Thread: IRS Employees Ordered to Send Tea Party Cases to Obama Political Appointee

IRS Employees Ordered to Send Tea Party Cases to Obama Political Appointee


July 17, 2013 - 2:31 PM

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By Ryan Kierman and Michael W. Chapman
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(CNSNews.com) – IRS employees were ordered by their superiors -- including IRS official Lois Lerner who pleaded the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination before Congress -- to send certain Tea Party tax-exemption applications to the IRS Chief Counsel's office, which is headed by Obama political appointee William Wilkins, according to a letter released today by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

“As a part of this ongoing investigation, the Committees have learned that the IRS Chief Counsel’s office in Washington, D.C. has been closely involved in some of the applications,” reads the letter. “Its involvement and demands for information about political activity during the 2010 election cycle appear to have caused systematic delays in the processing of Tea Party applications.”

[B]It further states, “ased on his decades of experience, [career IRS official Carter Hull] determined he had enough facts to make recommendations whether to approve or deny the applications . … However, Mr. Hull’s recommendations were not carried out.

Instead, according to Michael Seto, the head of Mr. Hull’s unit in Washington, Lois Lerner instructed that the Tea Party applications go through a multi-layer review that included her senior advisor and the Chief Counsel’s office.”

William Wilkins, the IRS chief counsel, was appointed by President Obama to his position in 2009, and is one of two politically appointed employees at the IRS.

IRS official Lois Lerner is sworn in on Capitol Hill on May 22, 2013, before a House Oversight Committee hearing, where she pleaded the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

The nine-page letter was sent to IRS Principal Deputy Commissioner Daniel Werfel and was signed by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Way and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.).

The letter is based upon interviews by the Committees of several long-term IRS employees, including Carter Hull, a tax-law specialist and 501c(4) expert with 48 years of experience at the IRS, according to the letter. From his interview, “the Committees were informed that Tea Party applications under his review were, in an unusual turn of events, referred to the Chief Counsel’s office for further review at the direction of Lois Lerner, the head of the Exempt Organizations division. The IRS Chief Counsel is one of two politically appointed officials in the agency.”

Hull is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Thursday, July 18, along with several other IRS employees cited in today's letter.
Back in April 2010, according to the letter, Hull was instructed by his superiors to analyze several Tea Party tax-exemption applications as “test” cases to determine the best way for the IRS, as Hull explained, to “approach these organizations, and how [the IRS] should handle them.”

Hull sent development letters to the Tea Party groups requesting additional information, gathered and analyzed the data, and then concluded he had enough facts to make a decision on whether the groups had engaged in a permissible amount of political activity.

IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkens. (Photo: IRS)

“However, Mr. Hull’s recommendations were not carried,” states the letter. Instead, as the head of Hull’s unit in Washington, D.C., Michael Seto, related, Lois Lerner “sent me an email saying that when these cases need to go through multi-tire review and they will eventually have to go [through her staff] and the chief counsel’s office.”Hull also told the committees that Lerner’s senior adviser instructed him in the winter of 2010-2011 that the IRS Chief Counsel’s office would have to review the applications. Hull stated this was the first time in his career he had been told to send applications to Lerner’s senior adviser. As the committee reported:

Q: “Have you ever sent a case to [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] before?”
Hull: “Not to my knowledge.”
Q: “This is the only case you remember?”
Hull: “Uh-huh.”
Q: “Correct?”
Hull: “This is the only case I remember sending directly to [ the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner].”
…
Q: “Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?”
Hull: “She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go through the Chief Counsel.”
Q: “The IRS Chief Counsel?”
Hull: “The IRS Chief Counsel.”

The letter from the Committees to Werfel goes on to state that after a “substantial delay,” the Chief Counsel’s office finally met with Hull, with Lerner’s senior adviser, and with other Washington officials “to discuss these test case applications.”

Acting IRS Commisioner Daniel Werfel (AP Photo)

“During the intervening months, these applications lingered,” states the letter. Three years after Hull had been instructed to review the Tea Party applications, he told the Committees that he did not know whether those applications were still open or closed.

Hull’s superviser, Ronald Shoemaker, also was interviewed by the Committees. He stated that from that August 2011 meeting, the Chief Counsel’s office was still seeking more information about the Tea Party applicants’ political activities, specifically activities “leading up to the 2010 election.”

In that election, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and a Republican, John Boehner of Ohio, became the new Speaker.

As Shoemaker recounted to the Committees’ staff, the Chief Counsel’s office “indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period; that that had not occurred and that that’s what was missing. … [R]ight before the election period. In other words, immediately before.”

The letter to Werfel says, “the lengthy and unusual review of the test applications in Washington created a bottleneck and caused the delay of other Tea Party applications in Cincinnati. Indeed, multiple IRS employees in Cincinnati have told the Committee they were waiting on guidance from Washington on how to move the applications forward.”
Cindy Thomas, head of the IRS Cincinnati office, repeatedly asked officials in Washington, D.C. for guidance on the applications but did not receive definitive responses.

As the Committees’ interview reports:
Q: “So the cases that [Cincinnati employee] was working from October 2010 through September 2011 were still in kind of a holding pattern awaiting guidance from Washington? Is that right?”
Thomas: “That’s correct.”
Q: “And were there additional applications that were coming at this time?”
Thomas: “To my knowledge, yes.”
Q: “And those were also in a holding pattern?”
Thomas: “that’s correct.”
Q: “Pending guidance from Washington?”
Thomas: “That’s correct.”

In conclusion, the letter from the Committees to the IRS’s Werfel requests further documents and communications between or among employees of the IRS’s Chief Counsel’s office, the Treasury Department’s General Counsel’s office, and the Executive Office of the President between Feb. 1, 2010 and the present concerning all tax-exempt applications.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/irs-...ical-appointee

IRS Targeting Reached Office Of Obama Political Appointee (Video)

by DEBRA HEINE
17 Jul 2013

The IRS controversy is heating up, again, with new revelations, today, from career IRS officials in Washington DC.

New testimony from career IRS officials revealed that the Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner overruled the judgment of a career Washington, D.C. IRS lawyer and ordered Tea Party cases to go through a multi-layer review that included her senior advisor and the IRS Chief Counsel’s office.

“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 applications that the agency had screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.

Another Oversight and Reform hearing on the improper IRS targeting of conservatives is scheduled for tomorrow morning at 11:00 am. Eastern.
Giddy-up!

Darrell Issa, the Chairman of the of the House Oversight Committee, appeared on Fox News with Martha MacCallum to discuss the upcoming hearing.

He repeated his contention that the targeting was not isolated to Cincinnati, "but in fact went to Washington, and then went up the chain from there."
And he noted that the biggest obstruction into the committee's investigation is ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings, "who keeps saying that we know everything we need to know and it's over, and when corrected, he takes a little while, and then comes back and says there's nothing there, there." He promised that the notion that progressive groups were targeted, too would be dispelled once and for all, by IG Russell George's testimony.



http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2...ampaign=Buffer

The hearing is Today!
IRS lawyer says scandal was overseen by D.C., names names

9:32 PM 07/17/2013

Patrick Howley
Investigative Reporter

Top IRS officials in Washington, D.C. planned and oversaw the agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups, according to the 72-year old retiring IRS lawyer who will testify Thursday before the House Oversight Committee.

Retiring IRS lawyer Carter C. Hull implicated the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, headed by Obama appointee William J. Wilkins, and Lois Lerner, the embattled head of the IRS’ exempt organizations office, in the IRS targeting scandal and made clear that the targeting started in Washington, according to leaked interviews that Hull granted to the Oversight Committee in advance of Thursday’s hearing.

Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George will return to Republican chairman Darrell Issa’s committee Thursday along with two central characters in the IRS saga: Hull and Cincinnati-based IRS employee Elizabeth Hofacre, who previously gave Hull’s name to congressional investigators, fingering him as her Washington-based supervisor.

Hull is naming names.

“In April 2010, Mr. Hull was instructed to scrutinize certain Tea Party applications by one of his superiors in Washington. According to Mr. Hull, these applications were used as ‘test’ cases and assigned to him because of his expertise and because IRS leadership in Washington was ‘trying to find out how [the IRS] should approach these organizations, and how [the IRS] should handle them,’” according to Oversight Committee documents.

“According to Hull’s testimony, Ms. Lerner…gave an atypical instruction that the Tea Party applications undergo special scrutiny that included an uncommon multi-layer review that involved a top advisor to Lerner as well as the Chief Counsel’s office,” according to Oversight Committee documents.
In August 2012, the “Chief Counsel’s office held a meeting with Mr. Hull, Ms. Lerner’s senior advisor, and other Washington officials to discuss these test applications.”


Read Letter At:
2013.07.17 DEI Jordan Camp Boustany to Werfel REDACTED


Lerner eventually told Hull that tea party applications would have to go through a round of review at the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, which “created a bottleneck and caused the delay of other Tea Party applications in Cincinnati,” according to Oversight Committee documents.

Former IRS official Michael Seto also told investigators about an email Lerner sent laying out her new review process, in which tea party applications would have to go through her staff, according to Oversight documents.

As The Daily Caller reported, Hull instructed Hofacre’s Cincinnati office, which oversaw audits of tax-exempt nonprofit groups, to target tea party groups and provided her a copy of a letter he wrote to a conservative group requesting additional information in an audit. Hull signed a May 12, 2010 letter to the Albuquerque Tea Party, grilling the group on the recent content of its newsletters and its website.

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” Hofacre told congressional investigators.

Hull is retiring from the IRS this summer, and he recently took down his Facebook page after he was publicly exposed.

Hull’s interviews indicate that he is unlikely to plead the Fifth, as some lawyers involved in the scandal were expecting.

“The big question here is: will Carter Hull plead the Fifth?” Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which represents tea party plaintiffs in a class-action suit against the IRS, told the Daily Caller prior to the leaking of his interview transcripts. “We have letter after letter from him proving that he targeted tea party groups.
Will he acknowledge the existence of these letters? Or will he do what Lois Lerner did and plead the Fifth?”

“In her case, unsuccessfully,” Sekulow added.

Lerner, the Washington-based IRS official who originally apologized on behalf of the agency in May, attempted to plead the Fifth Amendment in an Oversight hearing, but committee members, led by Republican chairman Darrell Issa, ruled that she had already waived her Fifth Amendment rights by making a statement in a hearing attesting to her innocence.

It is unclear at this time whether Hull and Hofacre ever met in person prior to Thursday’s hearing.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/17/ir...c-names-names/