The ugly story behind the persecution of Catherine Engelbrecht

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engelbrecht

I finally understand why Elijah Cummings wanted so badly to persecute Catherine Engelbrecht. And as far as democrats go, it’s lies all around.

True the Vote is a organization made up of volunteers who are interested in preventing voter fraud.

Our initiatives include:
•Mobilizing and training volunteers who are willing to work as election monitors
•Aggressively pursuing fraud reports to ensure prosecution when appropriate
•Providing a support system for our volunteers that includes live and online training, quick reference guides, a call bank to phone in problem reports, information on videotaping at polling places, and security as necessary
•Creating documentaries and instructional videos for use in recruiting and training
•Raising awareness of the problem through strategic outreach efforts including advertising, social networking, media relations, and relational marketing
•Voter registration programs and efforts to validate existing registration lists, including the use of pattern recognition software to detect problem areas

Engelbrecht’s private company is Engelbrecht manufacturing, which makes precision machined parts. It has no political operation.

Which makes all this very odd.

Engelbrecht had the wrath of God visited upon her by the Obama regime for the crime of creating a tax exempt organization:

In July 2010 she sent applications to the IRS for tax-exempt status. What followed was not the harassment, intrusiveness and delay we’re now used to hearing of. The U.S. government came down on her with full force.

In December 2010 the FBI came to ask about a person who’d attended a King Street Patriots function. In January 2011 the FBI had more questions. The same month the IRS audited her business tax returns. In May 2011 the FBI called again for a general inquiry about King Street Patriots. In June 2011 Engelbrecht’s personal tax returns were audited and the FBI called again. In October 2011 a round of questions on True the Vote. In November 2011 another call from the FBI. The next month, more questions from the FBI. In February 2012 a third round of IRS questions on True the Vote. In February 2012 a first round of questions on King Street Patriots. The same month the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did an unscheduled audit of her business. (It had a license to make firearms but didn’t make them.) In July 2012 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration did an unscheduled audit. In November 2012 more IRS questions on True the Vote. In March 2013, more questions. In April 2013 a second ATF audit.

All this because she requested tax-exempt status for a local conservative group and for one that registers voters and tries to get dead people off the rolls. Her attorney, Cleta Mitchell, who provided the timeline above, told me: “These people, they are just regular Americans. They try to get dead people off the voter rolls, you would think that they are serial killers.”

This week Ms. Engelbrecht, who still hasn’t received her exemptions, sued the IRS.

And it has been a costly experience:

“We had never been audited. We had never been investigated, but all that changed upon submitting applications for the non-profit statuses of True the Vote and King Street,” she told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee.

“Since that filing in 2010, my private businesses, my nonprofit organizations, my family and I have been subjected to more than 15 instances of audit or inquiry by federal agencies,” she added.

Engelbrecht’s personal and business tax returns were audited in 2011 – “each audit going back for a number of years.” Her business was inspected by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 2012 when neither she nor her husband was present. She said she was later fined over $20,000 even though “the agency wrote that it found nothing serious or significant.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms audited her business in 2012 and 2013, and the FBI contacted her non-profit group six times since 2010 in an attempt to “cull through membership manifests in conjunction with domestic terrorism cases,” she claimed.

“They eventually dropped all matters and have now redacted nearly all my files,” Engelbrecht said.

Cummings lied about his involvement in this persecution:

Ms. Mitchell: We want to get to the bottom of how these coincidences happened, and we’re going to try to figure out whether any – if there was any staff of this committee that might have been involved in putting True the Vote on the radar screen of some of these Federal agencies. We don’t know that, but we – we’re going to do everything we can do to try to get to the bottom of how did this all happen.

Mr. Cummings. Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Meadows. Yes.

Mr. Cummings. I want to thank the gentleman for his courtesy. What she just said is absolutely incorrect and not true.

But it is true. Not only did the Oversight Minority Committee group put True the Vote on the radar, they all but demanded that the IRS eviscerate it.

◦The IRS and the Oversight Minority made numerous requests for virtually identical information from True the Vote, raising concerns that the IRS improperly shared protected taxpayer information with Rep. Cummings’ staff.
◦Five days after Cummings contacted True the Vote seeking “copies of all training materials used for volunteers, affiliates, or other entities,” the IRS sent True the Vote a letter requesting True the Vote provide “a copy of [True the Vote’s] volunteer registration form,” “…the process you use to assign volunteers,” “how you keep your volunteers in teams,” and “how your volunteers are deployed … following the training they receive by you.”
◦On or before January 25, 2013, Cummings’ staff requested more information from the IRS about True the Vote. The head of the IRS Legislative Affairs office e-mailed several IRS officials, including former Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner, that “House Oversight Committee Minority staff” sought information about True the Vote. On Monday, January 28, Lerner wrote to her deputy Holly Paz: “Did we find anything?” When Paz informed her minutes later that she had not heard back about True the Vote’s information, Lerner replied: “thanks – check tomorrow please.
◦On January 31, 2013, Paz attached True the Vote’s form 990s, which she authorized the IRS to share with the Minority staff. Neither Cummings nor the IRS shared these requested documents with the Oversight Majority. None of the Minority’s communications about True the Vote with the IRS were shared with the Committee Majority even though Ranking Member Cummings frequently complains about the Committee Majority contacting individuals on official matters without the involvement of Minority staff.
◦Cummings denied that his staff, “might have been involved in putting True the Vote on the radar screen of some of these Federal agencies” at a February 6, 2014, Subcommittee hearing:

So where does this begin? Engelbrecht’s original sin was committed in 2009 when she touched the democrats’ third rail:

This was True the Vote’s crime: They found irregularities in Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee’s turf and an ACORN affiliated group — and told on them.

What exactly did she do? Try to eliminate voter fraud:

The predominantly Democratic districts themselves had large variations between them in the number of instances with six or more registered voters at one address. The first had 7,560, the second 8,981, and the third—the district of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the prominent, outspoken Democratic congresswoman—had 19,596 instances with six or more voters registered at one address.
True the Vote then compared the socio-economic demographics of the three predominantly Democratic congressional districts in an effort to explain why Jackson Lee’s district could have such a high number

In comparison. Engelbrecht told Townhall, the group had found no significant difference to explain such a drastic variation in the numbers.
The group began doing research into the abnormalities in Jackson Lee’s district. They took the first 3,800 registrations of the flagged 19,596 instances with six or more registrants at one address and began to investigate further. The group visited addresses and scoured property tax records. The group found many of the addresses were vacant lots or business addresses. Thirty-nine were registered at businesses and 97 of the addresses were nonexistent. One hundred six of the registrations revealed the same registrant registered more than once, and 207 of the addresses turned out to be vacant lots.

Meanwhile, 595 registrations had registrants with driver’s license addresses not matching the registration, and many were voting in a district they did not live in. Of the random 3,800 registrations from Jackson Lee’s predominantly Democratic district, 25 percent had critical errors.”

Care to guess who wrote a letter to Eric Holder asking that True the Vote be investigated?

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate election integrity org True the Vote and its associated Tea Party group, King Street Patriots, immediately before the IRS and DOJ began targeting the group in June 2010.

Rep. Jackson Lee sent a letter to Holder which alleged that True the Vote was intimidating voters and their election monitors were crossing the line in unspecified “instances” of voter intimidation. The letter went on to directly assert that the “alleged events” were factual and that the True the Vote effort was behind the crimes. The letter offered no documented instances or data of any kind.

Lots of bluster, zero evidence:

Jackson Lee provided no documented evidence for True the Vote’s alleged violations of electoral integrity in her letter to Holder. Nevertheless, the group consequently underwent a series of 17 inspections, audits and visits by the FBI, IRS, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Commission on Environmental Quality, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A group inspired by True the Vote took an interest in Cummings’ back yard.

Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties, Maryland’s two largest counties, have the largest numbers of inconsistencies so far.

In Prince George’s County alone, the group identified nearly 500 dead people still on active registration rolls. Several hundred voters were found to be registered twice – primarily in Maryland and another state, and 400 voters listed vacant lots or businesses as their residential addresses.

Cummings took exception to this and went on to accuse Engelbrecht of being a racist:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OxD1VIQNm8[/youtube]

The IRS has done nothing but lie from day one when Steven Miller denied that there was any targeting of conservative groups and the IRS has still not provided all the requested emails.

And all roads lead to Lois Lerner who can and should be compelled to testify. The marvelous Trey Gowdy:

Some questions that need desperately to be answered:

– Lerner testified that she had done nothing wrong. So why does she need immunity? If Lerner does need immunity then she perjured herself in her opening testimony.
– Through her lawyer Lerner said that were she to testify in Congress her life would be in jeopardy. Why? Who is the threat to her life?
– How did Engelbrecht Manufacturing get on the OHSA radar?
– How did Engelbrecht Manufacturing get on the BATF radar?
– Who sent the FBI?

All emails between Cummings, Sheila Jackson Lee, the IRS, FBI, OSHA, the BATF and the DOJ regarding Engelbrecht Manufacturing and True the Vote need to be obtained and see the light of day. After all, Cummings said this was all supposedly all about “publicly available information.” Then there is nothing to hide or redact.

Who has the juice to initiate essentially simultaneous investigations by the IRS, BATF and OSHA? Who has the power to weaponize Federal Agencies? Probably only two people- the President and the Attorney General of the United States.

This has been a planned and coordinated effort right from the beginning

The Left establishment’s attack began in a full on assault; there was no warning shot over a bow and no effort to communicate or negotiate differences. The year was 2010. The Democratic Party of Texas and the ACORN front group, Houston Votes, filed lawsuits against True the Vote. Though the lawsuits were a direct response to True the Vote’s effort to call out apparent irregularities in their local Harris County/Houston election and voter registration processes, their lawsuits came as an assault on True the Vote’s nonprofit status. It was a collateral attack, using one pretext for lawsuits when their disagreement stemmed from another reason all together.

Though the lawsuits chose the indirect path, the left-of-center media outlets went straight for the target allegation — they alleged True the Vote stemmed from the “racist” Tea party movement and was an effort to marginalize or otherwise prevent “communities of color” from having a voice. Al Sharpton and MSNBC, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee with the help of the Houston Chronicle and local left-of-center news stations, and the Huffington Post were among the many who immediately attacked in a coordinated manner.

Cummings and Jackson-Lee were instrumental in the persecution of Catherine Engelbrecht and without a doubt the complicity goes very high up. They caused Engelbrecht pain and expense without so much as a shred of evidence of wrongdoing.

The story of Catherine Englebrecht is a story of the abuse of Federal agencies for a vengeful and vindictive democrats angry at a Supreme Court decision. All for the crime of wanting to protect the integrity of the voting process.

Integrity in voting is one of the greatest of left wing fears.

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@Greg:

Regarding ACORN, most of the highly publicized information that was used to destroy the organization was later proved to be fabricated. The organization essentially succumbed to a campaign of deliberate lies and slander.

This of course is incorrect. Remember, ACORN has in fact been repeatedly proven to be a thoroughly corrupt organization. It’s also important to understand, that ACORN wasn’t destroyed, it was merely forced to metamorphosize into other activist organizations under different names.

@Greg: Greg, I hope the kool aide you continue to drink is the diet variety. Otherwise, you must weigh close to 400 lbs by now.

@Kraken, #52:

The most accurate moment in the entire Acorn affair came when James O’Keefe portrayed himself as a pimp.

@Greg:

Empty rhetoric.

@Greg: Clearly demonstrating that the focus of Acorn was to service pimps. That’s what you were saying, right, Greg?

@Greg: #46

The source is World Net Daily, which has a history of promoting conspiracy theory

.

So, you admit that The Washington Times, “…has a history of promoting conspiracy theory.” Finally, something we both agree on.

Perhaps it’s my own bias, but I don’t trust the publication, nor do I trust the sources they’ve provided for the details of their story.

Liberals don’t trust the truth if it doesn’t fit their agenda.

If such instances are actually supported by credible testimony and evidence, I also have to wonder why they wouldn’t wind up being the subject of investigations and law suits.

Holder refuses to press charges against ANY of them. Ask him why.

8 yrs ago but it is once again relevant. There is absolutely no reason not to believe every word of the story. Dems are awful people who couldn’t care less about America, they simply use their power to enrich themselves. Its worse now than it was then. They are targeting Trump now. And right in front of us.

@Randy: #53
LOL

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It makes me sick. What’s worse is they are doing it again right now to Donald Trump and this time they are doing it right in front of us and we are doing nothing about it. Shame on those who have the ability to speak up but are too much of cowards. So many, have sacrificed so much to create this country, including the Engelbrechts, and you’re only worried about yourselves. You swore an oath and it meant nothing to every single one of you.