Internet Scofflaw

The IRS claims that all its misconduct was limited to a few front-line workers. We already knew that wasn’t true, but those front-line workers — tired of being scapegoated — are starting to give specifics and name names:

Two Internal Revenue Service agents working in the agency’s Cincinnati office say higher-ups in Washington directed the targeting of conservative political groups when they applied for tax-exempt status, a contention that directly contradicts claims made by the agency since the scandal erupted last month.

The Cincinnati agents didn’t provide proof that senior IRS officials in Washington ordered the targeting. But one of the agents said her work processing the applications was closely supervised by a Washington lawyer in the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status, according to a transcript of her interview with congressional investigators.

Her interview suggests a long trail of emails that could support her claim.

One of the agents explained that she had no autonomy when it came to Tea Party targeting:

Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington.

Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.”

“One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.”

“I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”

(Previous post.) (Via Legal Insurrection.)

One of the defenses offered for the IRS’s targeting of conservative, Christian, and pro-Israel groups is that is that political organizations oughtn’t be tax exempt in the first place. For example, here’s extreme leftist Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA):

We’re talking about whether or not the American taxpayers will subsidize your work. We’re talking about a tax break. If you didn’t come in and ask for this tax break, we would have never had a question to ask of you.

(ASIDE: The “we” is a nice touch. McDermott actually identifies himself with the IRS’s misconduct. Most liberals aren’t that honest.)

So what about the 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization Organizing for Action? Until a few months ago the organization went by a different name: Barack Obama 2012. Indeed, their web site is still located at barackobama.com. There is no more political organization in America.

(Previous post.)

I can’t even keep track of all the scandals any more. Here’s the latest:

CBS News has uncovered documents that show the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within their ranks. . .

CBS News’ John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”

The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State Department security contractors with drugs.

Aurelia Fedenisn, a former investigator with the State Department’s internal watchdog agency, the Inspector General, told Miller, “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases.”

In such cases, DSS agents told the Inspector General’s investigators that senior State Department officials told them to back off, a charge that Fedenisn says is “very” upsetting.

Sexual assaults and drug trafficking, and “senior State Department officials” quashed the investigations.

Beyond the appalling misconduct itself, just think about the ramifications: The people defending our embassies are being sexually assaulted and given drugs. Is it just possible that this might reduce their effectiveness a little bit? But “senior State Department officials” are fine with that. Is it no wonder the attack against our Benghazi consulate succeeded?

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)

The wife of Douglas Shulman (commissioner of the IRS when its targeting of conservative, Christian, and pro-Israel groups began) works for Public Campaign, a left-wing organization working for “fair” elections that is funded by a knave’s gallery of leftist groups:

Earlier this month, when news broke of the targeting scandal broke, Public Campaign president and CEO Nick Nyhart belittled the concerns of disenfranchised conservatives.

“There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status,” Nyhart said in a statement provide to ABC. “It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.” . . .

Public Campaign receives “major funding” from the pro-Obamacare alliance Health Care for America NOW!, which is comprised of the labor unions AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and the progressive activist organization Move On, among others.

That doesn’t smell good.

(Previous post. ”Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

I’m starting to think that the Obama administration’s plan to deal with the scandals is to have so many of them we can’t keep them straight any more. In the latest scandal, the NSA collected call data on all telephone calls placed on Verizon’s network in the United States. (The dragnet explicitly excludes calls that originate and terminate in foreign countries.) Before I got a chance to note it here, it was revealed that the NSA is collecting credit-card transactions as well.

This was so bad that even Obama’s boot-lickers at the New York Times lost patience with him, writing that he had “lost all credibility”, although they softened their criticism a few hours later.

This was Barack Obama in 2007, pledging to end the supposed abuses of the Bush administration:

Obama proclaimed, “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.” He then cast his massive dragnet to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime using the FISA court rather than national security letters. Oh, that’s much better.

I feel it necessary to contrast what Obama is doing (I suppose I should say, what Obama’s administration is doing, since he will surely turn out have been out of the loop once again) with what happened during the Bush administration. The Bush-era terrorist surveillance program was tapping the phones of specific foreign terrorists.

That, of course, is exactly what they should have been doing. The part that somehow became controversial is they kept listening when those foreign terrorists placed calls to the United States. Of course. It’s utter foolishness to suggest that we should stop listening to terrorists when the call the United States; indeed, those are the calls we most need to hear. But a dishonest media reported the matter as though the administration was tapping domestic phones rather than foreign ones.

The Bush-era program was spying on foreign terrorists, not Americans. The Obama-era program is the exact opposite: It spies on every American who uses Verizon or a credit card, and it specifically excludes foreigners!

The nation that invented individual liberty has abandoned it:

A 22-year-old man has been charged on suspicion of making malicious comments on Facebook following the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby.

Benjamin Flatters, from Lincoln, was arrested last night after complaints were made to Lincolnshire Police about comments made on Facebook, which were allegedly of a racist or anti-religious nature.

He was charged with an offence of malicious communications this afternoon in relation to the comments, a Lincolnshire Police spokesman said.

(Via Power Line.)

We don’t know the specifics of the “malicious comments”, but they don’t matter. If the comments weren’t inciting violence (which is not reported, and presumably would have been had it been so), they should have been protected speech, and once would have been, no matter how offensive they might be.

Fortunately this could never happen in America. Oh, dang:

The [Eastern District of Tennessee’s] top federal prosecutor, Bill Killian, will address a topic that most Americans are likely unfamiliar with, even those well versed on the Constitution; that federal civil rights laws can actually be violated by those who post inflammatory documents aimed at Muslims on social media. “This is an educational effort with civil rights laws as they play into freedom of religion and exercising freedom of religion,” Killian says in the local news story. “This is also to inform the public what federal laws are in effect and what the consequences are.”

(Via Instapundit.)

Doug Shulman, the IRS commissioner when most of the known IRS misconduct took place, made at least 157 visits to the White House. If that seems like a lot, it really is. It’s nearly twice the number of known visits as the second-most-frequent high-level visitor (86). Shulman’s boss, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, made only 48 known visits.

Nevertheless, he says he can’t remember the substance of any of those meetings.

(Previous post. ”Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

When the IRS demanded to know the substance of tax-exempt applicants’ prayers, it was not a few isolated incidents. The IRS made a practice of inquiring into applicants prayers:

Please explain in detail the activities at the prayer meetings. Also, please provide the percentage of time your organization spends on prayer groups as compared with the other activities of the organization.

(Previous post.)

House investigators have found 88 IRS employees with documents relevant to the IRS scandal.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

The Washington Free Beacon advances the story of the IRS’s targeting of pro-Israel groups. It seems that the targeting was not limited to stalling tax-exempt applications, it extended to audits as well.

This segment of IRS targeting is unique in that it’s been in the public record since 2010:

Z STREET was informed explicitly by an IRS Agent on July 19, 2010, that approval of Z STREET’s application for tax-exempt status has been at least delayed, and may be denied because of a special IRS policy in place regarding organizations in any way connected with Israel, and further that the applications of many such Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

The complaint specifically alleged an explicit IRS policy, and it named names. At the time I wasn’t sure whether the allegation was true, but now we have proof that the IRS does this sort of thing. The House committee it going to want to subpoena that guy.

Interestingly, by targeting pro-Israel groups, the IRS followed the urging of the New York Times, which ran pieces blasting tax-exempt pro-Israel groups:

Yet private organizations in the United States continue to raise tax-exempt contributions for the very activities that the government opposes.

People are engaging in activities the government (by which he means the Obama administration) opposes? Horrors! What is this, a free country?

The White House may end up being technically blameless in this scandal, but it is clear that a very large segment of the left was all in favor of turning the IRS into a political weapon.

(Previous post.) (Via Power Line.)

Sometimes it’s hard to believe Barack Obama’s audacity:

President Obama announced Thursday that Attorney General Eric Holder would launch a review into the Justice Department’s (DOJ) targeting of journalists who report on classified information.

I’m looking forward to Eric Holder’s searing report on the misconduct of Eric Holder. . .

(Previous post.)

In the Obama administration, the say-nothing-during-ongoing-investigation excuse has metastasized into a learn-nothing-during-ongoing-investigation. The White House says that President Obama was perfectly happy to be kept in the dark about the severe misconduct taking place in his administration.

(Previous post.)

The Inspector General is supposed to report “particularly flagrant problem” to Congress within seven days. Doing so would have exposed the IRS scandal during the 2012 election campaign, but instead the IG delayed the report for months.

The IG admits that he delayed the report because he was concerned it would be used politically:

Inspector General J. Russell George told Issa’s panel he withheld the information because he feared lawmakers would leak it to the public.

Recall that conservatives had been complaining for years, and for years the IRS and the liberal media were dismissing their complaints as entirely unfounded. Yeah, I’d say that the revelation that the Tea Party’s allegations were 100% true might have become public, and indeed it should have.

It’s not the IG’s job to ignore statutory deadlines because of the possible political consequences. That’s misconduct all its own.

POSTSCRIPT: This also further demolishes the absurd notion that it could be in any way improper to answer questions while an investigation is ongoing. When the investigation can be stalled indefinitely for practically no reason at all (e.g., “I was studying for and then taking a final.”), this is plainly just an excuse to avoid answering questions forever.

(Previous post.)

It wasn’t just the AP and Fox News, the Justice Department spied on the New York Times too.

It will be interesting to see how the NYT responds. Will they roll over for Obama even when his administration attacks them personally? I wouldn’t bet against it.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

Eric Holder personally signed off on the warrant application naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as a criminal accomplice:

The Justice Department pledged Friday [to] review its policies relating to the seizure of information from journalists after acknowledging that a controversial search warrant for a  Fox News reporter’s private emails  was approved “at the highest levels” of the Justice Department, including “discussions” with Attorney General  Eric Holder.

A second report confirms that Holder’s approval was not pro forma, he took part in the discussions. (This is significant, because Holder has already used the excuse that he can’t read every memo that crosses his desk.)

Not only does this put Holder hip-deep in the journalist surveillance scandal, it also seems to make him a perjurer:

In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.

That testimony was given under oath, since the House has wisely suspended its “no oath” courtesy for Cabinet secretaries in Holder’s case.

Moreover, if Holder tries to weasel out by claiming that he never actually intended to prosecute Rosen, then he made false claims on the warrant application:

If that’s their defense, they knowingly lied to the judge who would, hopefully, reject the request if they admitted it was just a fishing expedition for information.

But that might be the best stance to take, since the warrant application was already filled with false claims:

Moreover, the affidavit asserts that the “targets” of the investigation (including Rosen) were a risk to “mask their identity and activity, flee or otherwise obstruct this investigation.” It is highly questionable whether Holder believed any of that to be true. (Really, he imagined a Fox News reporter would flee the country? He thought Rosen would don a disguise?)

The good news is that, although Holder could end up disbarred, he’s very unlikely to face prosecution for his perjury; his own Justice Department would have to approve such a prosecution. If there were ever any doubt at all as to whether that could happen, they’ve already removed it.

(Previous post.)

Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRS scandal, had a history of grossly inappropriate political  and religious inquisitions in her previous job at the FEC. She ran a 6-1/2 year investigation/persecution of the Christian Coalition, that cost her target over hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs. She required 81 depositions, responses to nearly 2000 legal documents, and production of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, many of which had to be found, by hand, in uncatalogued government warehouses. All of her massive fishing expedition produced nothing; in the end the Christian Coalition was cleared of any wrongdoing. But, as they say, the process itself is the punishment.

Most striking about the investigation was its inquisition into private religious activities, even going so far as to demand to know the contents of individuals’ prayers, a repetition of which we have seen in the current scandal.

In short, this woman should never have been in a position of public trust at all, much less a sensitive position such as head of tax-exempt organizations.

Looking back, the IRS press release announcing Lerner’s appointment is ironic:

“Lois is an integral part of the EO team and has successfully increased the IRS presence in the exempt community,” said Steven T. Miller, Commissioner of the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, of which EO is a part. “Her integrity, skills and judgment are exceptional and will allow us to continue to provide improved service and enhanced enforcement of the tax laws.”

Increased the IRS presence in the exempt community? I’d say she has. Integrity and judgment? Not so much.

But, snark aside, this release points at another deeper problem: Why should the IRS be aiming to increase its presence in the first place? The IRS is a massive parasitical agency. At best it may be necessary, but it should always be trying to minimize its presence, not enhance it.

(Previous post.)

One of the lines used to minimize the IRS scandal is that all the IRS’s misconduct is in the past. It’s not. The IRS was continuing to stall Tea Party applications as recently as this month.

UPDATE: Lois Lerner signed letters harassing Tea Party applicants in March 2012, long after the policy supposedly ended.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

An astonishing 69% of all adoptive family claiming the adoption tax credit were audited by the IRS.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

Doug Shulman, former commissioner of the IRS, visited the White House 118 times over two years. When asked why he made so many visits, the only one he says he can remember is the Easter Egg Roll.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

The Treasury IG’s investigation of the IRS scandal wasn’t the first investigation. The IRS conducted an internal investigation a year earlier, but hushed up the results:

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.’

Ah yes, the internal investigation, friend of corrupt bureaucrats everywhere.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”) (Via Ace of Spades.)

Now that we know that the DOJ’s press surveillance was not an isolated incident — DOJ spied on both the Associated Press and Fox News — it’s a sure bet that they spied on other news outlets as well. So who are they? I’m sure every journalist in every newsroom (except Chris Matthews, natch) is wondering if he or she was targeted.

One is CBS’s investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who has done exemplary reporting on both Gunwalker and Benghazi. Attkisson says her computers have been compromised both at work and at home. She isn’t pointing any fingers yet, but obviously, she has reason to be suspicious. (Here’s an interview of Attkisson discussing the matter.)

White House officials have “screamed” and “cussed” at Attkisson for her reporting in the past, and they have even pressured CBS to fire her. They have every reason to want to burn her sources, and have shown they have no qualms about doing so.

For what it’s worth, which ain’t much, the DOJ denies responsibility. Sort of. We’ve learned that we need to parse these denials very carefully. The DOJ spokesman says “to our knowledge”, which means only that he hasn’t been told. But we’ve already learned how this administration operates: no one is ever told anything so everyone can deny everything.

(Previous post.)

We’ve known for days that the IRS was lying when it claimed that its misconduct took place exclusively in Cincinnati. Now we learn that officials in Washington not only were involved, they actually managed the effort:

From the outset, Internal Revenue Service lawyers based in Washington, D.C., provided important guidance on the handling of tea-party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status, according to both IRS sources and the inspector general’s report released in mid May.

Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to exercise tight control over these applications, creating both a backlog in application processing and frustration among Cincinnati agents waiting for direction.

An IRS employee who asked not to be identified tells National Review Online that all members of the agency’s Technical Unit are based in Washington, D.C. A current list of Technical Unit managers provided by another IRS employee shows that all such managers are based at the agency’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in the District of Columbia, and the IRS confirmed, in a testy exchange with National Review Online, that the Technical Unit is “based in Washington.”

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

It wasn’t only the Associated Press that the Justice Department was spying on, they also spied on James Rosen, a reporter with Fox News:

When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.

Unlike the AP case, DOJ wasn’t only digging for information, they actually named Rosen as a criminal co-conspirator. Glenn Greenwald (a liberal, one hastens to point out, but a consistent defender of the Freedom of the Press) gives the administration both barrels:

What makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen – the journalist – committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information – something investigative journalists do every day – Rosen himself broke the law. . .

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.

And it wasn’t just Rosen either. The DOJ spied on two other Fox News personnel as well, another reporter and a producer.

UPDATE: At least five different phones at Fox News, and the phone of James Rosen’s parents.

(Previous post.)

As Peter Ingemi puts it, nothing says “this was just rogue agents in Cincinnati” like the top IRS official taking the Fifth.

UPDATE: Or, at Glenn Reynolds puts it: “The Obama administration finally finds a constitutional amendment it can get behind.”

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

I don’t think this breaks any new news, but it’s a good summary.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

President Obama’s wall of ignorance is unravelling.

We knew already that the White House Counsel was informed of the IRS’s misconduct, but (we’re told) did not tell the president. To explain this, we’ve been told that it is somehow unethical for the White House Counsel to reveal the information to the president. I’ve never heard of a legal principle that would keep the president’s lawyer from disclosing to the president, legal matters relevant to the president. Indeed, that sounds like the opposite of the White House Counsel’s job. But suppose we grant that one.

We know now that other top administration officials were informed, including the White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough. This is no different, in practice, than notifying the president himself. The Chief of Staff is the most powerful figure in the US government after the president. He runs the administration, controls access to the president, is present at all key meetings, and (what is most significant here) ensures that the president is kept informed of all matters of importance.

If McDonough didn’t inform Obama, it’s because he judged that Obama wouldn’t want to be informed. Making that judgement is his job, for which he was hand-picked by Obama.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

Politico has a good story summarizing the White House’s changing story regarding the IRS scandal to date. I want to focus on just one point, which I hadn’t seen before:

Friday, May 10: . . . Outside the White House, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said that he’d first learned of the details of the investigation from news reports. . .

Friday, May 17: Lew, during an interview with Bloomberg News, revealed he’d actually first learned of the inspector general’s investigation in March, adding that he hadn’t been aware of the details of the report until May 10.

Lew’s defenders will doubtless say he was truthful; learning of an investigation isn’t the same as knowing the details. In a narrow sense that may be so, although (a) the same people are invariably much less charitable when it comes to Republicans, and (b) we have only his word for it in any case.

Nevertheless, Lew’s statement seems misleading. He knew that the investigation involved scrutinization of conservative groups. With or without details, he knew the takeaway. But he did nothing, and told no one.

But suppose we give him a pass; this only emphasizes the key point. We are in territory where every statement made by any official must be scrutinized for loopholes (as well as outright lies). When President Obama says “I certainly did not know anything about the IG report,” observe that he is not saying that he knew nothing about the investigation, or the underlying misconduct.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”) (Via Instapundit.)

When outsiders visit a totalitarian regime, they are accompanied by minders from the regime, to make sure they don’t see anything they shouldn’t see, or talk to anyone they shouldn’t talk to. Now, journalists visiting the IRS are accompanied by minders too, presumably for the same reason.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

Gunwalker, the Obama administration’s biggest scandal of all, has been lying dormant for a while, while we wait for the courts to rule that the House can subpoena documents, but today brings a significant development:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.

The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.” . . .

In addition to Burke’s involvement in leaking the document, emails the IG uncovered show senior officials at the Department of Justice discussed smearing Dodson.

Don’t worry, I’m sure (we’ll be told that) Eric Holder and Barack Obama had no knowledge of this.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The Washington Post catches Eric Holder in a lie regarding the contempt citation against him:

The fierce exchanges between Rep. Darrell Issa and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday garnered a lot of attention, but there was also an interesting substantive point that was discussed: Did Ronald C. Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, make his own decision regarding whether to prosecute Holder for criminal contempt of Congress?

Holder said Machen “made the determination.” What does the evidence show?

The story is a little bit complicated, but here’s the key point:

The decision on whether to empanel a grand jury rested with Machen. But the letter from Cole [indicating that the DOJ would not take action] came even before the House had transmitted the contempt resolution to Machen.

As it happens, this not only smells bad, it’s probably illegal. Under the law, the decision rests with the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, and no one else. But when the DOJ breaks the law, who can take action?

POSTSCRIPT: The Post is willing to forgive Holder because his office later retracted his false statement. My readers can decide for themselves whether subsequently retracting a lie excuses it.

(Previous post.)

Barack Obama probably never ordered the IRS to target conservative and Christian tax-exempt applicants, just as Richard Nixon never ordered the Watergate break-in. (Although, as Jonah Goldberg points out, there’s no earthy reason why we should take his word for it.) But, just as Nixon did, Obama created the circumstances in which the misconduct was likely, perhaps even inevitable.

Three must-read columns make the case. Jonah Goldberg observes that, when Tea Party groups began making credible claims that they were being targeted by the IRS, he did nothing. He didn’t even take the minimal step of asking someone to look into it. Against that backdrop, his current profession of outrage over the IRS’s actions are clearly crocodile tears.

Goldberg goes on to recount the very clear signals that he sent, quite deliberately, that his political opponents should be silenced. Kimberly Strassel expands on the point, observing that Obama and his Democrats attacked the people funding opposition to Obama’s rule, and explicitly called for the IRS to scrutinize them.

Rand Simberg adds another key point. The IRS, unsurprisingly, is a very liberal organization, and the division that review tax-exempt applications is even further left. Thus, these people were sent a clear indication by the president and his party who the bad guys are, and they were receptive to that indication.

In such an environment, it was essential to make it clear that partisan bias was unacceptable. However, Barack Obama sent the exact opposite message. He liked to joke about misusing his office (e.g., revenge audits, secret provisions), he called for his supporters to take “revenge” and “punish our enemies“, and he warned his enemies that he was “keeping score“.

To sum up, you have a sharply partisan IRS, unchecked by higher scrutiny, and being told clearly who the enemy is and that persecuting that enemy is morally appropriate. Under such circumstances they would likely want to persecute their party’s enemies. The only remaining necessary element is the ability to do so without facing repercussions.

And, of course, they had that too. We now know that the Obama administration is run on a “see-no-evil, hear-no-evil” basis. White House officials are careful to insulate the president and his key deputies from any knowledge of his administration’s wrongdoing: When the White House was informed of Gunwalker, those informed made sure the information went no higher (or so we are told, anyway). Ditto the IRS scandal. And when the Gunwalker misconduct became public, the White House stonewalled the investigation, and continues to do so to this day.

Furthermore, Obama administration officials are never punished for their misconduct. The persons responsible for Gunwalker were not punished; indeed most were promoted, while the whistleblowers were punished. The same is true in the IRS scandal. The woman in charge of the key IRS office has been promoted to run the IRS’s Obamacare office. The high-profile firing of Steven Miller (the acting IRS commissioner) was bogus. In fact, he had been in the position for just over a week, and was due to step down in less than a month anyway.

In short, people doing Obama’s never-explicitly-ordered bidding are safe from punishment. He has their back. If only the people who defend our country from terrorists were so secure.

(Previous post. “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

If you’re enjoying the IRS scandal, just wait until the IRS takes up its role as Obamacare enforcer. I’ve heard a lot of people make that remark since the IRS scandal broke, but it takes on even more currency with this revelation:

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.

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.

That’s just great.

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The Associated Press reveals another pattern in the IRS’s targeting of conservative and Christian organizations:

There’s an irony in the Internal Revenue Service’s crackdown on conservative groups.

The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was underway. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right. . .

Why would the IRS leave the big guys alone? I think Ed Morrissey has the explanation: the big guys have the resources to defend themselves.

If you were looking to prevent abuse of the tax code by bogus tax-exempt application, you would start with the biggest applicants, because those are potentially the biggest abusers. On the other hand, if you were looking to suppress as much Tea Party activity as possible, you wouldn’t waste your time on a few well-funded organizations that could fight back, you would concentrate on suppressing the small grassroots organizations that had no recourse. And we know now which route they chose.

(Previous post: “Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”)

“Please detail the content of the members of your organization’s prayers.”

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Another IRS scandal:

The Internal Revenue Service stole and improperly accessed 60 million medical records after raiding a California company, according to a legal complaint filed in March with the California superior court for San Diego. Fifteen IRS agents are now facing a class-action lawsuit in the matter.

“In a case involving solely a tax matter involving a former employee of the company, these agents stole more than 60,000,000 medical records of more than 10,000,000 Americans” the complaint, filed by attorney Robert Barnes, alleges. “No search warrant authorized the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to the IRS search.”

Soon the IRS won’t have to steal medical records. As the enforcer of Obamacare, they will have many of them already.

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Senate Democrats have put a hold on Rand Paul’s (R-KT) resolution condemning the IRS for targeting conservatives.

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The IRS now admits that the supposedly extemporaneous revelation of its misconduct was actually staged.

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Despite the IRS’s self-serving claims, their misconduct was not limited to a single office in Cincinnati:

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.

The Washington Post also found corroboration of the allegation that a special task force was looking at conservative applications:

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.

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In January, the DC Court of Appeals eviscerated the president’s recess appointment power. While we wait for that case to arrive at the Supreme Court, another court has now invalidated President Obama’s most bogus recess appointment, that of Craig Becker to the NLRB. I haven’t had a chance to look at the opinion, so I don’t know yet if they went as far as the DC Court of Appeals in sweeping away the recess appointment power nearly in its entirety.

This is a good occasion to remember that this was a massive unforced error on Obama’s part. He didn’t need to pick this particular fight, and if he hadn’t, the courts would not have had the occasion to look carefully as what the recess appointment power has become. But he wanted a fight, and now he’s been hoisted by his own petard for it.

It got buried by the IRS’s admission of political targeting, but another scandal erupted last Friday. The Obama administration is worried by Obamacare’s stubborn refusal to become popular, so they want to run propaganda in support of it. Strangely, Republicans refuse to appropriate funds for Obamacare propaganda, and the administration apparently doesn’t want to waste the tens of billions in its Obamacare slush fund.

Instead, we learned Friday, they sent out the execrable HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to shake down health care companies, the very same companies that Sebelius’s agency regulates:

[HHS Spokesman Jason] Young said that Sebelius did not solicit for funds directly from industries that HHS regulates, such as insurance companies and hospitals, but rather asked them to contribute in whatever way they can.

But the industry official who had knowledge of the calls but did not participate directly in them said there was a clear insinuation by the administration that the insurers should give financially to the nonprofits.

Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which researches government ethics issues, said she was troubled by Sebelius’s activities because the secretary seemed to be “using the power of government to compel giving or insinuate that giving is going to be looked at favorably by the government.”

The House of Representatives is opening an investigation. Those guys are going to be busy.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Washington Examiner reports:

“In one case, the IRS withheld approval of an application for tax exempt status for Coalition for Life of Iowa. In a phone call to Coalition for Life of Iowa leaders on June 6, 2009, the IRS agent ‘Ms. Richards’ told the group to send a letter to the IRS with the entire board’s signatures stating that, under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood,” the Thomas More Society announced today. “Once the IRS received this letter, their application would be approved.”

It’s clear now that pretty much anyone the left hates got targeted.

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The IRS claims that it was targeting conservatives to cope with a surge of tax-exempt applications. We already knew this is untrue because their strategy for identifying conservatives took more effort, not less; and because an even greater surge of tax-exempt applications for labor groups went unscrutinized.

Now you can add this: When the IRS started targeting conservatives, there was no surge of tax-exempt applications. In fact, it was just the opposite:

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010.

In fact, applications were declining, data show.

What was happening in 2010 was the rise of the first small-government populist movement in modern history. Something had to be done.

UPDATE: A bushel of Pinocchios.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The IRS’s inspector general knows, but he won’t tell us:

What kicked off the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups? The Treasury Department’s Inspector General apparently knows but the rest of us cannot. His report on the scandal includes three timelines of events, but in each case, the first item in the timeline has been redacted.

Another reason why we need a truly independent investigation.

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The New Republic says that the IRS scandal is really the Tea Party’s fault, because . . . Well, honestly I don’t even understand their argument, because it seems as though they are saying that it’s the Tea Party’s fault because they were being paranoid that the IRS might persecute them.

In any case, the New Republic has been defending fascists since the day Herbert Croly founded it, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect any different.

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The IRS claims (joined by Journolist lefties) that its enhanced scrutiny of conservative groups was not partisan, but just an ill-advised labor-saving strategy. Pretty much no one believes that anyway, but here’s proof: Tea Party groups were not the largest segment of the increase in tax-exempt applications. Labor groups were:

While IRS officials attributed the agency’s heavy scrutiny on conservative groups to the spike in applications over the past few years, fresh reports and figures are raising questions about whether the agency knowingly applied a double standard.

A highly anticipated watchdog report, released late Tuesday by the inspector general’s office, depicted an even bigger spike in applications for tax-exempt status from a type of group that includes labor organizations. Yet, according to the report, the conservative groups were the ones singled out for special treatment.

“Questions”? More like answers.

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While IRS was targeting Tea Party groups for special scrutiny and intimidation, liberal groups were put on the fast track:

In February 2010, the Champaign Tea Party in Illinois received approval of its tax-exempt status from the IRS in 90 days, no questions asked.

That was the month before the Internal Revenue Service started singling out Tea Party groups for special treatment. There wouldn’t be another Tea Party application approved for 27 months.

In that time, the IRS approved perhaps dozens of applications from similar liberal and progressive groups, a USA TODAY review of IRS data shows.

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with liberal-sounding names had their applications approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” the liberal groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.

We pretty much knew this already, but it’s good to have it laid out in black and white.

POSTSCRIPT: Right now, the left is looking frantically for anyone on the left who can claim to have been mistreated by the IRS during the Bush administration. Given how badly the IRS treats everyone, I’m frankly surprised they haven’t located someone already. This makes me wonder if this favoritism goes back years.

UPDATE (5/20): The IRS commissioner confirms (see the video at bottom) that no left-oriented keywords (e.g., “progressive” or “organizing”) were used for targeting.

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A Wall Street Journal op-ed has a brief history of political targeting by the IRS. The prime offenders were Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, and Clinton. (I suppose Woodrow Wilson didn’t bother with the IRS; he just locked up his opponents for sedition.) It’s interesting that in that group, Nixon is the only one most journalists are able to remember.

There’s also this appalling statistic:

The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee.

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It wasn’t only the IRS that gave special scrutiny to conservative organizations; the EPA did it too:

Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. . . Government agencies are supposed to waive fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit. . .

For 92 percent of requests from green groups, the EPA cooperated by waiving fees for the information. Those requests came from the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, The Waterkeeper Alliance, Greenpeace, Southern Environmental Law Center and the Center for Biological Diversity. . .

CEI, on the other hand, had its requests denied 93 percent of the time. . . Similarly, requests from conservative groups Judicial Watch and National Center for Public Policy Research were approved half the time, and all requests from Franklin Center and the Institute for Energy Research were denied.

I’m sure the EPA will deny this, just as the IRS did. The House investigators ought to roll this into their inquiry too.

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The IRS claims they put a stop to the practice of special obstacles for Tea Party groups in 2011, but did they? A letter the IRS sent to the attorney for the Albuquerque Tea Party just last month suggests otherwise.

Also, the letter came from Washington, DC, not from Cincinnati, which is where we’re told all the misconduct took place.

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Jon Stewart:

I didn’t realize that apologies are sufficient in IRS-related issues!

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Is the stonewall beginning?

IRS Won’t Say If It Will Comply With Congressional Demand for All Communications and Names Involved in Discriminating Against Tea Party Groups

The Internal Revenue Service has given no indication to the House Ways and Means Committee about whether it will respond to the committee’s demand, delivered in writing last Friday, that the agency hand over copies of all internal communications containing the words “tea party,” “patriot,” or “conservative” and the names and titles of all IRS officials involved in discriminating against tea party and conservative groups when they submitted applications for tax-exempt status.

IRS spokesmen also did not respond to repeated emailed and telephone inquiries that CNSNews.com made between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning asking if the IRS intended to comply with the committee’s demand–and if not, why not.

This would be a great time for Congress to have subpoena power.

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