Internet Scofflaw

One of the beneficiaries of Kathleen Sebelius’s shakedown of health care companies (she pressured them, under cover of authority, to contribute to organizations promoting Obamacare) is caught engaging in nakedly political activity:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ favorite pro-Obamacare nonprofit held a Democrats-only congressional briefing earlier this year, according to emails obtained by nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch.

Enroll America president Anne Filipic, a former Obama White House aide, exchanged emails with Debra Curtis, a Democratic staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee.

“They [House Democrat leadership] want to do another one next week while Congress is in recess that would be open [to] all House Democratic Staff to start getting folks up to speed,” Curtis wrote to Filipic in a Feb. 11, 2013, email.

“We’ll check IDs to be sure we’ve got all Dems coming as well,” Curtis added the next day while projecting that a 100 people would attend.

Democrats haven’t really had to address Sebelius’s shakedown; with all the other Obama administration scandals sucking up all the oxygen, this didn’t get much attention. But if they did, I’m sure they would say that it was appropriate for her to fundraise for organizations seeking to further the government’s goals.

That wouldn’t be true in its own right — the government has no right to exploit its regulatory power to coerce any financial contributions in excess of legal tax liabilities — but this shows it’s not even true to that extent. Sebelius was extorting financial contributions to organizations engaging in partisan political activity. That’s a crime.

POSTSCRIPT: Sebelius sure is a piece of work.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

You can’t carry a gun in New York, and the police are under no obligation to help you.

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this is an old story, but I think it’s important to be reminded each step the sordid case takes as it winds its way through the system.

Barack Obama, 2004:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.

Barack Obama, 2007:

I don’t want to pit red America against blue America. I want to be the President of the United States of America.

Barack Obama, 2008:

We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America.

That was when he was seeking office. Today, if you’re a Republican, Obama doesn’t care about you. You can’t even attend his speech:

Ten College Republicans were dubbed a security threat and refused admittance to President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Central Missouri on Wednesday.

Despite the fact that the students had tickets to the event, security personnel turned them away at the door to the recreation center where Obama gave a speech on economic policy, telling the group it wasn’t about their politics but the president’s safety.

ASIDE: It should go without saying that the security justification was just a pretext.  If the Secret Service can’t protect the president from a few College Republicans, he can’t be giving public speeches.

This isn’t just disgusting, it’s illegal. As Glenn Reynolds points out, discriminating based on political affiliation at a public university is a violation of the First Amendment. They ought to sue.

UPDATE: The Secret Service claims that they were turned away because the venue was full.

The ACLU has changed its long-held position opposing double jeopardy and now approves of it, at least in George Zimmerman’s case.

The ACLU saving grace was always its consistency. They didn’t care about the right to keep and bear arms, and they didn’t much care about religious freedom, but they were strong on free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, even when the target was unpopular (such as the KKK or the cops in the Rodney King beating). Without that consistency, the ACLU is just another liberal pressure group.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been reading a lot of commentators who have been saying that re-trying George Zimmerman on federal charges would not be double jeopardy. Saying so is an offense against the semantics of the English language. It may be true that courts have ruled that way (I’m not saying they have, I don’t know), but if so, it is their error and we ought not go along with it. According to the phrase’s plain meaning, it is double jeopardy when the government gets another try at a defendant after he is acquitted. It changes nothing that they are re-trying him in a different venue, or on slightly different charges stemming from the same incident.

(Previous post.)

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who oversaw the IRS’s misconduct, and who is one of only two political appointments in the IRS, met with President Obama just two days before authoring the agency’s rules on dealing with Tea Party applications. I do hope someone asks what the meeting was about.

(Previous post.)

No one who paid attention to the George Zimmerman trial could have been at all surprised by the verdict, given Zimmerman’s story and utter lack of any credible evidence to contradict it. The real question is: with no evidence to convict him, why was Zimmerman charged in the first place?

Much of the story played out in public. The city of Sanford refused to prosecute. Inflamed by false reporting, the public was outraged, and Florida governor Rick Scott wilted under pressure. He appointed the execrable Angela Corey as special prosecutor, with a clear mandate to prosecute Zimmerman, which she did.

But a hidden side to the story is now revealed: Judicial Watch has obtained documents showing that the Department of Justice was working behind the scenes to stir up outrage. (More here.)

The little-known Community Relations Service is tasked with making peace in communities in conflict:

The Community Relations Service is the Department’s “peacemaker” for community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race, color, and national origin. Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, CRS is the only Federal agency dedicated to assist State and local units of government, private and public organizations, and community groups with preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.

But making peace doesn’t advance Democratic interests, so in Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the CRS did exactly the opposite.

Now Zimmerman is acquitted, and the Justice Department isn’t satisfied with a pointless prosecution. They want to prosecute him for something, but all the talk of charging him with a hate crime is going nowhere. (If the shooting was justified, it can’t be a hate crime; plus there’s no evidence that the shooting had anything to do with race; plus Zimmerman actually has a long record of friendliness toward blacks.)

But, eager to find something they can charge Zimmerman with, the Justice Department has established a tip line:

“They were calling on us to actively refer anyone who had any information,” that might build a case against Zimmerman for either a civil rights violation or a hate crime, [activist Barbara] Arnwine said. “They said they would very aggressively investigate this case.” . . .

DOJ officials also said they would open a public email address so people could send in tips on the case. That email address, which is now in operation, is [redacted].

So this is how American justice works now? First you pick the target, then you inflame public opinion against him, and then you solicit accusations? Absolutely astonishing and appalling. America has sunk far.

(Previous post.)

A federal judge has issued an injunction in the Hobby Lobby case, barring enforcement of the HHS mandate to provide contraceptives and abortifacients.

This seems right to me; under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Hobby Lobby has a very strong case. The Act requires strict scrutiny of government compromises of religious freedom. Even if providing free contraceptive and abortifacients is taken to be a compelling state interest, there’s no way that requiring employers to provide them is a narrowly-tailored solution.

Another branch of the IRS scandal is opening:

For the first time, [Inspector General Russell] George revealed claims that IRS officials targeted political candidates for audits. . .

The story doesn’t offer any details, but when we do, I’m sure they will be damning. Not a single aspect of the IRS scandal has yet failed to be damning.

POSTSCRIPT: Remember, the tone is set at the top.

(Previous post.)

The saddest thing about this story might be that it’s not surprising any more:

A government watchdog has found for the first time that confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly scrutinized by government officials, but the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the cases.

Its investigators also are probing two allegations that the Internal Revenue Service “targeted for audit candidates for public office,” the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, has privately told Sen. Chuck Grassley.

In a written response to a request by Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. George said a review turned up four cases since 2006 in which unidentified government officials took part in “unauthorized access or disclosure of tax records of political donors or candidates,” including one case he described as “willful.” In four additional cases, Mr. George said, allegations of improper access of IRS records were not substantiated by the evidence.

The story doesn’t identify whose records were improperly accessed, but I think we can assume that the victims were opponents of the Obama administration.

ASIDE: Could one of the victims have been the Koch brothers? The White House claimed knowledge of their tax returns, which they had no legitimate access to. Another victim appears to be Christine O’Donnell.

It’s one thing for the misconduct to take place. A few bad apples and all that. It’s quite another for the Justice Department to refuse to prosecute. By so doing, the Obama administration has approved the misconduct after the fact. Worse, they are encouraging it to happen again.

(Previous post.)

The IRS claimed that its misconduct was limited to a few rank-and-file employees in Cincinnati. We’ve known that to be a lie almost from the beginning, but not how much until now:

The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney.

In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

The IRS scandal now goes all the way to the top. The Chief Counsel is one of only two political appointees in the entire agency.

Let’s dwell on that a little further: The lawyer that President Obama picked to run the IRS legal department was responsible for improperly harassing President Obama’s political opponents.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

In a 2011 interview, Lois Lerner explains the IRS’s purpose behind sending massive, intrusive questionnaires:

Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.”

She was discussing the practice in a different context than the IRS scandal, but this confirms — as we have long believed — that the purpose of invasive IRS inquiries is not actually to collect information.

(Previous post.)

It took a while for the Democrats to find their footing in the astonishing and appalling IRS scandal, but they now seem to have settled on a strategy. Conducting a good-faith investigation and reforming the agency is, of course, out of the question. (Indeed, the much-vaunted IRS investigation seems to be a Potemkin investigation, the FBI has not interviewed any of the targeted Tea Party groups — at least as of earlier this month.) No, Democrats like the IRS just the way it is.

So the strategy they have settled on is to allege that the IRS flagged for special scrutiny not only Tea Party and other conservative groups, but also progressive groups as well. This proves — supposedly — that the IRS was behaving in a non-partisan manner.

This narrative has a small grain of truth to it: The IRS did maintain BOLO (be on the lookout) lists of keywords to search for, and one of the many keywords was progressive. What the Democratic narrative leaves out is that the BOLO lists also instructed agents on what to do with the applicants that they flagged.

For Tea Party applicants the BOLO list instructed:

Any cases should be sent to group 7822. Liz Hofacre [more on this name later] is coordinating. These cases are currently being coordinated with EOT.

(The actual document is here.) From that referral, the harassment would begin.

The instructions for “progressive” applicants was entirely different:

Applicants submit form 1023. Their “progressive” activities appear to show that (c)(3) may not be appropriate.

What this means is that “progressive” groups appear to be involved in politics, which would make them ineligible to be 501(c)(3) “charitable” groups, to whom contributions are tax deductible. (This suggests that progressive groups had a history of improperly applying as 501(c)(3).) In contrast, most (perhaps all) Tea Party applicants applied as 501(c)(4) “social welfare organizations”, which are permitted some political activity.

In short, in regard to progressive groups, agents were just instructed to make sure that political groups were not applying 501(c)(3), which is entirely appropriate. The instructions did not prevent first-line screeners from approving the application, and they did not result in the kind of harassment that Tea Party applicants received.

Indeed, Liz Hofacre (the agent who received Tea Party applications) testified that, on the occasions in which she was sent a progressive application by mistake, she simply returned it:

When that occurred, pursuant to the instructions that were given to me, I would send those applications to general inventory since they were not within the scope of the Tea Party emerging issue.

(Emphasis mine.) And, if that that’s not clear enough, the notes for an IRS screening workshop specifically stated:

“Progressive” applications are not considered “Tea Parties”

(The actual document is here, hosted by the House Democrats, who have nevertheless failed to take notice of this particular element.) It should be obvious that there would be no need to distinguish progressive and Tea Party applicants if they both faced the same treatment.

To summarize then, progressive applicants faced only an appropriate review to ensure they weren’t trying to do politics under the 501(c)(3) umbrella, while Tea Parties were sent off for special treatment. Russell George, the Treasury Dept. Inspector General, made much of this explicit in his letter to the House Democrats:

Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.

The inspector general stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention, while only 30 percent of the groups with “progress” or “progressive” were highlighted as potentially political. . .

“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, e-mails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,” George wrote to Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

However, having settled on a narrative, the Democrats are not likely to be turned aside merely by a letter from the Inspector Genera. They have simply added George to their attack list. Not only does this help preserve their narrative, it also helps to neutralize the investigation.

(Previous post.)

The law is supposed to forbid the IRS from compromising the privacy of taxpayers’ information, but as we well know, it has failed to prevent it. Nevertheless, with astonishing chutzpah, the IRS now claims that same law also forbids the IRS from revealing which of its employees violated the law.

Their privacy, not ours, is sacrosanct.

The Supreme Court bans protests on its grounds.

The New York Post reports:

A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive coverup — including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes.

A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.

Among the bombshell findings: A DS agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.

“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo. . .

Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy ordered the investigation ceased, and the ambassador remains in place, according to the memo.

Gutman was a big Democratic donor before taking the post, having raised $500,000 for President Obama’s 2008 campaign and helping finance his inaugural.

(Via Instapundit.)