Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS division that singled out conservative groups, is expected to invoke the Fifth Amendment Wednesday when she appears before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Fox News has learned.
That means Lerner, head of the exempt organizations division, probably won’t answer any questions on what she knew about IRS agents going after Tea Party-related groups. That also means she probably won’t say why she sat on the information for so long before it became public.
Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor III, asked committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in a letter if she could skip Wednesday’s hearing since she would be pleading the Fifth.
Taylor argued in the letter that forcing Lerner to appear “would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.”
Here is the video of her plea video …. Just ship to the last ten minutes to avoid listening to the BS. The guilty always take the 5th.
Remember this and remember it well …
“The price of apathy of public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” – Plato
The six Cincinnati workers we have identified, who sent scrutinizing letters to conservative groups with words including “patriot, liberty, tea party or 9-12″ in their names are Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr, Stephen Seok, Liz Hofacre and a woman identified only as Ms. Richards.
But was all of this done at the hands of a small group of Cincinnati employees working together? During Friday’s congressional hearing, that appeared to be the theme. Now, that explanation just became less likely.
Thanks to two FOX19 sources connected to the IRS, we now understand the chain of command for these workers.
Mitchel Steele, Carly Young, Joseph Herr and Liz Hofacre are IRS agents. Stephen Seok is a supervisor IRS agent.
But according to the IRS employee directory that FOX19 has obtained exclusively, each of these agents has a different manager and then above them a different territory manager.
That is important because while it may sound reasonable to the average person that these workers began targeting groups on their own, the IRS structure is designed to prevent that.
Read the whole thing.
And watch out guys — you keep committing acts of journalism, you may get your phones tapped.
Charles Krauthammer weighed in on the IRS targeting scandal Tuesday on Special Report after another day of IRS targeting the Tea Party hearings.
Sir Charles issued this warning to Democrats.
“Yes, the Republicans are up in arms but the Democrats are too. This thing will go on and it could be fatal.”
Charles Krauthammer weighed in on the IRS targeting scandal Tuesday on Special Report after another day of hearings. He issued a warning to Democrats.
“Yes, the Republicans are up in arms but the Democrats are too. This thing will go on and it could be fatal.”
The WHY is simple, prevent people from donating to conservative causes. because of the fear of audits by the IRS.
It’s just not overreaching, it’s flat out far reaching tyranny. When your government goes bad. Of course they won’t do this with ObamaCare and death panels… So just remember when you are on your death-bed, as a registered white Republican, ObamaCare, won’t be their.
Haha, that’s how you make a target of donors.
Don’t forget that 15 of Mitt Romney’s major donors were audited by the IRS, after donating, including their professional establishments. Not just their personal income.
And it’s not just political adversaries … they have targeted whislebolwers more than all the other administrations combind, over history.
Here is another who has neen targeted.
Another iG weighs in, this time fast and furious. The IG confirms …
If there’s one thing that the Obama administration’s IRS/Tea Party scandal has done, it’s unite a large sector of the media in a collective skepticism of many of those involved. On Monday morning, the Washington Post showed just how far that skepticism is creeping when it published a blistering fact-check of the IRS and the department head in charge of the exempt organizations division, Lois Lerner.
“In some ways, this is just scratching the surface of Lerner’s misstatements and weasely wording when the revelations about the IRS’s activities first came to light on May 10,” the Post concluded.
So how did the Post get there? We examine below.
1. Lerner claimed that the targeting of Tea Party groups happened after the passing of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and applications for 501(c)(4) status doubled.
The Post:
But this claim of “more than doubled” appears to be a red herring. The targeting of groups began in early 2010, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United was announced on Jan. 21. The ruling paved the way for political groups to apply under a tax-exempt status known as 501(c)4. Most charities apply under 501(c)3, but under 501(c)4 nonprofit groups that engage in “social welfare” can also perform a limited amount of election activity.
[...]
But it turns out that these are federal fiscal-year figures, meaning “2010” is actually Oct. 1, 2009 to Sept. 30, 2010, so the “2010” year includes more than three months before the Supreme Court decision was announced.
[...]
In other words, while there was an increase in 2010, it was relatively small. The real jump did not come until 2011, long after the targeting of conservative groups had been implemented. Also, it appears Lerner significantly understated the number of applications in 2010 (“1500”) in order to make her claim of “more than doubled.”
2. Lerner said she only heard out about the targeting from the press.
According the IG, Lerner had a briefing on the issue on June 29, 2011, in which she was told about the BOLO (“Be On the Look Out”) criteria that included phrases such as “Tea Party” or “Patriots.” The report says she raised concerns about the wording and “instructed that the criteria be immediately revised.” She continued to be heavily involved in the issue in the months preceding the new reports, according to the timeline.
3. Lerner said she never addressed the issue before because she was never asked.
Not true, says the Post. In fact, just two days before Lerner planted a question on the issue so the IRS could come clean, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) gave Lerner a chance to talk about it on Capitol Hill:
“She provided a bland answer about a questionnaire on the IRS Web site, failing to take the opportunity to disclose the results of the probe,” the Post said.
You can read the full fact-check here, including the Post’s point about the IRS’s reaction.
But don’t worry, the IRS won’t check voter roles with Obamacare …. Just because the woman who did that with the Tea Party tax exempts is now running the IRS Obamacare outfit.
IRS targeting Tea Party groups, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is now using that scandal to try to bring down President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During a rally in Washington Thursday morning, Bachmann spoke to the press, asking, in light of what happened with the IRS, “could there be potential political implications of access to healthcare, denial of healthcare?”
After outline the “extremely troubling” details of the IRS targeting story, Bachmann made an effort to tie the scandal to her consistent opposition to the president’s health care law. “Knowing it’s the IRS who will be the enforcing mechanism for this new entitlement program of Obamacare,” Bachmann stated, “it is very important to ask — and now it is reasonable to ask — could there be potential political implications of access to healthcare, denial of healthcare? Will that happen based upon a person’s political beliefs, or their religiously held beliefs?”
“Those questions would have been considered out of bounds a week ago,” she continued. “Today these questions are considered more than reasonable, and more than fair for the American people.”
Bachmann was joined at the rally by other like-minded members of Congress, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY), along with members of Tea Party groups from across the country.
It’s time to disband the IRS, and do a flat tax instead …. It would save us lots of time and money.
The Internal Revenue Service scandal involving the apparently unjustified targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups has also hit home with the Hispanic community.
George Rodriguez, former president of the San Antonio Tea Party, said that when the organization applied for non-profit status, leaders were intimidated by IRS workers with excessive paperwork and meddling questions.
“They asked us all sorts of things that were out of the norm,” Rodriguez, now head of the conservative South Texas Alliance, told Fox News Latino. “We knew these questions were not the norm and we had our suspicions about them.”
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