IRS Targeted Conservative Groups

Denny Crane · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Who are the Woodward and Bernstein today? We need a strong and skeptical press. We don't have it.
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http://sportstwo.com/showpost.php?p=3016421

maxiep · May 13, 2013

julius said: ↑

Wasn't the guy who was responsible for this hired under the previous administration?
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Republicans hate the Tea Party as well.

Denny Crane · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Republicans hate the Tea Party as well.
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+1

...

DaLincolnJones · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Republicans hate the Tea Party as well.
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truth

PapaG · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Who are the Woodward and Bernstein today? We need a strong and skeptical press. We don't have it.
Click to expand...

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guyben...ied-to-benghazi-scandal-are-brothers-n1593081

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/

PapaG · May 13, 2013

Gee, the President's staff, and possibly the President, lied again. What a shock!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...185644-bbdf-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_print.html

IRS officials in Washington were involved in targeting of conservative groups

By Juliet Eilperin and Zachary A. Goldfarb,

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.

IRS officials at the agency’s Washington headquarters sent queries to conservative groups asking about their donors and other aspects of their operations, while officials in the El Monte and Laguna Niguel offices in California sent similar questionnaires to tea-party-affiliated groups, the documents show.

IRS employees in Cincinnati told conservatives seeking the status of “social welfare” groups that a task force in Washington was overseeing their applications, according to interviews with the activists.

Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters Friday that the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

In one instance, however, Ron Bell, an IRS employee, informed a lawyer representing a conservative group focused on voter fraud that the application was under review in Washington. On several other occasions, IRS officials in Washington and California sent conservative groups detailed questionnaires about their voter outreach and other activities, according to the documents.

“For the IRS to say it was some low-level group in Cincinnati is simply false,” said Cleta Mitchell, a partner in the law firm Foley & Lardner who sought to communicate with IRS headquarters about the delay in granting tax-exempt status to True the Vote.

Moreover, details of the IRS’s efforts to target conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency in May 2012, far earlier than has been disclosed, according to Republican congressional aides briefed by the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration *(TIGTA) on the details of their reviews.

Then-Commissioner Douglas Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who stepped down in November, received a briefing from the TIGTA about what was happening in the Cincinnati office in May 2012, the aides said. His deputy and the agency’s current acting commissioner, Steven T. Miller, also learned about the matter that month, the aides said.

The officials did not share details with Republican lawmakers who had been demanding to know whether the IRS was targeting conservative groups, Republicans said.

“I wrote to the IRS three times last year after hearing concerns that conservative groups were being targeted,” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Monday. “In response to the first letter I sent with some of my colleagues, Steven Miller, the current Acting IRS Commissioner, responded that these groups weren’t being targeted.”

“Knowing what we know now,” he added, “the IRS was at best being far from forth coming, or at worst, being deliberately dishonest with Congress.”

As new details emerged Monday, Democrats and Republicans alike decried the agency’s actions as an unacceptable abuse of power.

In a news conference Monday, President Obama said he learned of the investigating in media reports on Friday and has “no patience with it.”

“If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on, and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that’s outrageous,” Obama said. “And there’s no place for it. And they have to be held fully accountable.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Monday that the White House counsel’s office learned of an upcoming IRS inspector general’s report on April 22 as part of a routine notification but had not received access to the report.

On Capitol Hill, two Senate panels — the Finance Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — announced Monday that they will investigate. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Ways and Means Committee have been looking into reports of IRS attempts to single out organizations on the right for heightened scrutiny. Ways and Means has called IRS officials to testify Friday.

“These actions by the IRS are an outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). “The IRS will now be the ones put under additional scrutiny.”

Separately, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) introduced companion bills Monday that would require the IRS to fire any employee found “willfully” violating “the constitutional rights of a taxpayer,” according to statements by both lawmakers. The bills also would make them criminally liable for their actions.

Even as Obama vowed that his administration “will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this,” however, the IRS offered no new information on how it selected which groups to single out for scrutiny.

The White House is legally barred from contacting the IRS about a tax matter, under a prohibition adopted after the Watergate scandal. And although it can contact the Treasury Department about tax issues, neither Treasury nor the IRS can disclose specific taxpayer information. The IRS can release information about a petition for tax-
exempt status only after it has been approved.

Obama is not in a position to remove Lerner, a career official who can be terminated for cause only under normal civil service proceedings. The IRS has two political appointees: the commissioner, who serves a five-year term, and the chief counsel.

As the IRS came under broader political attack Monday, more details surfaced on how the exempt-organizations division struggled to determine which nonprofits should receive “social welfare” status after the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling. That decision, which allowed corporations and unions to raise and spend un*limited amounts of money on elections, opened the door for groups to accept undisclosed contributions as long as their “primary purpose” was not politics.

In a Jan. 9, 2012, letter to the Richmond Tea Party, IRS specialist Stephen Seok asked questions including “the names of the donors, contributors and grantors,” as well as the size of the contributions and grants, and when they were given.
Richmond Tea Party President Larry Nordvig, whose group applied for tax-exempt status in December 2009 and received it in July 2012, said the extended inquiry had “a very chilling effect” on how much money the group could raise because its donors preferred anonymity.

The Wetumpka Tea Party of Alabama experienced a two-year delay after submitting its initial application.

Becky Gerritson, a 44-year-old stay-at-home mother and the group’s president, said the IRS sent a questionnaire asking for the names of all volunteers, donor identification and contribution amounts, the names of any legislators its members had communicated with directly or indirectly, and the contents of all speeches its members had made, among a long list of other details.

“I was outraged,” Gerritson said. “Being an election year, I felt like it was intimidation.”

The group did not provide the information. Approval came only after the group sought help from the American Center for Law and Justice, which threatened a lawsuit against the IRS, Gerritson said.

Although some of the groups were explicitly labeled “tea party” or “patriot,” others that came under intense scrutiny were focused on challenging the Affordable Care Act — known by many as Obamacare — or the integrity of federal elections.

In a June 3, 2011, letter to the IRS, Mitchell questioned the agency’s motivations for delaying recognition of one of her clients who had filed nearly two years earlier, writing, “Is the [group’s] opposition to Obamacare and the takeover of America’s healthcare system by the government the reason that this application has been held up and not approved?”

Catherine Engelbrecht, president of the Houston-based True the Vote, first filed for tax-exempt status in July 2010. At one point, Engelbrecht — who is still awaiting a determination from the IRS regarding her voting rights organization and a separate tea party group, King Street Patriots — said an IRS employee informed her: “I’m just doing what Washington is telling me to do. I’m just asking what they want me to ask.”

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Josh Hicks and Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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ehizzy3 · May 13, 2013

blazerboy30 said: ↑

Organizations are different than individuals.
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what about businesses?

MickZagger · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Who are the Woodward and Bernstein today? We need a strong and skeptical press. We don't have it.
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Their names are Shooter, Crane and the like.

PapaG · May 13, 2013

jlprk and his false posts should have a field day with this one.

Revealed: The 55 questions the IRS asked one tea party group after more than two years of waiting – including demands for names of all its donors and volunteers
Lengthy questionnaire arrived more than two years after the Richmond Tea Party applied for tax-exempt status
IRS demanded 'names of the donors, contributors, and grantors' and insisted: 'Please identify your volunteers'
Tax collectors began in 2012 to scrutinize conservative nonprofits more closely than others
Documents show senior IRS officials in Washington knew of the practice as early as August 2011, but the White House says it learned last month

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ds-names-donors-volunteers.html#ixzz2TEq2A5uZ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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PapaG · May 13, 2013

The IRS is in charge of ObamaCare's oversight.

This should scare the hell out of most rational people. I know the 4 or 5 left-wing kooks here don't care because they can't think for themselves (Union daddy, hold my hand please!!), but this is some scary stuff.

MARIS61 · May 13, 2013

maxiep said: ↑

Who are the Woodward and Bernstein today? We need a strong and skeptical press. We don't have it.
Click to expand...

Where and for whom would they work? And how long before they disappeared?

jlprk · May 13, 2013

PapaG said: ↑

jlprk and his false posts should have a field day with this one.
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The IRS manager who did this is a BUSH APPOINTEE. During the Bush regime, she refused to go after pro-Bush political nonprofits masquerading as religious outfits.

Lerner has headed the IRS exempt-organizations office since 2006. It oversees the familiar kinds of nonprofits — universities, hospitals, charities — as well as the murkier world of “social welfare” groups that also dabble in politics.

These groups, known by the legal designation 501(c)(4), can avoid paying taxes as long as politics does not become their “primary purpose.”

The job for Lerner’s office is to decide how much politics is too much.

“It’s a difficult dance,” said Philip Hackney, a former IRS lawyer who teaches law at Louisiana State University. IRS examiners often ask about how much money and time a particular group spends on political purposes — and how much it spends on everything else.

Hackney said Lerner often reminded staffers that they could not make decisions based on a group’s political beliefs. “She would regularly be working with those folks to train them to be thinking in that sort of nonpartisan manner,” he said.

During Lerner’s tenure, one of the touchiest questions was how to deal with churches that preached politics from the pulpit. After the 2004 elections, there were complaints that conservative pastors had endorsed President George W. Bush’s reelection — something they were barred from doing at churches treated as legal nonprofits.

The IRS found that some churches had indeed overstepped the rules. But the people who made those charges said that, under Lerner, the agency was too timid in following up.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...1d82-bc01-11e2-a31d-a41b2414d001_story_1.html

Masbee · May 13, 2013

MickZagger said: ↑

Can someone pass me one of those tinfoil hats?
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Is this an act, or are you seriously this willfully ignorant?

Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling this a major scandal.

How stupid and out of touch do you have to be to make a post like this on this day?

PapaG · May 13, 2013

jlprk said: ↑

The IRS manager who did this is a BUSH APPOINTEE. During the Bush regime, she refused to go after pro-Bush political nonprofits masquerading as religious outfits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...1d82-bc01-11e2-a31d-a41b2414d001_story_1.html
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You're a proven liar with you "when have wars started with Dem Presidents?" bullshit. You know you're a liar and an insincere poster. Why do you get so upset when you're called out on your obvious shtick?

PapaG · May 13, 2013

Masbee said: ↑

Is this an act, or are you seriously this willfully ignorant?

Democrats on Capital Hill are calling this a major scandal.

How stupid and out of touch do you have to be to make a post like this on this day?
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His union daddy will make him his tinfoil hat. Just wait...

jlprk · May 13, 2013

Masbee said: ↑

Is this an act, or are you seriously this willfully ignorant?

Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling this a major scandal.
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Who?

jlprk · May 13, 2013

PapaG said: ↑

You're a proven liar with you "when have wars started with Dem Presidents?" bullshit. You know you're a liar and an insincere poster. Why do you get so upset when you're called out on your obvious shtick?
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Like a little girl, you have now called me a liar about 10 times in the last 2 days. I tire of your juvenile fighting words.

Maybe we should meet to discuss this.

Masbee · May 13, 2013

jlprk said: ↑

Who?
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Are you fucking serious?

What the hell are your news sources? MSNBC and Mother Jones?

jlprk · May 13, 2013

(Note to PapaG: Observe how an adult deals with this guy without descending to fighting language.)

Am I to take it that you made it up?

MickZagger · May 13, 2013

Union envy is running rampant 'round these parts.

As for Masbee, have you ever had a political conversation where you weren't overly emotional?

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IRS Targeted Conservative Groups

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Masbee -- Rookie of the Year

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IRS Targeted Conservative Groups

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