Thread: George Will: IRS Actions Against Conservatives An Impeachable Offense - Video

George Will: IRS Actions Against Conservatives An Impeachable Offense

Video at the Page Link:

MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC NEWS: I want to start with you George Will and the IRS. What a week the IRS, look at these headlines. IRS targeted tea party groups for scrutiny. Searching words like "patriot," "tea party." Does this sound like a familiar story to you George Will?

GEORGE WILL: Mr. Hicks, when he was in Libya said his jaw dropped at the explanation back here. This was a job dropping moment. In a response to a question at an American Bar Association Convention, a second level IRS person said, oh yeah by the way, we did target these people. Not progressives.

RADDATZ: Which apparently they've known about for a while.

WILL: Oh the Tea Party people have known about this and have been working on this.

RADDATZ: And the IRS.

WILL: But they said a) it was inadvertent, just some odd underlings out in Cincinnati and who did this. And there was no political motive whatever involved. Now the question is, how stupid do they think we are? Just imagine, Donna Brazile, if the George W. Bush administration had IRS underlings, out in Cincinnati of course, saying, we're going to target groups with the word "progressive" in their title. We would have all hell breaking loose.

May I read you something from an ancient document?

RADDATZ: Yes you may. I would be surprised if you didn't.

WILL: This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer here in Washington. "He has through his subordinates and agents endeavored to cause in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner." Section 1, Article 2, the Impeachment Articles of Richard Nixon. (This Week, May 12, 2013)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...e_offense.html

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McConnell Demands Probe of IRS Tea Party Targeting

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/irs...o_code=13750-1

Obama ‘on the same page as Richard Nixon’

Posted on 12 May, 2013 by Amy


By Joe Klein

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his Administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office — although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private-sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the midreaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety-net programs, like Social Security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the ‘absolutely inappropriate’ actions by ‘frontline people’ were not driven by partisan motives.
Does anyone actually believe this?

Yet again, we have an example of Democrats simply not managing the government properly and with discipline. This is just poisonous at a time of skepticism about the efficacy of government. And the President should know this: the absence of scandal is not the presence of competence. His unwillingness to concentrate — and I mean concentrate obsessively — on making sure that government is managed efficiently will be part of his legacy.

Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.
http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/11/irs-mess/

http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/05/1...richard-nixon/

GOVERNMENT

GLENN BECK’S WITHERING RESPONSE TO THE IRS ADMITTING IT TARGETED THE 9/12 PROJECT, CONSERVATIVE GROUPS

May. 11, 2013 11:07pm Erica Ritz

Glenn Beck (File Photo)

Glenn Beck issued a response Saturday to the Internal Revenue Service’s shocking admissionthat it has unfairly targeted conservative groups, pointing out that he and his news organization have been reporting on the issue for over a year.

“In February 2012, TheBlaze first reported what the IRS now admits to – that they unfairly targeted conservative groups including the 9/12 project. It is nice to see everyone else playing catch-up and finally asking the same questions that TheBlaze started raising over a year ago,” Beck’s statement read.

As early as February 14, 2012, TheBlaze’s Mike Opelka published a story titled: “Is Obama Using the IRS to Silence Opposition Voices?”

In it, Opelka detailed the emails TheBlaze has received from conservative groups “alerting us to the oppressive demands being sent to them from the IRS.” Among other things, the IRS apparently wanted hard copies of every social media post; the name, address, and corporate federal ID of members; and the time, location and content schedule of each event, including printouts of the text of every speech given.

The IRS apologized on Friday for singling out groups with words like “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12 Project” in the run-up to the 2012 election, and an IRS watchdog organization claims senior IRS officials knew about the matter in 2011.

The issue hits close to home for Beck, who started the 9/12 project as a volunteer based, non-partisan movement focusing on building and uniting our communities back to the place they were on 9/12/2001.

And Beck wasn’t the only one to issue a public statement on the scandal.

Sarah Palin also weighed in on Facebook, saying Obama likely appreciated the IRS’ efforts during the election before warning:

Americans should remember that this same corrupt IRS will be in charge of enforcing Obamacare. And this same inept and corrupt government will supposedly secure our now unsecured borders in advance of immigration reform and will implement a completely ethical and non-political IPAB panel to make life and death health care decisions for you and your family.

Forgive me for not trusting these big government promises any more than I trust the White House’s latest Benghazi spin or the IRS’ fairness.

She concluded with a word of inspiration, saying the so-called “fundamental transformation of America” is only temporary.

“This attempted transformation into a disheartened, weakened, unrecognizable nation is so far below anything Americans deserve,” she wrote. “It becomes permanent only if we throw up our hands and surrender to the corruption and cover-ups.”
–

Related:

• Is Obama Using The IRS To Silence Opposition Voices?
  
• SHOCK: IRS Admits to Targeting Conservative Groups During 2012 Election, Apologizes
  
• Watchdog: Senior IRS Officials Knew Conservative Groups Were Being Targeted in 2011

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...vative-groups/

Rep. Mike Rogers: The Revelation that the Obama IRS Was Targeting Conservatives “Should Send a Chill Up Your Spine”

Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, May 12, 2013, 9:08 PM

Video at the Page Link:

Rep. Mike Rogers told FOX News today that the revelations that the Obama IRS was targeting conservatives “should send a chill up your spine.”

FOX News reported:

Washington Republicans on Sunday characterized the IRS targeting Tea Party groups and other conservative political organizations as “chilling” and intimidating acts that heighten Americans’ mistrust in government.

Their comments follow the IRS acknowledgment Friday that the agency targeted such groups during the 2012 election cycle to see whether they were violating their tax-exempt status — a revelation followed by a report that such activity dated back to the previous year.

“The conclusion that the IRS came to is that they did have agents who were engaged in intimidation of political groups,” Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers told “Fox News Sunday.” “I don’t care if you’re a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine. It needs to have a full investigation.”

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013...up-your-spine/

IRS Probe Expands To Groups Opposed To Gov’t, Teaching Constitution

Posted on 12 May, 2013 by Amy


By Juliet Eilperin

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” according to the appendix in the IG report, which was requested by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has yet to be released.

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday he’s not satisfied with the Obama administration’s handling of the controversy. The IG report was “leaked by the IRS. to try to spin the output,” Issa said, and lawmakers now need to go through the full report so they can “see what the instituted changes need to be to make this not happen again.

The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for social welfare groups — which file for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code — until May 17, 2012, according to the timeline in the inspector general’s report.

At that point, the IRS again updated its criteria to focus on “organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention (raising questions as to exempt purpose and/or excess private benefit.)”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g-report-says/

http://gopthedailydose.com/2013/05/1...-constitution/

THE IRS SCANDAL GROWS BROADER AND DEEPER



By: John Hayward
5/13/2013 09:44 AM

A few conspiracy-minded observers have wondered if the Obama Administration dropped the IRS political-audit scandal to distract attention from the Benghazi scandal. It’s starting to look as if the reverse conspiracy theory would be more plausible, because the IRS thing is going nuclear. Four days in, and we still haven’t heard a single word from the President who bends our ears so relentlessly when he’s got an agenda to push, even as more high-profile commentators – most recently George Will, on ABC’s This Week - are reminding us that Nixon’s fall was partly due to just this sort of politicized abuse of Internal Revenue Service power.

We’ve learned that the target list for these political IRS audits was far broader than we initially thought. Fox News got its hands on a timeline prepared by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that shows this scurrilous operation growing even faster than most government programs do:

The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and “patriot” groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to “make America a better place to live.” It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of “how the country is being run.”

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in “limiting/expanding government,” education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform.

In other words, basically every group that organized dissent against the Obama regime. The only bright side to this scandal is that it might win Obama some respect and admiration from the likes of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Bashar Assad.

The Jewish Press adds suspicions that pro-Israel Jewish groups were also targeted for audits:

For example, in 2010, the passionately pro-Israel organization Z STREET filed a lawsuit against the IRS, claiming it had been told by an IRS agent that because the organization was “connected to Israel,” its application for tax-exempt status would receive additional scrutiny. This admission was made in response to a query about the lengthy reveiw of Z STREET’s tax exempt status application.

In addition, the IRS agent told a Z STREET representative that the applications of some of those 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.”

Z STREET’s lawsuit claims the IRS activity constitutes viewpoint discrimination and a violation of its constitutionally protected right of free speech. The organization is seeking, among other things, complete disclosure to the public regarding the origin, development, approval, substance and application of the IRS policy to treat pro-Israel organizations differently than it does other organizations.

And at least one purely religious Jewish organization, one not focused on Israel, was the recipient of bizarre and highly inappropriate questions about Israel. Those questions also came from the same non-profit division of the IRS at issue for inappropriately targeting politically conservative groups. The IRS required that Jewish organization to state “whether [it] supports the existence of the land of Israel,” and also demanded the organization “[d]escribe [its] religious belief system toward the land of Israel.”

The hilariously clumsy lie that all this was the work of a few “low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati” didn’t make it through the weekend, as the Wall Street Journal cites more leaks from that Treasury Inspector General report to announce that “a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted – nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn’t targeting conservative groups.”

The report concludes that “IRS senior leadership was not aware of this level of specific details” when Shulman gave testimony to Congress in March 2012, a reference to the detailed timeline of the scandal that Fox News described. But that’s only the “senior” leadership, and the IG only absolves them of knowing very “specific details.”

The high-ranking (but not “senior”) official who did know what was going on, according to documents obtained by the IG, was Lois Lerner, who heads the agency’s tax-exempt organizations division. She’s also the one who introduced the phrase “low-level employees in Cincinnati” to the lexicon of American political scandals. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lerner was “raising concerns” about the politicized audits internally, as far back as July 2011, even as she somehow failed to relate these concerns to congressional Republicans who were investigating complaints from the targeted groups. The Associated Press says Lerner knew exactly what was going on, having been briefed on specifics during a July 29, 2011 meeting.
Not only President Obama, but the entire Democrat Party has been eerily silent about this outrage… to the point where Chuck Todd of NBC News actually made the suggestion I alluded to at the beginning of this post: the Democrats were too punch-drunk from the Benghazi hearings to wrap their rattled brains around the IRS scandal:



What a great defensive strategy! Hey, man, our Party has grown so corrupt under Obama that you can’t expect us to focus on any one scandal. We can’t say anything about the IRS because we’re still working on our Benghazi excuses.

Republicans have not been as quiet as their friends across the aisle. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) told Fox News Sunday, “The conclusion that the IRS came to is that they did have agents who were engaged in intimidation of political groups. I don’t care if you’re a conservative, a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, this should send a chill up your spine. It needs to have a full investigation.”

“This is truly outrageous and it contributes to the profound distrust that the American people have in government,” Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) told CNN’s State of the Union. “It is absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review. And I think that it’s very disappointing that the president hasn’t personally condemned this.”

Collins also said she wasn’t buying the “rogue IRS employees” excuse, since “groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight Committee, promised further investigations, and dismissed the IRS’ weak efforts to get ahead of the story during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. In fact, it sounds like Issa might be launching an investigation into the behavior of IRS officials just over the past weekend, as they tried to get the spin machines churning.

“This is something you have to institute changes to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Issa. ”There has to be accountability for the people who did it. And quite frankly, up until a few days ago, there’s got to be accountability for people who were telling lies about it being done. And lastly, to be honest, one of the most offensive parts is, my committee and Jim Jordan and I instigated this investigation, got the IG to do the investigation – and before the IG’s report comes to the public or to Congress as required by law, it’s leaked by the IRS to try to spin the output.

This mea culpa is not an honest one.“

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/05/1...er-and-deeper/

http://www.alipac.us/f9/glenn-beck-f...2/#post1344174

Is this the way that Harry Reid got Romney's tax file??? Propublica is a liberal organization 504, that is funded by one of Obama's biggest donors. This article claims that the Cincinnati office was the sole culprit, just like the administration.

IRS Office That Targeted Tea Party Also Disclosed Confidential Docs From Conservative Groups

by Kim Barker and Justin Elliott
ProPublica, May 13, 2013, 5:40 p.m.

President Barack Obama at a news conference Monday during which he addressed the IRS. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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.

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.

http://www.propublica.org/article/ir...fidential-docs

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