A series of letters suggests that senior IRS official Lois Lerner was directly involved in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups as recently as April 2012, more than nine months after she first learned of the activity.
Lerner, the director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Washington, D.C., signed cover letters to 15 conservative organizations currently represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) between in March and April of 2012. The letters, such as this one sent to the Ohio Liberty Council on March 16, 2012, informed the groups applying for tax-exempt status that the IRS was “unable to make a final determination on your exempt status without additional information,” and included a list of detailed questions of the kind that a Treasury inspector general’s audit found to be inappropriate. Some of the groups to which Lerner sent letters are still awaiting approval.
Lerner has denied involvement in the targeting, which she has blamed on a few “front-line people” in the agency’s Cincinnati field office. “I have not done anything wrong,” she told members of the House oversight committee on Wednesday. However, she then refused to answer any questions, citing protection under the Fifth Amendment. She has since been placed on (paid) administrative leave, and the committee may call her to testify again.
“One thing is clear: this correspondence shows [Lerner’s] direct involvement in the scheme,” wrote Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the ACLJ. “Further, sending a letter from the top person in the IRS Exempt Organization division to a small Tea Party group also underscores the intimidation used in this targeting ploy.”
So the IRS was conducting it’s own investigation and yet the IRS commissioner testified before Congress that there was nothing going on when he was asked about it? Wow. I have a feeling that when the information dam finally breaks on the IRS, it’s going to be ugly.
DAILY MAIL – Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee’s chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.
But despite the IRS recognizing in May 2012 that its employees were treating right-wing groups differently from other organizations, Issa said, IRS personnel withheld those conclusions from legislators.
‘Just yesterday the committee interviewed Holly Paz, the director of exempt organizations, rulings and agreements, division of the IRS,’ Issa said. ‘While a tremendous amount of attention is centered about the Inspector General’s report, or investigation, the committee has learned from Ms. Paz that she in fact participated in an IRS internal investigation that concluded in May of 2012 – May 3 of 2012 – and found essentially the same thing that Mr. George found more than a year later.’
‘Think about it,’ he continued: ‘For more than a year, the IRS knew that it had inappropriately targeted groups of Americans based on their political beliefs, and without mentioning it, and in fact without honestly answering questions that were the result of this internal investigation.’
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….MORE IMAGES TO BE POSTED AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE
PROTEST THE CORRUPTION – PROTEST THE CRIMINAL OBAMA IRS
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Thanks to Barack Obama the Tea Party is once again outraged and motivated.
The Tea Party Patriots on behalf of Tea Party, Patriot groups, 9/12, liberty activists, and the American people, we are calling for anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at noon local time.
UPDATE: Here’s more info on the St. Louis area protest:
BUILDING: TOWN & COUNTRY
ADDRESS: 1122 T & C COMMONS
CITY: CHESTERFIELD
STATE: MO
ZIPCODE: 63017
BUILDING_T: IRS OFFICE
FULL ADDRESS: 1122 T & C COMMONS, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63017
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Click HERE to view PICTURES of the various protests.
The World’s Least Credible Blogger™ has been tying himself into laughable knots of hilarious self-contradiction lately, attempting to defend President Wiretap Benghazi Failure against . . . Well, facts.
Facts have always been optional with Obama, who has relied on his media-generated force field to survive all previous encounters with unfortunate reality. Obama’s fawning fanboy Charles Johnson fancies himself an apostle of Scientific Truth (and imagines his antagonists are all ignorant bigots), but the relentless drip, drip, drip of scandalous facts the past few days have been quite hard on CJ’s self-image.
So, Johnson falls back on the deny, deny, deny tactic. It does not matter that Conservative groups WERE targeted, or that the IRS ADMMITED that they targeted Conservative groups, not to Johnson. Stacy gets in one more barb at CJ while directing us to a list of his recent failures
The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.
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Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.
Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.
Grant announced today that he would retire June 3, despite being appointed as commissioner of the tax-exempt office May 8, a week ago.
Outraged Bay State Democrats are blasting President Obama for exhibiting a Nixonian abuse of power after the stunning news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeted conservative groups – new scandals emerging against the backdrop of heightened Benghazi criticism.
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“There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay,” U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) said about the IRS scandal. “Not only is it bad government and bad to society, it is horrendous politics. The worst thing you can do is give your opponent an easy hammer with which to hit you.”
“It doesn’t seem to be a couple rogue employees. This appeared to be a systemic issue,” said U.S. Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-South Boston), who wants to investigate the matter as a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee already has scheduled a hearing on the issue for this week, Lynch said, adding, “No American should find themselves the target of the IRS or any other federal organization because of their political beliefs.”
Both U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Malden) and the GOP’s Gabriel Gomez, rivals in the Senate special election, slammed the administration’s actions, as new reports emerged yesterday that the Department of Justice seized two months’ worth of phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors. Gomez called it “another troubling example of overzealous federal agencies restricting our First Amendment rights.”
Markey said in a statement: “The Justice Department has many questions it now must answer as to why this sweeping request for information was ever necessary. As we work to prevent terrorist attacks against our country, we must continue to respect our laws and uphold our constitutional rights, including freedom of the press.”
Obama yesterday called the IRS actions “outrageous” if true, saying those responsible must be held “fully accountable.”
“I’ve got no patience with it,” he added. “I will not tolerate it, and we will find out exactly what happened.”
The Treasury Department apologized Friday for “inappropriate” targeting of groups seeking tax-exempt status with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names, and others that stated their purpose was to question government spending or power. The IRS initially blamed low-level employees, but emails have since shown top officials knew as early as 2011.
“I’m old enough to remember Watergate, and I’m not saying this is another Watergate, but when the IRS is involved, it really hits home,” said U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.). The references to the Nixon administration recalled the massive abuse of power scandals such as the bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon aides also directed so-called “plumbers” to plug leaks – operatives digging up dirt on people such as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Nixon’s aides maintained a so-called “enemies list,” with the intent of turning the IRS on them. A congressional investigation later found undue IRS audits were not carried out under Nixon.
Democratic Montana Senator Max Baucus is leading an investigation into why the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny despite the fact that Baucus once wrote a letter urging the IRS to do exactly that.
Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will head the committee’s investigation into the IRS, which apologized Friday for targeting groups with the terms “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their titles for extra scrutiny of their nonprofit status as early as 2011.
However, Baucus once wrote a letter requesting that the IRS engage in that very conduct.
“With hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in election contests by tax-exempt entities, it is time to take a fresh look at current practices and how they comport with the Internal Revenue Code’s rules for nonprofits,” Baucus wrote in the letter.
“I request that you and your agency survey major 501(c)(4), (c)(5) and (c)(6) organizations involved in political campaign activity to examine whether they are operated for the organization’s intended tax exempt purpose and to ensure that political campaign activity is not the organization’s primary activity,” Baucus wrote in the letter.
“The tax exemption given to non-profit organizations comes with a responsibility to serve the public interest and Congress has an obligation to exercise the vigorous oversight necessary to ensure they do,” Baucus said in a 2010 statement accompanying his letter.
Though Baucus identified 501 (c) (5) groups – or labor unions – as worthy of investigation, the only organizations cited in his request were conservative, pro-Republican groups.
Baucus specifically named Americans for Job Security, which is described as a “pro-Republican organization,” as a specific target for the IRS to investigate.
Crossroads GPS, co-founded by Karl Rove, and American Action Network, chaired by former Republican senator Norm Coleman, were also cited in press coverage related to Baucus’ letter as pro-Republican groups helping to elect GOP congressional candidates in 2010.
Those organizations appeared in a September 16, 2010 TIME article by writer Michael Crowley titled, “The New GOP Money Stampede.” Baucus cited that piece in his letter to the IRS.
Whatever the fallout might be from such a conflict of interest, Baucus won’t be around too much longer to deal with it.
He’s already announced his retirement from the Senate, and won’t run for re-election in 2014.
A Baucus spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.
From the White House near the height of the mid-term campaign in 2010:
Remarks by the President at a DNC Finance Event in Austin, Texas
August 09, 2010
Four Seasons Hotel, Austin, Texas
THE PRESIDENT: …Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.
A Supreme Court decision [Citizens United] allowed this to happen. And we tried to fix it, just by saying disclose what’s going on, and making sure that foreign companies can’t influence our elections. Seemed pretty straightforward. The other side said no.
This is the same blatant lie that Supreme Court Justice Alito shook his head about and said ‘no,’ during Obama’s State Of The Union address in January 2010. Citizens United does not allow foreigners to contribute to campaigns.
They don’t want you to know who the Americans for Prosperity are, because they’re thinking about the next election. But we’ve got to think about future generations. We’ve got to make sure that we’re fighting for reform. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t have a corporate takeover of our democracy…
This is nothing short of Obama’s ‘dog-whistle’ to his his supporters at the IRS. After all, Obama doesn’t need to give his bureaucrats a direct, written (and therefore traceable) order.
He merely has to express his displeasure with some group and his lackeys will know what they have to do. And we now know how much these ‘low level workers’ have done for his administration over the years. (Fast & Furious, Benghazi, the releasing of illegal alien criminals.)
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But now we fast forward to yesterday, where Obama expressed outrage that the IRS would be seeking the names of donors to conservative groups. In fact, Obama even denied knowing that the IRS was even interested in such things until he read about it in the papers back on Friday. A claim even his spokes-flack, Jay Carney, undercut.
Carney: White House lawyers knew of IRS investigation in April
By Justin Sink | May 13, 2013
Press secretary Jay Carney acknowledged Monday that the White House was informed in April that the Treasury Department’s Inspector General was investigating the IRS’s Cincinnati field office, which is accused of targeting conservative political groups for extra scrutiny.
“My understanding is that the White House Counsel’s Office was alerted in the week of April 22 of this year, only about the fact that the IG was finishing a review about matters involving the office in Cincinnati,” Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One…
President Obama said earlier in the day that he first heard about the allegations that the IRS had specifically targeted Tea Party groups last week. “I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday,” Obama told reporters at a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
While Carney insisted that nobody in the White House knew of the specific allegations of improper targeting, the news nevertheless drew fresh questions from Republican critics.
Why only Republican critics? Doesn’t the news media object to be lied to? (This is a rhetorical question.)
“Who else in the White House knew about the IRS scandal but didn’t tell the president?” tweeted Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)…
In his press conference Monday, the president pledged to hold accountable those responsible. “I can tell you that if you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions,” Obama said.
So is he going to hold himself accountable? (This is another rhetorical question.)
The IRS scandal is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that must be terrifying to an Administration already dealing with fallout from the uncovering of their Libya lies and the knowledge that the Department of Justice seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters. Tuesday morning, ABC News revealed what might have been the political motivation behind the IRS’s decision to target Tea party groups – to ensure they weren’t as effective in 2012 as they were in 2010.
In the 2010 midterms, even the media that despises the Tea Party will admit that the nationwide grassroots movement was a major factor behind record GOP electoral gains. By the time the smoke cleared, Obama had lost the House and his filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate.
Is it just a coincidence that it was only after these 2010 victories that the IRS decided to single out Tea Party groups for special scrutiny? And not just scrutiny, but the kind of scrutiny that bogged these groups down with paperwork and restricted their political activities.
The Narrative some in the media, like JournOlist founder Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, are desperate to spin is that this was a single Midwest IRS office concerned with political groups abusing a new tax exempt status. The isolation of Tea Parties was merely “discriminatory.”
Already this morning, though, Klein’s spin is falling apart. Chris Good of ABC News reports that Jennifer Stefano of Philadelphia was so intimidate by the IRS that she closed her Tea Party down:
“In the documents that were sent to me, if you did not tell the whole truth by not putting all your personal information out there by Facebook, by Twitter, of your personal relationship with candidates and parties… it could be considered perjury and perjury carried jail time,” Stefano, 39, told ABC News.
“That was frightening and that’s why I shut it down. I shut my group down.”
Tom Zawistowski, former president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, told ABC News that, “The reason for this attack by the IRS on the tea party was to make sure we were not as effective in 2012 as we were in 2010, and that’s what they did[.]“
Zawistowski also believes that the ridiculous amount of information and documents requested by the IRS was “opposition research,” having nothing to do with whether or not a group would qualify as tax exempt.
The IRS asked another Ohio tea party organization, the Liberty Township Tea Party, about its political views and relationships with an individual and another group.
“Provide a list of all issues that are important to your organization. Indicate your position regarding each issue,” the IRS commanded in a letter with 35 questions, many including between three and six bullet-pointed subquestions.
ABC News adds:
In letters obtained by ABC News, the Internal Revenue Service asked detailed questions of local tea party groups from 2010 to 2012.
Other Tea Party groups interviewed complained of getting bogged down by the paperwork. One group claims that “500 pages of stuff” went “back and forth” between them and the IRS:
There was kind of a cloud over us… It did curtail the things we could do. We could not go outside the IRS rules. Tax-exempt status allows you to do certain things, and we did not go outside them.
These groups say they didn’t hear from the IRS until after their 2010 victories. Then, before they could recreate that success against Obama in 2012, all of a sudden they are intimidated, restricted from certain political activities, and bogged down in a bureaucratic nightmare – all at the hands of the IRS.
Sorry, Ezra Klein, that doesn’t sound “discriminatory” to me – that sounds like a political tactic. Moreover, if it was a political tactic, we already know that it was not one confined to a single office in the Midwest. Klein’s own Post reports Tuesday that…
Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
We now know that the IRS targeted Obama’s political enemies, and either by accident or design, made them less effective during his reelection campaign in 2012. W also now know that Administration officials are lying about what they knew about this scandal and when they knew it.
The only question that matters now is whether or not anyone in the Obama re-election campaign is in any way tied to this. And at this point, that is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
President Obama knows he’s in trouble when Andrea Mitchell – Andrea Mitchell! – proclaims the IRS and AP scandals to be among “the most outrageous excesses I’ve seen” in all her years in journalism [which pre-date Watergate]. The strength of Mitchell’s statement drew gasps from Scarborough and Brzezinski. Then Ron Fournier, former AP editor now with the National Journal, darkly described the White House being “consumed” if it turns out someone there or in the Obama campaign had been aware of the IRS targeting of conservative groups. It happened on Morning Joe today.
But hey, President Obama still has his hangers-on. Take good old Carl Bernstein. As we reported, on yesterday’s Morning Joe Bernstein blathered that he “can’t imagine” that President Obama coudl be involved in the IRS mess. And there was Bernstein again today. When Fournier spoke of consequences of White House or Obama campaign knowledge of the IRS targeting, Bernstein quickly burped out that “we have no evidence of that whatsoever.” Joe Scarborough had to remind the former Watergate reporter: “that’s why you have investigations. You know that.” View the video after the jump.
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…………………….Click on image above to watch video.
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Watch the clouds gather over the White House. And when among your few umbrellas are the likes of Carl Bernstein…
Note: The screencap brings Hollywood Squares to mind. PRESIDENT OBAMA: I’ll take the joker in the upper left-hand corner for the block!
ANDREA MITCHELL: Yes, they did have to look and see whether some of these groups were political rather than pro bono. But not in any kind of non-neutral way. The test had to be neutral. The fact they went after the Tea Party here as David said earlier feeds the Republican critics -
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: It really does.
MITCHELL: And this is one of the most outrageous excesses that I’ve seen in all my years in journalism.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh my gosh.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Wow.
MITCHELL: We knew about the past national security probes, but I think this Associated Press investigation just rises to that standard, as well. The press is not popular, we are not popular. But this is, I think, an outrageous invasion of constitutional rights.
SCARBOROUGH: Andrea, it’s remarkable. As long as you’ve been a reporter at the top of your game, to say that a scandal that broke on Friday is one of the most outrageous excesses, the IRS scandal, and then for us to talk about what happened yesterday that most reporters agree with Ron and you, it rises to that level as well. To have two of these falling in two successive business days is going to require a dramatic reset inside the White House, is it not?
MITCHELL: And I don’t see why they don’t get that yet.
RON FOURNIER: The IRS thing, to me, I think that’s the one that has the most chance to be a game changer. If we find out in these hearings that somebody in the White House, especially in the political shop, or somebody in the campaign knew about this political targeting of conservative groups, I think that could be something that could consume the White House for the rest of his second term.
SCARBOROUGH: I agree. That is the key.
FOURNIER: I’m not pleased to say that.
CARL BERNSTEIN: We have no evidence of that whatsoever.
SCARBOROUGH: How could we, Carl? Of course we don’t have any evidence of that, but that’s why you have investigations. You know that. I know that.
The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.
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The IRS did not respond to requests Monday following up about that release, and whether it had determined how the applications were sent to ProPublica.
In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved – meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)
On Friday, Lois Lerner, the head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, apologized to Tea Party and other conservative groups because the IRS’ Cincinnati office had unfairly targeted them. Tea Party groups had complained in early 2012 that they were being sent overly intrusive questionnaires in response to their applications.
That scrutiny appears to have gone beyond Tea Party groups to applicants saying they wanted to educate the public to “make America a better place to live” or that criticized how the country was being run, according to a draft audit cited by many outlets. The full audit, by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, will reportedly be released this week. (ProPublica was not contacted by the inspector general’s office.)
Before the 2012 election, ProPublica devoted months to showing how dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns. Social-welfare nonprofits are allowed to spend money to influence elections, as long as their primary purpose is improving social welfare. Unlike super PACs and regular political action committees, they do not have to identify their donors.
In 2012, nonprofits that didn’t have to report their donors poured an unprecedented $322 million into the election. Much of that money – 84 percent – came from conservative groups.
As part of its reporting, ProPublica regularly requested applications from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which is responsible for reviewing applications from nonprofits.
Social welfare nonprofits are not required to apply to the IRS to operate. Many politically active new conservative groups apply anyway. Getting IRS approval can help with donations and help insulate groups from further scrutiny. Many politically active new liberal nonprofits have not applied.
Applications become public only after the IRS approves a group’s tax-exempt status.
On Nov. 15, 2012, ProPublica requested the applications of 67 nonprofits, all of which had spent money on the 2012 elections. (Because no social welfare groups with Tea Party in their names spent money on the election, ProPublica did not at that point request their applications. We had requested the Tea Party applications earlier, after the groups first complained about being singled out by the IRS. In response, the IRS said it could find no record of the tax-exempt status of those groups – typically how it responds to requests for unapproved applications.)
Just 13 days after ProPublica sent in its request, the IRS responded with the documents on 31 social welfare groups.
One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012.
Applications were sent to ProPublica from five other social welfare groups that had told the IRS that they wouldn’t spend money to sway elections. The other groups ended up spending more than $5 million related to the election, mainly to support Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Much of that money was spent by the Arizona group Americans for Responsible Leadership. The remaining four groups that told the IRS they wouldn’t engage in political spending were Freedom Path, Rightchange.com II, America Is Not Stupid and A Better America Now.
The IRS also sent ProPublica the applications of three small conservative groups that told the agency that they would spend some money on politics: Citizen Awareness Project, the YG Network and SecureAmericaNow.org. (No unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.)
The IRS cover letter sent with the documents was from the Cincinnati office, and signed by Cindy Thomas, listed as the manager for Exempt Organizations Determinations, whom a biography for a Cincinnati Bar Association meeting in January says has worked for the IRS for 35 years. (Thomas often signed the cover letters of responses to ProPublica requests.) The cover letter listed an IRS employee named Sophia Brown as the person to contact for more information about the records. We tried to contact both Thomas and Brown today but were unable to reach them.
After receiving the unapproved applications, ProPublica tried to determine why they had been sent. In emails, IRS spokespeople said ProPublica shouldn’t have received them.
“It has come to our attention that you are in receipt of application materials of organizations that have not been recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt,” wrote one spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge. She cited a law saying that publishing unauthorized returns or return information was a felony punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and imprisonment of up to five years, or both.
In response, ProPublica’s then-general manager and now president, Richard Tofel, said, “ProPublica believes that the information we are publishing is not barred by the statute cited by the IRS, and it is clear to us that there is a strong First Amendment interest in its publication.”
ProPublica also redacted parts of the application to omit financial information.
Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for Crossroads GPS, declined to comment today on whether he thought the IRS’s release of the group’s application could have been linked to recent news that the Cincinnati office was targeting conservative groups.
Last December, Collegio wrote in an email: “As far as we know, the Crossroads application is still pending, in which case it seems that either you obtained whatever document you have illegally, or that it has been approved.”
This year, the IRS appears to have changed the office that responds to requests for nonprofits’ applications. Previously, the IRS asked journalists to fax requests to a number with a 513 area code – which includes Cincinnati. ProPublica sent a request by fax on Feb. 5 to the Ohio area code. On March 13, that request was answered by David Fish, a director of Exempt Organizations Guidance, in Washington, D.C.
In early April, a ProPublica reporter’s request to the Ohio fax number bounced back. An IRS spokesman said at the time the number had changed “recently.” The new fax number begins with 202, the area code for Washington, D.C.
Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general’s report obtained by The Associated Press that contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.
. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Douglas Shulman testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington before the House Oversight Committee
The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was “inappropriate” targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware.
But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog’s report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with “Tea Party,” ”Patriot” or “9/12 Project” in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says.
The 9/12 Project is a group started by conservative TV personality Glenn Beck. In a statement to the AP, Beck suggested that the revelations were hardly news to him and other conservatives.
“In February 2012, TheBlaze first reported what the IRS now admits to — that they unfairly targeted conservative groups including the 9/12 project,” Beck said, citing his website and TV network. “It is nice to see everyone else playing catch-up and finally asking the same questions that TheBlaze started raising over a year ago.”
Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups “immediately,” the report says.
The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration is expected to release the results of a nearly yearlong investigation in the coming week. The AP obtained part of the draft report, which has been shared with congressional aides.
Among the other revelations, on Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS’ Rulings and Agreements office “held a meeting with chief counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue.”
On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was changed to, “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement,” the report says.
While this was happening, several committees in Congress were writing numerous letters IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman to express concern because tea party groups were complaining of IRS harassment.
In Shulman’s responses, he did not acknowledge targeting of tea party groups. At a congressional hearing March 22, 2012, Shulman was adamant in his denials.
“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman said at the House Ways and Means subcommittee hearing.
The portion of the draft report reviewed by the AP does not say whether Shulman or anyone else in the Obama administration outside the IRS was informed of the targeting. It is standard procedure for agency heads to consult with staff before responding to congressional inquiries, but it is unclear how much information Shulman sought.
The IRS has not said when Shulman found out that Tea Party groups were targeted.
Shulman was appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican. His 6-year term ended in November. President Barack Obama has yet to nominate a successor. The agency is now run by an acting commissioner, Steven Miller.
The IRS said in a statement Saturday that the agency believes the timeline in the IG’s report is correct, and supports what officials said Friday.
“IRS senior leadership was not aware of this level of specific details at the time of the March 2012 hearing,” the statement said. “The timeline does not contradict the commissioner’s testimony. While exempt organizations officials knew of the situation earlier, the timeline reflects that IRS senior leadership did not have this level of detail.”
Lerner’s position is three levels below the commissioner.
“The timeline supports what the IRS acknowledged on Friday that mistakes were made,” the statement continued. “There were not partisan reasons behind this.”
Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s oversight subcommittee, said the report “raises serious questions as to who at IRS, Treasury and in the administration knew about this, why this practice was allowed to continue for as long as it did, and how widespread it was.”
“This timeline reveals at least two extremely unethical actions by the IRS. One, as early as 2010, they targeted groups for political purposes. Two, they willfully and knowingly lied to Congress for years despite being aware that Congress was investigating this practice,” Boustany said.
“This is an outrageous abuse of power. Going after organizations for referencing the Bill of Rights or expressing the intent to make this country a better place is repugnant,” Boustany added. “There is no excuse for this behavior.”
Several congressional committees have promised investigations, including the Ways and Means Committee, which plans to hold a hearing.
“The admission by the agency that it targeted American taxpayers based on politics is both shocking and disappointing,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “We will hold the IRS accountable for its actions.”
The group Tea Party Patriots said the revelation was proof that the IRS had lied to Congress and the public when Schulman said there had been no targeting of tea party groups.
“We must know how many more lies they have been telling and how high up the chain the cover-up goes,” Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the group Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement Saturday.
“It appears the IRS committed crimes and violated our ability to exercise our First Amendment right to free speech. A simple apology is not sufficient reparation for violating the constitutional rights of United States citizens. Therefore, Tea Party Patriots rejects the apology from the Internal Revenue Service,” Martin said. “We are, however, encouraged to hear that Congress plans to investigate. Those responsible must be held accountable and resign or be terminated for their actions.”
On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration expected the inspector general to conduct a thorough investigation, but he brushed aside calls for the White House itself to investigate.
Many conservative groups complained during the 2012 election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.
The forms, which the groups have made available, sought information about group members’ political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.
In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.
There has been a surge of politically active groups claiming tax-exempt status in recent elections – conservative and liberal. Among the highest profile are Republican Karl Rove’s group Crossroads GPS and the liberal Moveon.org.
These groups claim tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which is for social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities, but their primary activity must be social welfare.
That determination is up to the IRS.
The number of groups filing for this tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of these applications in an office in Cincinnati.
Lerner said on Friday this was done to develop expertise among staffers and consistency in their reviews. As part of the review, staffers look for signs that groups are participating in political activity. If so, IRS agents take a closer look to make sure that politics isn’t the group’s primary activity.
As part of this process, agents in Cincinnati came up with a list of things to look for in an application. As part of the list, they included the words “tea party” and “patriot,” Lerner said.
“It’s the line people that did it without talking to managers,” Lerner told the AP on Friday. “They’re IRS workers, they’re revenue agents.”
In all, about 300 groups were singled out for additional review, Lerner said. Of those, about a quarter were singled out because they had “tea party” or “patriot” somewhere in their applications.
Lerner said 150 of the cases have been closed and no group had its tax-exempt status revoked, though some withdrew their applications.
Attention House GOP members. Karl Rove is not the solution to your problems, Karl Rove IS your problem
BUZZFEED – Republican strategist Karl Rove huddled with a group of House GOP leaders in the office Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy Thursday morning to discuss the party’s messaging efforts, Republicans familiar with the meeting said.
Details of Rove’s presentation to a group of McCarthy’s “whip team” — a subset of the broader conference tasked with educating the rank and file, rounding up votes on key bills and generally enforcing discipline within Republican ranks.
Following the meeting, several lawmakers could be heard instructing staff to setup meetings with Rove.
Rove’s trip to Capitol Hill may not be met with enthusiasm from every Republican. Rep. Steve King, one of the House’s most vocal conservative firebrands, has been eyeing a run to replace Sen. Tom Harkin now that the veteran Iowa Democrat is resigning.
King is in many ways the sort of conservative candidate that makes the party’s establishment nervous about the coming general election, and King told the Iowa Republican earlier this month his is now strongly considering a run — in part as a response to Rove.
“If I would back up in front of Karl Rove’s initiative, that would just empower him, and he would go on state after state, candidate after candidate,” King told the Republican.
Conservatives like Steve King have always made the GOP establishment nervous, Reagan made them nervous, the Tea Party makes them nervous. That is the problem, these weasels are so busy being nervous, they cannot lead, so we keep getting stuck with “safe” candidates that lose, McCain,Romney, that type of candidate. Here is a BIG HINT to the GOP leadership. Stop backing the candidates the Democrats WANT you to run! See the Democrats will signal which candidate they fear by going hard after those candidates in the primaries. The ones they do not fear they will ignore. And the candidate they want us to nominate? They will praise them and talk about what a “good presidential candidate” he or she would make, and how “formidable” they would be. By the way the media does the same thing. I have to point this out since you, Karl Rove, and his stupid white board cannot figure it out!
Tell you what. Fire Karl Rove, he is all about Karl Rove, not the GOP anyway. Call me, I work cheap, Hell I will advise you for free. Why? Because I actually care about Conservatism. Or you can keep getting advice from Rove, and his ilk. Tell me how is that working out for you?
a president that might actually understand that security in our schools is the best answer, not more useless gun control laws
At a Tea Party event Monday, former Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry became the highest-profile Republican politician to support arming teachers and administrators.
Perry argued that anyone with a concealed handgun license should be able to take guns on public property in Texas, including schools, and he urged legislators “to look at ways to improve safety at schools.”
“In the state of Texas, with our concealed handgun license, if you have been duly backgrounded and trained and you are a concealed-handgun-license-carrying individual, you should be able to carry your handgun anywhere in this state.” Teachers should have “access to weapons in their school,” Gov. Perry said, provided they have the proper training and license, and it should be left up to local school districts to determine their own policies in allowing firearms on their campuses. He later added that property owners had the right to prohibit guns on their own private property. Some school districts across Texas already allow school personnel to carry guns; when Perry referred to the one school district that allows teachers and administrators to carry weapons, he was interrupted by loud applause from the crowd.
Perry warned citizens of rash decisions from the federal government.“One of the things that I hope we don’t see from our federal government is this knee-jerk reaction from Washington, D.C., when there is an event that occurs, that they come in and they think they know the answer.”
In every one of the recent school shootings, the killer has stopped when? When he decide enough was enough? When a Liberal sang him a song of peace? No, when he was confronted with armed resistance! In Pearl Mississippi, that resistance came in the form of an assistant principal who ran to his car to retrieve his gun. The fact the Left is not willing to grasp is that sometimes evil is visited upon us, and we must fight back. Passing more laws that the next killer will ignore will do nothing.
C’mon Now, GOP, Don’t Go Wobbly on Us by Sarah Palin on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 12:10pm Please read and pass along this article. We send good conservatives to D.C. to fulfill the promises they made to the electorate, and yet when they stay true to their wordthe permanent political class in their own partypunishes them. This won’t be forgotten come 2014. Right now the GOP establishment is more concerned about the opinion of the media and the Georgetown cocktail circuit than they are “we the people” who hired them. For all this new talk of how the GOP needs a “populist movement,” it would do them good to remember they already have one; it’s called the Tea Party movement, and it won for them the majority they now enjoy in the House.
Just for the sake of argument, let me posit that John Boehner is NOT a sellout, a tool, a double agent, a doddering buffoon, a sad little throne-sniffer, a spineless sycophant, a Ruling Class meat puppet, and an obsequious piece of work.
Instead, let us assert that there is some sort of method to his madness, with some plan forthcoming:
Ken Burns, who massacred the facts in his documentary mockumentary The Civil War so badly a group of historians felt the need to write a book correcting the many errors is no historian. But, since he is a flaming Liberal, he gets airtime from the Liberal media. Weasel Zippers has Burns take on the recent secession movement
Documentarian Ken Burns appeared as a panelist on Meet the Press this morning to discuss Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As the conversation veered to contemporary politics, Burns argued, in essence, that the secession movement we’re seeing in the wake of the election is spurred by racism. The basis for this claim, I believe, is the same as for the claims that opposition to a potential Susan Rice nomination is an indication of racism.
Good grief! In the first place this guy is a hack, he is not a historian. And, as the clip shows, he is suffering from Racial Obsession Syndrome, RACE has everything to do with everything in his mind. And note how he is still parroting the lies about the “vitriol” that came from the Tea Party. That is a typical Liberal, just keep repeating the lies, even when they have been disproved.
Facing defeat, Florida Rep. Allen West on Wednesday demanded a recount in his bid for re-election against Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy.
With all precincts in the south Florida district reporting, Murphy has 160,328 votes, or 50.4 percent, to West’s 157,872 votes and 49.6 percent, according to the Associated Press, which has still not officially declared a winner.
In a statement Wednesday morning, the Republican congressman and Tea Party favorite’s campaign said the race was still far from over.
“This race is far from decided and there is no rush to declare an outcome,” the campaign said. “Ensuring a fair and accurate counting of all ballots is of the utmost importance. There are still tens of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in Palm Beach County and potential provisional ballots across the district.”
The campaign went on to voice suspicions about the actions of one county election supervisor and called for a full hand recount.
“Late last night Congressman West maintained a district-wide lead of nearly 2,000 votes until the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections ‘recounted’ thousands of early ballots,” the campaign said. “Following that ‘recount’ Congressman West trailed by 2,400 votes.”
The campaign said there were “numerous other disturbing regularities” reported at polls across the county, including “doors to polling places being locked when the polls closed” — a violation of Florida law because it prevents the public from being able to witness how results are tabulated.
Stacy McCain has a very informative post up about Rauhauser’s “on-line personas” and his tactical blunders, not to mention Rauhauser’s denial of his own culpability in his screw-ups. Go read it all here is a small taste
What the astute reader will discern is Rauhauser’s repeated efforts to impress others with his assertions of expertise. It appears that his 2010 TwitterGate debacle was a misguided attempt by Rauhauser to make himself a hero to the Progressive online community by waging a Twitter war against the Tea Party. Sir Neal planned to ride out and slay the Tea Party dragon, but instead got his virtual ass handed to him by Patrick Read, Greg Howard, Zapem and others.
Unable to accept responsibility for his failures, Rauhauser scapegoated his enemies and has spent the past 18 months trying to redeem himself by slaying some other dragon: Patrick Frey, James O’Keefe, Aaron Walker, Ace of Spades — any target will do, just as long as Rauhauser can claim “victory” and strut before his admirers as a dragon-slaying White Knight.
Once again, however, Rauhauser has committed a tactical blunder that anyone with infantry training will recognize: He’s marched into an L-shaped ambush, hit the trip-wire that exploded the Claymore mines, and now finds himself pinned down in the kill-zone by heavy fire from forces he did not expect to encounter.
Neal’s paranoia is, in some sense, justified: For the past year or so, those whom he has targeted have been watching his online activity very closely. All the things he tried to “scrub” from the Internet? Screen-capped, cached and securely stored offline.
One of the intended victims of Rauhauser’s smears told me the other day: “I had to get a new computer just to hold all the stuff I’ve got on Neal. External hard drives, CD-ROMs — I’ve got sh*tloads of it, so much I can’t even keep track of it all.”
Bob Belvedere is also covering this and links to the Lisa Grass Radio Show, where Stacy talked about Team Kimberlin last night
Lisa Graas was able to broadcast her Blog Talk Radio show unmolested last night [you should be able to listen to it here]. Her guest was Stacy McCain, who provided a useful summary of the whole La Cosa Kimberlin Saga. Bravo to Lisa, Rebecca Diserio, and the rest of the gang at Fidelis Radio for not giving-in to the bastards who tried to intimidate them.
-Stacy McCain has filed three more reports since last Friday that help to further expose Neal Rauhauser for the evil and delusional danger he is to decent people.
=On Saturday, he filed a report on some of the latest news in the saga of La Cosa Kimberlin and commented:
Every day, we grab hold of some piece of the Kimberlin saga — some previously unreported fact or overlooked detail, some development on the legal or political front — and we push it as hard as we can, making the story new and fresh every day. One month into this epic battle of informational warfare, there is now a nationwide readership of thousands following this story with fascinated interest, and I am keenly aware of the need to keep moving the ball down the field, like a football team driving toward a touchdown.
It’s so important that we keep this story alive and one of the best ways to do that is by we, the rank and file of The Army Of Davids, doing the research and spreading the word.
=On Sunday, Stacy exposed Neal Rauhauser’s method of thought by publishing items that he had removed from the Internet — but, of course, such items rarely completely disappear. A highlight:
FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Earlier this year, Neal Rauhauser “scrubbed” from the Internet several of his online writings in an apparent attempt to conceal evidence that he has been cyberstalking and harassing his enemies, including the late Andrew Breitbart, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and the group of Tea Party activists who exposed Rauhauser’s role in the 2010 “TwitterGate” scandal.
Cached versions of Rauhauser’s deleted posts were preserved by some of the conservatives he targeted, and show Rauhauser’s fetish for secrecy and his obsession with his various enemies….
The examples of Rauhauser’s writings are useful examples of the man’s demented state of mind, but they also show he is a functioning mentally unbalanced person.
=In his latest from earlier today, Stacy questions why law enforcement officials have seemingly not acted on the evidence at hand:
We are at the point of the story where, if this was a TV crime drama, the detectives would have the suspects locked in a room, confronting them with the evidence and interrogating them for 14 consecutive hours until they cracked.
Is the FBI incompetent? Or — I hesitate to suggest this — has the Justice Department become so corrupted that even the FBI’s hard-won reputation for integrity has been compromised?
This is why Neal Rauhauser’s repeated boastings about his contacts in the FBI disturb me. We know that Rauhauser is a liar and a braggart, but what if he’s actually telling the truth about his cozy relationship with law enforcement? What if the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have actually bought into Rauhauser’s deceptions?
The Pit of Weirdness that is the Kimberlin saga just gets deeper and weirder!
This collected piece of work is continues to reveal the piece of work Kimberlin & Company are and continue to be. Take a look at Stacy McCain’s latest, for those who don’t want to go through 2414 works here is the meat and potatoes.
By now the astute reader understands – and I don’t really have to point this out do I? — that Kimberlin and Rauhauser’s belief in an imaginary conspiracy of their enemies led them into creating an actual conspiracy of their own.
It’s all right there, you see: Presenting himself as an agent of Velvet Revolution, Rauhauser elicited assistance from members of Anonymous in a conspiracy that “put Breitbart & Co. square in their gunsights.” What did Rauhauser mean by that expression? What manner of activity did Anonymous agree to conduct against the target “in their gunsights”? We don’t know.
What we do know is that, once more, Rauhauser’s compulsive bragging has led to the exposure of one of his schemes.
Of course, the Left has been doing that for a long time. They accuse Republicans of the very thing THEY, themselves do. Then they whine and play the victim. Stacy offers up more on the tactics of Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser is crazy and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and his boastful arrogance has been his downfall before. So it is again.
In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as “a very big dog from the Anonymous pen” conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) “Breitbart associates.”
The campaign of harassment and intimidatiion we have seen carried out in recent months apparently is the product of that game plan — and Rauhauser boastfully explained how he developed that plan quite publicly more than eight months ago.
Stacy goes on to lay out his case
Before I share that with you, however, let me preface it by explaining that the claim to victimhood that Rauhauser presents in this 970-word treatise is false. His exposure in the 2010 “TwitterGate” affair was the result of his open incitement of his s0-called “beandogs,” the gang of online thugs who obscenely harassed Tea Party activists on Twitter. His public Tweets to the “beandogs” were screen-capped and documented by Patrick Read, Michelle Lessick and others, and Rauhauser’s role was clearly evident.
Furthermore, exactly as with his current role in the Kimberlin case, Rauhauser had described – publicly and in advance – his plans for an online war against the Tea Party, in two posts at the forum Open Left:
That was in August, not long after Rauhauser had been a speaker at the Netroots Nation conference. He was a consultant with the firm Progressive PST, which included several Democratic politicians (including Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva) among its clients.
Rauhauser deleted [his "WingNutWatch" Twitter] account and protected [his personal Twitter account], the kind of gesture a detective might say was indicative of “consciousness of guilt.” The obvious question: If Rauhauser has nothing to hide, why is he hiding? Let me suggest an obvious answer: Rauhauser is becoming an embarrassment to his Democratic clients, especially Arizona 7th District Rep. Raul Grijalva. Rauhauser had boasted of his relationship with Grijalva — who sent the consultant a “thank you” note — and like so many other previously “safe” Democratic incumbents this year, Grijalva is in the toughest re-election battle of his career.
In late September 2010 — before I even noticed TwitterGate, but after Read, Lessick and others had begun exposing the “beandogs” operation – Rauhauser clearly realized his scheme was busted. Caught attempting to victimize others, Rauhauser declared himself the realvictim in a Daily Kos post entitled, “Tea Party Stalks Me & My Kids.”
This tendency toward self-pity, blaming others for problems that he himself caused, appears to be a deeply engrained personality trait with Rauhauser. Incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures, Rauhauser psychologically projects responsibility onto scapegoats, whom he demonizes and accuses of malicious motives and actions, as a means of justifying his attacks on them, attacks that he encourages others to join.
MUCH more at The Other McCain, go read it all. Stacy McCain is in his element here. Also check out these other posts Stacy has done
The name of one Convicted Speedway Bomber Brett Kimberlin’s “non-profit” groups is Velvet Revolution. His Wikipedia page and the website of his bogus tax-exempt charitable organization are at the top of Google.
On November 19, 1989, the people of Prague, in the former state of Czechoslovakia, gathered to commemorate a massacre of Czech students by Nazi Germany fifty years earlier. By the end of the day, the gathering turned into a demonstration against a ruling Communist government that had begun massacring Czechs and Slovaks from virtually the moment the Nazis were booted out. By December 29, 1989, without a shot fired, the protesters had driven out their Communist masters, electing poet, playwright, and political prisoner Vaclav Havel as interim President. This peaceful revolt by a peaceful people against their Stalinist puppet government became known as the “Velvet Revolution”.
[...]
Brett Kimberlin, and his associate Brad Friedman, do not own the name “Velvet Revolution”. They do not, and cannot, claim trademark or copyright protection in the term, because in the realm of politics, where Kimberlin and Friedman seek to meddle, the term “Velvet Revolution” is more generic than “Jell-O”.
Likewise, we do not own the name “Velvet Revolution”. No one owns the term. The Czechs and Slovaks who put their lives on the line in 1989 have a pretty strong moral claim, but they’re all in MittelEuropa. The Czechs and Slovaks have bigger problems than one terrorist moonbat making a mockery of a First Amendment that they don’t have anyway.
So we’re taking the name back, for them.
Help them out by linking to them if you have a blog, tweeting their links, posting it on facebook or whatever social networking tool you may use.
There is a ton more out there. More and more of Congress is taking notice, but much of the media has been silent. Maybe because they do not see ratings in this story, maybe because they see it as just those “bloggers” going at one another. But, rest assured this story is important to anyone who values their right to freedom of speech. And also to anyone who truly wants to stamp out cyber bullying, which certainly seems to describe what is going on here.
Stacy McCain rightly points out that anyone who criticizes Brett Kimberlin is likely to be targeted, in one way or another for harassment by a website McCain refers to as “Not Brett Kimberlin”. Patterico has an example of the despicable attacks on Mandy Nagy It is very nasty, demeaning stuff you might expect to hear from some crazed stalker in a bad horror flick. No doubt a coward wrote that crap, but, this is one of the tactics the Left is using now to bully, intimidate, and demean those that stand up to them. This group, or person, is attempting to shut all of us up. So, who is behind this? Who is funding them? Stacy takes a look at some evidence that might help clue us in
Is the “Not Brett Kimberlin” site part of Rauhauser’s operation? Whatever the strategic wisdom of this “brass knuckles reputation management” — as Professor Glenn Reynolds has called Kimberlin’s campaign of harassment and intimidation — one thing should be clear: Such activities are clearly not legitimate uses of tax-exempt funds. Here are the most recent available IRS 990 forms for Kimberlin’s outfits:
People experienced in the management of non-profit organizations who have examined those 990s describe them as “thinly documented.” The phrase “red flag” occurs when discussing these IRS forms with such experts, who marvel that anyone would contribute to groups that exhibit such an astonishing lack of tranparency about exactly how they spend the money they collect.
All very good questions that need answers. Go read the whole post Stacy has up, and contact your Congressman and tell them to keep looking into this.
So, Dick Lugar is not going to win reelection. The media reaction? Not so good!
ABC’s Good Morning America treated last night’s loss of long-time serving Republican Senator Richard Lugar, to the more conservative Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock, as a sad sign of the end of bi-partisanship. In the 7am half-hour of Wednesday’s show, ABC’s Josh Elliott declared Lugar’s loss was an “earthquake of great degree” and eulogized Lugar as a senator who was “well-known for his willingness to reach across party lines.” Later on in the 8am half-hour Elliott called Lugar’s loss “a massive political headline” as he reported: “A long time voice of bipartisanship…has been defeated.”
CNN’s Erin Burnett, on last night’s edition of Outfront, also cast the Mourdock victory as a bad omen for Washington, as she worried, “So are the only people willing to find the middle ground disappearing from Washington…This is pretty tragic that we have gotten to this point where working together is a negative thing.” (Video after the jump)
Burnett’s colleague, John Avlon, joined in her hand-wringing as he added: “If you are frustrated with the way Washington isn’t working, with the division and dysfunction this primary is an important reason why. Right now reaching across the aisle to try to solve a problem is a hanging offense in the Republican Party primaries. This RINO-hunting and DINO-hunting is only going to divide us further and to someone like Dick Lugar who’s got a record to reach across the aisle that becomes a big bull’s eye on his back, we have a problem in America.”
Lots more hand-wringing at Newsbusters, but be warned it redefines PATHETIC!
darcprynce
Dave C
Gatordoug
