionnaire on the IRS Web site, failing to take the opportunity to disclose the results of the probe. (The clip is embedded below, with the question coming at 5:09.) Small wonder that Crowley is now calling for her to resign, saying that Lerner lied to him.
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We gave the IRS the weekend to provide a response. A spokeswoman said they were not able to offer an explanation for Lerner’s remarks in time for our deadline.
The Pinocchio Test
In some ways, this is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10. But, taken together, it’s certainly enough to earn her four Pinocchios.
In what former Republican executive and activist Dylan Nonaka is calling a massive invasion of privacy that suggests a coordinated effort to target conservative groups, two IRS offices last year independently and simultaneously conducted costly audits and sought tea party-related training materials that they apparently believed could be tied to Nonaka.
Nonaka, who is the former executive director of the Hawaii Republican Party and a faculty member of the Arlington, Va.-based conservative activist training organization the Leadership Institute, is little-known outside of Hawaii. So when the now-infamous Cincinnati IRS office in 2012 demanded that the Hawaii Tea Party explain its “relationship with Dylan Nonaka” and the Leadership Institute, and “provide copies of the training material used by Dylan Nonaka” – all almost at the same time that the Baltimore IRS office separately began auditing the Leadership Institute and requesting its training materials – it wasn’t long before Nonaka became suspicious.
“It’s a little bit scary,” Nonaka told The Daily Caller, adding that the apparent coordination made it extremely unlikely that only two IRS officials were primarily behind the agency’s efforts to target conservative groups, as the IRS has claimed.
“To say that these were are a couple of rogue IRS agents, there’s just no way,” Nonaka said. “They obviously had to have done research into the state of Hawaii.”
BELOW – Four of the IRS’ questions for the Hawaii Tea Party. (Read the full request here)
The Hawaii Tea Party, based in Maui, was audited in 2011. But despite the IRS’ inquiries, Nonaka said he had only limited interaction with the group.
“I think I did one training with [the Hawaii Tea Party] through the Leadership Institute, when the Leadership Institute came to Hawaii,” Nonaka told TheDC.”I was never a member of the Hawaii Tea Party. I was never involved with them.”
Meanwhile, also in 2011, the Leadership Institute was under the IRS’ microscope.
“Our audit began June 1, 2011,” Leadership Institute spokeswoman Abigail Alger told TheDC. “We were asked for additional documentation in February 2012″ – just 19 days after the Hawaii Tea Party was asked for additional information.
“The Baltimore office asked for copies of our training material,” Alger said. “The questions ranged from turning over the content of our 2008 training materials, to giving them all the information on our 2008 interns. These were just college kids, but they asked who our 2008 interns went on to work for.”
“In May, the IRS had an internal workshop. Our audit was closed July of that year, with no evidence of wrongdoing,” Alger said. “By that point, we had spent $50,000 in legal fees.”
The Hawaii Tea Party was also cleared of wrongdoing by the Cincinnati office.
“It’s a pretty big invasion of privacy,” Nonaka said.
An Internal Revenue Service watchdog testified Friday that he told Obama administration officials in June that he was looking into allegations the IRS targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
The revelation by Inspector General Russell George came at the first congressional hearing on the IRS misconduct, which has generated a political firestorm since it was disclosed a week ago.
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George’s testimony represented the first evidence that officials in the Obama administration knew of the allegations as long as a year ago, during the presidential campaign.
Appearing Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee, George said he told the Treasury Department’s general counsel of his investigation on June 4, in a routine briefing of what his office was working on.
George said he did not disclose that he had concluded the targeting was improper.
But his testimony that knowledge of the allegations was not limited to the IRS is likely to fuel efforts by Republicans to link the scandal to the White House and congressional Democrats.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Friday that he was briefed in March that an investigation was underway of IRS screening of conservative groups – though he didn’t learn the substance of the findings until last week.
In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Lew said he had “a getting-to-know-you conversation” with George in mid-March, a couple of weeks after he was sworn in as treasury secretary, and the investigation “was one of the things he briefed me was ongoing.”
“I didn’t know any of the details of it until last Friday,” Lew said.
Lew also disclosed that he has ordered Danny Werfel, whom President Obama named Thursday to take over as acting IRS commissioner, to come up with an action plan within 30 days to address the handling of applications for tax-exempt status.
Obama also has said he first learned of the matter last Friday – when a Treasury Department official, Lois Lerner, revealed during an American Bar Association conference that IRS workers in a Cincinnati office had subjected groups with “Tea Party” or “patriots” in their names for extra scrutiny to determine if they should be tax exempt.
During yesterday’s testimony, Steven Miller, who was forced to resign this week week as the IRS acting commissioner, revealed that Lerner made her disclosure in response to a planted question at the bar association conference.
“We talked about what would be said and how we might do it,” he said.
The revelation irked lawmakers already angry the IRS never told them it had been improperly targeting conservative groups, despite numerous inquiries by members of Congress.
Reps. Joe Crowley (D-Queens) and Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) demanded Lerner resign or be fired.
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During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing today, Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., grilled outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller about the IRS targeting a pro-life group in Iowa.
“Their question, specifically asked from the IRS to the Coalition for Life of Iowa: ‘Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers,’” Schock declared.
“Would that be an inappropriate question to a 501 c3 applicant?” asked Schock. “The content of one’s prayers?”
“It pains me to say I can’t speak to that one either,” Miller replied.
After Schock pressed him further, Miller explained that although he couldn’t comment on the specific case, it would “surprise him” if that question was asked.
The report comes from the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm for religious liberty.
Coalition for Life of Iowa found itself in the IRS’s crosshairs when the group applied for tax exempt status in October 2008. Nearly ten months of interrogation about the group’s opposition to Planned Parenthood included a demand by a Ms. Richards from the IRS’ Cincinnati office unlawfully insisted that all board members sign a sworn declaration promising not to picket/protest Planned Parenthood. Further questioning by the IRS requested detailed information about the content of the group’s prayer meetings, educational seminars, and signs their members hold outside Planned Parenthood.
In House testimony Friday, former Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller explained that the IRS mistakes in handling applications for non-profit status from tea party groups were due, in large part, to a flood of applications following the Citizens United decision. Miller said the targeting was a botched attempt to centralize the process to account for the increased workload. There were fewer applications in 2010, when the IRS began targeting conservative groups, than the year before, however.
In 2009, before IRS began targeting tea party organizations, 1,751 groups applied for 501 (c)4 status. That number dropped in 2010 to 1,735. In fact, applications were down across all areas in the Tax Exempt division’s jurisdiction. So, they had more staff available for processing. While the number of applications did increase in 2011 and 2012, there was no increase in applications when the IRS began isolating tea party groups.
Moreover, the IRS reportedly abandoned the targeting in early 2012. It presumably had little trouble handling the increased number of applicants in advance of the 2012 election.
For whatever reason the IRS chose to target tea party organizations for special scrutiny, it wasn’t due to a flood of new applications.
The Obama IRS demanded that several Tea Party groups provide back-end access to their websites.
And, from reliable sources: This happened to several Tea Party groups!
The source has this in writing. It states they wanted access to everything the members had access to, which would be chats, email, contact information, etc. The group raised less than $600. She was targeted as early as October 2010.
Central Texas 912 President, Maria Acosta joined Kristina Ribali from FreedomWorks to discuss being singled out by the Feds.
The IRS asked for back-end access to the group’s website.
And this is a tax question?
Here is the latest creepy story of IRS harassment and abuse.
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UPDATE: The IRS also demanded the Richmond Tea Party in Virginia to provide access to the back-end of their website.
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued a statement to ProPublica saying that the agency’s release of pending confidential tax-exempt applications from conservative groups last year had been found to be “inadvertent and unintentional disclosures by the employees involved.”
In the statement, the IRS said the cases had been referred to and reviewed by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
“When these two issues were previously raised concerning the potential unauthorized disclosures of 501(c)(4) application information, we immediately referred these cases to TIGTA [Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration] for a comprehensive review,” the statement said. “In both instances, TIGTA found these instances to be inadvertent and unintentional disclosures by the employees involved.”
This is not my country. The Chicago thugocracy we have in the White House is every bit what Michelle Malkin has always said it was, using government to target and oppress political ‘enemies’.
In this segment, Frank Vandersloot tells BillO that after he gave Romney one million to help his campaign, he was then targeted by the Obama campaign on their official website along with seven others. Shortly after that he received a letter from the IRS saying he would be audited. And then on top of that, he also had the Labor Dept. come calling because they wanted to look at his books.
The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.
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According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.
“This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power by several Internal Revenue Service agents,” the complaint reads. “No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search. IT personnel at the scene, a HIPPA facility warning on the building and the IT portion of the searched premises, and the company executives each warned the IRS agents of these privileged records,” it continued.
According to the case, the IRS agents had a search warrant for financial data pertaining to a former employee of the John Doe company, however, “it did not authorize any seizure of any healthcare or medical record of any persons, least of all third parties completely unrelated to the matter,” the complaint read.
The class action lawsuit against the IRS seeks $25,000 in compensatory damages “per violation per individual” in addition to punitive damages for constitutional violations. Thus, compensatory damages could start at a minimum of $250 billion.
The Internal Revenue Service already has confessed to targeting and trying to injure tea party, Constitution and patriot organizations, by demanding answers to arbitrary questions and delaying their applications for a tax status so they could operate.
Now WND has learned that the IRS also put an organization in its bull’s-eye that wanted to do nothing more than share its pro-life message with churches.
Cherish Life Ministries was created to be a non-profit under the IRS 501(c)3 provision so that churches would feel comfortable working together…
…Shinn said the IRS contacted him regarding his application for nonprofit status, and was told he didn’t qualify.
“The representative was telling me I had to provide information on all aspects of abortion, I couldn’t just educate the church from the pro-life perspective,” he said. “Every time I pressed her on this issue and asked her to clarify her position, she would state that it wasn’t what she was saying, and then, she would repeat it almost the same way.”
The IRS agent did not respond to a WND request for comment on the ministry’s position.
But Shinn said he was accused of setting up a political organization.
“I asked her why she said we were political organization and she said it was because we had said in our application that we did less than 5 percent political activity. I explained to her that this was what was stated in the application and all we were doing was acknowledging that we were doing less than 5 percent political activity,” he said.
When a Tennessee lawyer asked the IRS for tax-exempt status for a mentoring group that trained high school and college students about conservative political philosophy, the agency responded with a list of 95 questions in 31 parts, including an ultimatum for a list of everyone the group had trained, or planned to train.
‘Provide details regarding all training you have provided or will provide,’ the IRS demanded. ‘Indicate who has received or will receive the training and submit copies of the training material.’
‘Can you imagine my responsibility to parents if I disclosed the names of their children to the IRS?’ he asked MailOnline.
It’s ‘an impossible question to answer fully and truthfully,’ he said, ‘without disclosing the names of anyone I ever taught, or would ever teach, including students.’
Like the leaders of many tea party-affiliated groups whose tax-exemption applications have become the subject of angry complaints, Kookogey called the IRS’s inquisition an overreach, ‘especially considering that my organization mentors high school and college students.’
It ‘should send chills through your spine,’ he told MailOnline, ‘that the government would ask me to identify those I teach, and to provide details of what I teach them.’
The 13-month delay, while burdensome, was far shorter than those some other groups endured. According to a report released late Tuesday by the IRS’s Office of Inspector General, the average delay at one point was 574 days.
But Kookogey said a $30,000 grant was canceled as a result of the IRS’s months-long radio silence, when he couldn’t tell his donor that Linchpins had earned its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
That money would have made a significant difference to the group, judging from its public filings in Tennessee. In 2011, Linchpins of Liberty reported collecting just $3,460 in contributions, and spending $7,328 on its programs.
The group’s online materials refer to it as ‘an American leadership development enterprise.’ Its stated purpose is to mentor high school and college students, placing an emphasis on Western civilization and an old-style core curriculum – what previous generations called the ‘great books.’
‘Our ideas are opposed to the Obama administration, but we’re not tea party,’ Kookogey told The Tennessean.
It’s that lack of a tea party connection, he said, that makes his predicament so maddening.
He told MailOnline that nothing about his group – ‘not our name or our description or our website, or anything’ – should have placed it among the organizations the IRS chose to scrutinize closely by using key words like ‘tea party,’ ’9/12,’ and ‘patriots’ as qualifiers.
‘I’m not a Tea Party group. I’m not a Patriot group by name’ he told NewsChannel 5 in Nashville.
‘We mentor high school and college students in conservative political philosophy. It’s a one on one relationship.’
Kookogey summed it up in an interview with MailOnline as ‘unethical, unconstitutional, and unfair,’ later asserting in an email that ‘[w]e were targeted by the IRS based on our political beliefs and the content of our speech.’
The American Center for Law and Justice, which represents 27 conservative groups including Linchpins of Liberty, is planning to file suit against the IRS.
Jay Sekulow, that organization’s chief counsel, wrote on Tuesday that ‘the IRS abuse is ongoing.’
‘Even though the IRS admitted wrongdoing,’ Sekulow wrote in an essay for FoxNews.com, even though the Inspector General’s report indicates that wrongdoing was widespread, the IRS still hasn’t withdrawn its overbroad and unconstitutional questions, and it still hasn’t granted the exemptions it should grant, despite the fact that some applications have been pending for more than two years.’
The Inspector General’s report includes a list of ‘the seven questions’ the IRS asked right-wing groups that were later ‘identified as being unnecessary.’
Its request for the list of students trained by Linchpins of Liberty was not among them.
The report also largely exonerates political appointees in the Treasury Department and at the top of the IRS, instead blaming mid-level bureaucrats for providing ‘ineffective management’ and using ‘inappropriate criteria’ to red-flag conservative groups.
It makes no mention of anyone in the White House directing the IRS to play political favorites. But The Washington Post has reported that ‘senior IRS officials’ in Washington, D.C. were notified of the practice in 2011.
In December of that year, Kookogey says, he called the IRS’s nonprofit evaluation arm in Cincinnati, Ohio, to find out why his group’s application had taken so long.
The agent on the other end of the line, he said, told him, ‘We are waiting on guidance from our superiors as to your organization and similar organizations.’
Attorney General Eric Holder has said that he ordered the FBI to initiate a criminal probe on Friday, when he learned about the IRS’s practices.
The IRS’s actions, he said, were, ‘certainly outrageous and unacceptable, but we are examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations.’
Holder is expected to testify in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday in Washington. On Friday the House Ways and Means Committee will hear testimony from acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller and Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George.
Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has called for Miller to lose his job.
‘At a bare minimum, those involved with this deeply offensive use of government power have committed a violation of the public trust that has already had a profoundly chilling effect on free speech,’ Rubio wrote Monday in a letter to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. ‘Such behavior cannot be excused with a simple apology.’
‘It is clear the IRS cannot operate with even a shred of the American people’s confidence under the current leadership,’ Rubio continued. ‘Therefore, I strongly urge that you and President Obama demand the IRS Commissioner’s resignation, effective immediately.’
On Friday, Sekulow demanded that the IRS immediately approve the tax-exempt status applications of his organization’s 10 legal clients, including Linchpins of Liberty, that are still waiting. He issued the agency an ultimatum: Grant the requests by noon on May 17, or prepare to fight in court.
‘We are demanding that the IRS grant our remaining clients tax-exempt status immediately,’ Sekulow said in a statement. ‘If that does not occur by Friday, we will advise our clients of their right to sue the IRS for the redress of their grievances.’
Lois Lerner, the senior executive in charge of the IRS tax exemption department and the person at the center of the exploding scandal over the IRS targeting conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel non-profits, has been given $42,531 in bonuses since 2009.
That figure was included in data provided by the IRS in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Examiner. Lerner is director of the IRS exempt organizations division, which processes and approves or denies applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Lerner received $17,220 for 2009, $24,691 for 2010 and $10,620 for 2011, the most recent year for which the I(RS said data was available.
The Treasury Inspector General’s damaging report on the IRS-Tea Party scandal has destroyed the administration’s claim that low-level workers in a Cincinnati, Ohio office are to blame, revealing that 10 of 12 agency offices referenced in the affair are in Washington.
The report repeatedly references actions taken by the Washington-based Exempt Organizations unit and guidance specialists also in Washington. What’s more, the report was researched in the Exempt Organizations offices and the Cincinnati-based Determinations Units, which has received the blame for targeting Tea Party groups.
The audit, for example, probes into how the Cincinnati-based Determinations Unit developed its plan to pay attention to groups with the words “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” and other phrases used by anti-Obama groups during the 2010 election.
Washington-based offices denied involvement, but did change the “criteria” for groups to target in July 2011. Instead of looking for “Tea Party” groups seeking tax exempt status to investigate, the criteria was broadened to “political, lobbying or [general] advocacy.”
However, “the team of specialists subsequently changed the criteria in January 2012″ back, apparently without telling their bosses. “Specialists” are both Washington- and Ohio- based.
Popular talk radio host Mark Levin, one of the first to post the IG report online, suggested that the House committees investigating the scandal use the IG’s “High-Level Organization Chart of Offices Referenced in this Report” on page 29 in picking who should testify. He suggested that the heads of all 12 be called to testify.
In the midst of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal, individuals and groups, alike, are continuing to come forward with ever-startling allegations. On Wednesday, Dr. Anne Hendershott, a devout Catholic and a noted sociologist, professor and author, exclusively told TheBlaze that she believes she may have been one of the IRS’s targets.
According to Hendershott, the IRS audited her in 2010 and demanded to know who was paying her and “what their politics were.”
It all started with a phone call she received at her home in May of that year – a call during which Hendershott was told she would be audited. A letter that followed on May 19, 2010 solidified the IRS’s request to meet her in person two months later in July. While IRS investigations are certainly not uncommon occurrences, the professor believes that the situation surrounding hers was more-than-curious.
“The IRS calls my house and says… ‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to be auditing your business’ and I said ‘My businesses?’ and he said, ‘You know the expenses you take off for writing,” the academic recalls.
Hendershott was surprised she was being audited on business grounds considering she does not operate an entrepreneurial endeavor in the traditional sense. In addition to her academic work, she told TheBlaze that she occasionally freelances for Catholic outlets and for the Wall Street Journal. But can this really be considered “business” activity?
“I don’t make a lot of money from writing. In fact most years I don’t show a profit,” she told TheBlaze.
Hendershott said some of the outlets and organizations she has written for haven’t paid her a cent.
But the circumstances surrounding the irregular nature of the experience don’t end there. Hendershott noted it was particularly surprising that she, alone, was audited. Her husband, who brings in the vast majority of the family’s income, was not included in the IRS’s inquiry – even though the Hendershotts always files jointly.
So when the agent explained that she would need to come alone and in person to discuss her “business” activity in July of 2010, the professor was perplexed.
“[The IRS agent] didn’t even let me decide when it would be good for me… He didn’t want my husband to come,” she said of the meeting, which was held at an IRS office in New Haven, Connecticut.
The process was a grueling one, including many questions that Hendershott felt were political in nature. Numerous records were requested before the in-person meeting, as well as during and after.
“Every question had to do with bank deposits we made. Every single question,” she said. “What is this money? And I didn’t know a lot of it. We had to go to our bank and get deposits back. We had to get records showing where the money came from.”
While asking about the deposits, the agent wanted to know if the monies came from groups and, if so, what the organizations’ politics were.
The mention of groups, Hendershott notes, is particularly interesting, as she had been writing for numerous Catholic outlets and organizations at the time. In addition to Catholic World Report and the Catholic Advocate, she also penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. Many of these writings were critical of President Barack Obama and his policies.
And the plot thickens. Among the organizations she targeted in her writings were progressive groups highly supportive of Democratic causes, including: Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Catholics United, and Catholic Democrats.
At the time, one of the founders of Catholics United, Chris Korzen, had become a target of her work, as she exposed, in her view, his true leftist agenda and some of the complicated theological stances the left-of-center organizations he associated with were taking. Plus, there were alleged financial ties with billionaire liberal George Soros. Here’s just two paragraphs from an article she wrote in March 2010, just months before her meeting with IRS officials:
On its website, Catholics United describes itself as a 501(c) (4) non-profit organization – eligible to accept donations. But, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good emerged in 2005 as a kind of sister organization to Catholics United. A 501(c) (3) organization, donors can claim a deduction against personal income tax when they donate money to Catholics in Alliance. Reviewing the 2007 IRS 990 forms for both Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United raises some questions, because Chris Korzen is listed as having received $84,821 in compensation for 40 hours per week from Catholics in Alliance on the group’s 990 Form – even though the Catholics United website claimed he was the director there during the same time period. [...]
Despite their inability to engage in extensive lobbying, Catholics in Alliance has been extremely successful in attracting large donors. Never a friend to the Catholic Church, George Soros, one of the earliest donors, contributed $50,000 to Catholics in Alliance in 2005 and another $100,000 in 2006 through his Open Society Institute. Likewise, Smith Bagley, a major Democratic donor and fundraiser, whose wife, Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, is Chairman of the Board of Catholics in Alliance, came close to matching Soros with grants from his family’s Arca Foundation. With a long history of supporting progressive organizations like ACORN, the Gamaliel Foundation, People for the American Way, and Planned Parenthood, Arca contributed $50,000 to Catholics in Alliance in 2007 and another $75,000 in 2008.
Hendershott can’t help but wonder if her writings against progressive groups played a role in her audit. It’s obvious that before she was notified by the IRS she was commenting regularly about matters of faith and politics and, in particular, Obamacare. While she doesn’t have proof that the IRS investigation was political in nature, she has strong suspicions that it was.
“I started writing articles like crazy saying these are fake Catholic groups,” she said of the aforementioned organizations, noting that Korzen would often target her work and rail against her assertions.
Hendershott noted that the progressive leader once called into a radio show she appeared on to challenge her contention that he had accepted Soros money.
“I had the tax return in front of me and read off the amounts that Chris Korzen was getting paid from Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good – a Soros supported fake Catholic group,” she told TheBlaze, noting that, through Catholics in Alliance, he had received $85,000.
While Korzen denied this on the air, Hendershott read from the 990 form in an effort to prove he wasn’t telling the truth. This, she believes, may have sparked – or played a role – in spawning the IRS audit.
“He was getting paid by one organization and working for another,” the professor said of Korzen. ”The IRS should have gone after them.”
Her writings for the Catholic Advocate soon ceased because, Hendershott admits, the IRS audit silenced her. If her suspicions are true, this may have been its chilling intention.
“I haven’t written for them since the audit, because I was so scared,” she said (records show her last article for the organization was on July 10, 2010 – the same month the IRS audit unfolded).
So far, she has only shared her story with friends and those close to her, but in light of the recent IRS scandal, she has decided to speak out.
“It was clear they didn’t like me criticizing the people who helped pass Obamacare,” she said of the audit,” later adding, ”The IRS is very frightening.”
In addition to creating stress and fear, Hendershott said that the experience came at a great emotional and financial expense for the family, noting that even after the audit the government sought more information from her.
“It was like they just couldn’t find what they wanted because they wanted more and more and more,” she said.
In March of 2012 Democratic Senators sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service demanding that Tea Party groups get extra scrutiny (harassment). The Democrats even threatened legislative action if the IRS did not act.
A group of seven Senate Democrats urged the Internal Revenue Service on Monday to impose a strict cap on the amount of political spending by tax-exempt, nonprofit groups.
The senators said the lack of clarity in the IRS rules has allowed political groups to improperly claim 501(c)4 status and may even be allowing donors to these groups to wrongly claim tax deductions for their contributions. The senators promised legislation if the IRS failed to act to fix these problems.
“We urge the IRS to take these steps immediately to prevent abuse of the tax code by political groups focused on federal election activities. But if the IRS is unable to issue administrative guidance in this area then we plan to introduce legislation to accomplish these important changes,” the senators wrote.
The letter was signed by Senators Charles E. Schumer, Michael Bennet, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall, Jeanne Shaheen and Al Franken. It follows an earlier letter, sent to the IRS by the same of group of senators last month, that also urged the IRS to better enforce rules pertaining to 501(c)4 organizations.
A copy of the letter is here.
This week Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana vowed congressional hearings and called the IRS actions “an outrageous abuse of power.” But, over the last three years, Democratic senators repeatedly and publicly pressured the IRS to engage in the very activities that they are only now condemning today.
UPDATE: Inspector General: The IRS targeted EVERY group with Tea Party in its name.
The owner of a Bethel Park music store shot and killed an intruder who had attacked the owner’s wife inside their store late this morning.
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Bethel Park police Chief John Mackey said Alfred Armen, owner of Armen’s House of Music at 5920 Library Road, jumped to his wife’s defense as she was being clubbed by a man who, just minutes earlier, had entered the store to browse.
The man stayed in the store for two or three minutes, went outside to his car, and came back in with some type of wooden club, Chief Mackey said.
He attacked Sylvia Armen, clubbing her on the head, and Mr. Armen came to her defense, the chief said.
The man then attacked him with the club, and Mr. Armen pulled a revolver and shot him dead, Chief Mackey said.
Allegheny County homicide detectives were assisting Bethel Park police with the investigation.
Chief Mackey said the Armens were being treated at UPMC Mercy Hospital for injuries they received in the attack.
The chief said robbery appeared not to be the motive in the attacks. He said he didn’t know whether the Armens knew the man, described only as white and in his early 30s.
The Allegheny County medical examiner’s office removed the body from the store about 4 p.m.
The store sells instruments and offers music lessons, according to its Facebook page.
A father who was robbed while eating with his family took out his own gun and shot the suspect, Miami Police said.
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It happened at about 1 p.m. Friday at the Burger King restaurant at Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast 17th Street, police said.
The robber walked in, flashed his gun to the family, demanded their valuables, then headed for the door, according to police.
The father, fearing for his life, took out his gun and shot the suspect in the leg as he stood outside the restaurant, police said.
The suspect, 36-year-old Travis Harris, jumped into a getaway Ford F-150 and took off, police said.
Police said they found him and the driver, 38-year-old Ramon Smalls, a few blocks away thanks to a Good Samaritan who followed them and alerted police. The two suspects were taken into custody at a gas station at Northeast 2nd Avenue and 26th Street after they apparently ran out of fuel, police added.
The Burger King incident followed an earlier incident in which the duo teamed up to rob a young woman of her iPhone 4S at 2200 NE 4th Ave. at about 10:15 a.m., with Smalls driving the truck as they fled, police said. Her phone was later found inside the truck, police added.
Harris was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma to be treated for his gunshot wound, and faces three counts of armed robbery with a firearm, police said.
Smalls faces one count of strongarm robbery for the morning incident, and possible pending charges for the afternoon incident, police said.
It was not immediately known whether Harris or Smalls have attorneys.
The father who fired his gun is not being charged, police said.
A dramatic 911 call recorded a Oklahoma man’s confrontation with an intruder who broke into his Ponca City home early Thursday morning. The homeowner ended up shooting the intruder several times when police didn’t arrive in time.
The roughly five minute 911 call begins frantically enough: “You better get these (expletive) here or they will die,” the man told a 911 dispatcher.
The homeowner stayed on the line with 911 as he waited for the police to arrive. However, the police didn’t arrive before the intruder found his way into the house.
“They’re beating on my front door right now,” he said.
“Okay, we’ve got them on the way,” the dispatcher replied.
“They better hurry up, because I will blow these (expletive) away.”
A short time later, the home intruder managed to gain entry into the home. It was at this point that the homeowner fired several shots at the suspect.
“I just put three rounds in his ass,” he informed the dispatcher.
Ponca City Police say the incident took place at around 4:30 a.m. Thursday. The intruder was transported to a nearby hospital by ambulance and then airlifted to another Tulsa hospital. His condition was unknown Friday and police have not identified the suspect.
“The case is under investigation. Ponca City Police say once they complete the investigation the case will be turned over to the DA,” KOKH-TV reports.
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Dave C
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