Thread: Embattled IRS chief counsel met with Obama 2 days before agency changed targeting cri

Embattled IRS chief counsel met with Obama 2 days before agency changed targeting criteria

07/22/2013
Patrick Howley
Investigative Reporter

The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.

On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.

Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS sent letters demanding groups’ training materials, personal information on groups’ donors and college interns, and even the content of a religious group’s prayers.

Wilkins’ meeting with Obama on April 23 was attended by 13 people.

Wilkins, who is one of only two Obama appointees at the IRS, is a former lobbyist with the firm WilmerHale, where he spent his time “counseling nonprofit organizations, business entities, and investment funds on tax compliance, business transactions, and government investigations.” At the firm, Wilkins defended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Chicago-based United Church of Christ from a 2008 investigation into whether Wright violated his church’s nonprofit status by speaking in favor of Obama. Wilkins successfully defended Wright’s church pro bono.

The White House did not return a request for comment.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/22/em...ting-criteria/

http://www.alipac.us/f12/judicial-wa...etween-259700/

Daily Caller: IRS official met with Obama two days before advising colleagues on how to target conservatives

Published by: Dan Calabrese on Tuesday July 23rd, 2013


By DAN CALABRESE - Dots connected.

Nice piece of dot-connecting by investigative reporter Patrick Howley at the Daily Caller, whose review of the White House visitor logs casts serious doubt on the notion that Obama had nothing to do with IRS targeting of conservative groups. The nuts and bolts are these: William Wilkins is the IRS chief counsel, and one of only two IRS officials directly appointed by Obama. He's the one who issued guidance to others at the IRS about how to target Tea Party groups and other conservatives. And two days before issuing a new set of guidelines to this effect in April, guess where he was:

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.

On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.

Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS sent letters demanding groups’ training materials, personal information on groups’ donors and college interns, and even the content of a religious group’s prayers.

Wilkins’ meeting with Obama on April 23 was attended by 13 people.

So Obama meets with Wilkins on April 23, then Schulman is at the White House on April 24, although we don't know exactly who he was meeting with. Two straight days of top-level IRS officials at the White House. And on the third day, out come the new guidelines for targeting conservatives, issued directly by Wilkins.

But don't worry, it was just some rogue employees in Cincinnati.

Howley did nice work here, and more uncovering of the truth in this scandal will have to come from people like Howley because - as we showed you recently - the MSM have decided in all their groupthink wisdom to declare this scandal "fizzled" and ignore it from this point forward.

They think the inclusion of a few liberal-sounding words on the watchword list absolves the IRS and Obama entirely from culpability for what actually happened to conservative groups around the country. Or more to the point, they think it gives them cover to ignore the story, which is what they've really wanted to do all along.

It's clear the White House was closely involved with all this, and conservative media will have to keep pressing on it, as will Congressman Darrell Issa in his investigation, because the MSM refuses to do so.

http://www.caintv.com/daily-caller-irs-official-met

Obama IRS Scandal Updates: Edict from the President?

If you want to know why Judicial Watch has led the fight to obtain every White House visitor log, look no further than the still-growing IRS scandal, where the agency targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, improperly disclosed confidential financial information from these organizations and targeted conservative individuals with unnecessary audits.

Per The Daily Caller:
The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012.

On April 25, 2012, Wilkins' office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit "additional comments on the draft guidance" for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general's report.

The Daily Caller also notes that "Wilkins' boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs."

Raise any red flags with you? It certainly does with me. The IRS man behind the targeting of Tea Party and other conservatives met with President Obama two days before the attack plan was issued. And his boss, then-IRS Commissioner Shulman, met with the president the very next day. And they did not discuss this new plan?

GovernmentExec.com called the revelation a potential "smoking gun." I tend to agree. At the very least, President Obama needs to personally address exactly what was discussed during these meetings. His silence will only deepen suspicions that the president himself issued the order, in a scandal the administration attempted unsuccessfully to pin on the local Cincinnati IRS office.

(Incidentally, Wilkins also has ties to Obama's nut-house spiritual advisor and life coach, the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright. Click here for more on that.)

As evidence emerged seemingly suggested that the IRS scandal could have been initiated from the very top, new allegations also surfaced this week that IRS targeting was more far-reaching than initially believed. In addition to Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status, new evidence suggests that conservative organizations that had already received tax-exempt status were also subject to scrutiny. Judicial Watch was proud to sign a Free Congress-led coalition letter with nearly 80 other conservative organizations and activists demanding a broadened investigation into this very issue. This coalition got results.

Fox News had the story:
House Republicans want an inspector general to open up a new front in an investigation of the Internal Revenue Service, focusing on the agency's treatment of conservative groups that were already granted tax-exempt status.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan charged Monday the IRS targeted those groups for extra scrutiny.

Among the organizations allegedly targeted: The Leadership Institute and the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute.

The Leadership Institute, operating as a tax-exempt organization since 1979, was audited in 2011 and 2012. The IRS reportedly subjected the organization to "invasive questions" and required more than 23,000 pages of documents. The tab for the audits cost approximately $50,000.

The Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, in business for over a decade, was subjected to its first ever audit in 2011. Michelle Easton, a spokesperson for the Institute told The Wall Street Journal, that "she was asked for donor lists and had to provide check registries and other paperwork, a process that was expensive, time-consuming, and made it hard to focus on the group's mission."

And that's not all folks.

Not only did the IRS scandal involve more conservative organizations than initially believed, but it also seems to have involved the Federal Election Commission (FEC). While IRS official Lois Lerner told Congress she "did nothing wrong," she may have violated federal law, says The National Review:
Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission's general counsel's office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC's vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online.

The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency's enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American Future Fund, before recommending that the commission prosecute it for violations of campaign-finance law. Lerner, the former head of the IRS's exempt-organizations division, worked at the FEC from 1986 to 1995, and was known for aggressive investigation of conservative groups during her tenure there, too.

According to federal law, the IRS is not legally able to disclose confidential tax information to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Nonetheless, Lerner reportedly willingly turned it over in advance of the FEC vote. The FEC General Counsel's office, for its part, is not, by law, allowed to begin an investigation of a non-profit until after the vote of the six-member FEC panel. (Ultimately the panel split, and then voted 6-0 to close the case.)

So is anyone still buying Lerner's "non-testimony" before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee?

Here's Lerner's statement verbatim: "I have not done anything wrong, I have not broken any laws, I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations and I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee."

Then she took the Fifth.

So let's sum up the week's news. First we have the IRS official responsible for issuing the edict to target Tea Party organizations meeting with President just two days before the command was issued. We have the list of organizations targeted by the IRS expanding to conservative organizations that had already been cleared by the IRS and had received tax-exempt status. And we have IRS official Lois Lerner improperly releasing tax records to the FEC General Counsel's office, at its request, to target yet another conservative organization - both parties evidently in violation of the law.

It continues to go from bad to horrible to outrageous for the Obama administration in this ever-growing IRS scandal.

As I've reported in this space previously, Judicial Watch has a number of active Freedom of Information Act investigations into the IRS scandal, and our legal and investigative staff has been appropriately mobilized. Also be sure to check out the panel discussion we held on June 20, 2013 entitled, "The Continuing IRS Scandal." You can watch the video here.

Source: Judicial Watch