Yesterday brought a bombshell finding in the IRS scandal. Of the groups targeted for inspection by the IRS, 83% were right-leaning. Of the groups selected for audit, 100% were conservative.
That’s right. 100%.
Less than two weeks after President Obama insisted that there wasn’t even a “smidgen of corruption” involved in the IRS targeting scandal, it appears that the scope of that scandal is widening.
Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, revealed yesterday that the committee’s investigation had found that it wasn’t only conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status that came in for IRS targeting and harassment. Existing 501(c)(4)’s were targeted, as well. In fact, Camp stated,
At Washington, DC’s direction, dozens of groups operating as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the groups’ activities, websites and any other publicly available information. Of these groups, 83% were right-leaning. And of the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100% were right-leaning.
That’s right — “somehow,” every single 501(c)(4) that the IRS selected to endure the time, expense, distraction and stress of an audit just happened to be conservative.
democrats have responded to the findings of abuse by doing a little targeting of their own. They are trying to pin the blame for the IRS being out of control on Treasury IG Russell George.
Democrats have for months said that George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, crafted a flawed, misleading report that helped fan the flames of the IRS targeting controversy.
Now Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) are sharply criticizing George for agreeing to brief GOP staff at a late January meeting on the Affordable Care Act without Democrats in attendance.
Aides say they now know of multiple meetings of George with the staff of Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) from which Democrats were excluded.
Two Democratic members of that panel – Reps. Matt Cartwright (Pa.) and Connolly – lodged a complaint on Wednesday about George’s original report on the IRS targeting last year, questioning his “independence, ethics, competence, and quality control” with an oversight board for inspectors general.
“If you want to connect the dots, a reasonable observer could be expected to conclude that he colluded with Issa’s staff to limit his report and the path of his investigation,” Connolly told The Hill concerning George.
“They have a tainted IG doing their bidding for them and making sure that the line of investigation is limited to what they want,” Connolly added.
With a November democrat disaster looming on the horizon, fair-minded democrats now want the IRS to ramp up the crushing persecution of conservatives:
Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races.
In the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, the Democrats are publicly prodding the agency instead of lobbying them directly. They are also careful to say the IRS should treat conservative and liberal groups equally, but they’re concerned about an impending tidal wave of attack ads funded by GOP-allied organizations. Much of the funding for those groups is secret, in contrast to the donations lawmakers collect, which must be reported publicly.
One of the most powerful groups is Americans for Prosperity, funded by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. It has already spent close to $30 million on ads attacking Democrats this election cycle.
“If they’re claiming the tax relief, the tax benefit to be a nonprofit for social relief or social justice, then that’s what they should be doing,” said Sen. Mark Begich (D), who faces a competitive race in Alaska. “If it’s to give them cover so they can do political activity, that’s abusing the tax code. And either side.”
Asked if the IRS should play a more active role policing political advocacy by groups that claim to be focused on social welfare, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) responded, “Absolutely.”
“Both on the left and the right,” she said. “As taxpayers, we should not be providing a write-off to groups to do political activity, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Shaheen is full of sh*t.
Media Matters, OFA and Think Progress would be exempted, of course. This is, pure and simple, fascism.
a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism.
Companies are now subject to thought crimes:
Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so.
Elijah Cummings and his band of Fascists have all but raped some conservative women:
Engelbrecht said shortly after founding and leading True to Vote and King Street Patriots, she was visited by law enforcement agencies and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), even though outside of filing their tax returns, she and her husband never dealt with any government agency in nearly two decades of running their small business.
“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.
“All of these incursions into my affairs began after filing applications for tax-exemption. There is no other remarkable event. There’s no other reason to explain how for decades I went unnoticed, but now find myself on the receiving end of interagency coordination into and against all facets of my life, both personal and private,” she said.
“Bear in mind, distinguished ladies and gentlemen of this subcommittee, these events were occurring while the IRS was subjecting me to multiple rounds of abusive inquiries with request to provide every Facebook and Twitter I’d ever posted, questions about my political aspirations and demands to know the names of groups that I had spoken with, the content of what I had send and everywhere I intended to speak in the coming year,” she added.
“This government attacked me because of my political beliefs, but I refuse to be cast as a victim,” she said. “I am not a victim, because a victim has no options. I do have options, and I intend to use them all to the fullest extent of my capabilities.”
“As an American citizen, I am part of a country that still believes in freedom of speech,” Engelbrecht said.
One can only imagine what’s next for conservatives.
Thankfully, the investigation isn’t over. Far from it. Dave Camp:
All of this provides context for today’s markup, which is legislation we are considering that would stop the ability of the IRS and Treasury to legalize the targeting of conservative groups. On Black Friday, Treasury released proposed rules regarding 501(c)(4)s that would essentially remove conservative groups from the public square. The rationale of the IRS and Treasury was that the rules, which have been in place for more than 50 years, created “confusion.”
However, we learned that Treasury and the IRS had been working on these guidelines behind closed doors for years. According to interviews with IRS employees, as early as 2011, work started on new 501(c)(4) regulations. A June 2012 email between Treasury officials and then-IRS Director of Tax Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner revealed that these potential regulations were being discussed “off-plan” – meaning that the plans for the regulations were not to be published on the public schedule. Treasury’s fabricated rationale for changing a 50-year old rule raises serious questions about the integrity of the rule-making process and counsels for putting a hold on the draft rules.
It is important to note that the Committee has made these discoveries without even having the full universe of documents requested from the IRS – including thousands of documents from Lois Lerner that have not yet been provided. Simply put, our investigation is not yet over, the document collection is not yet complete, and I don’t believe the IRS or the FBI has interviewed a single victim. The notion that the Administration would rush forward with rules intended to remove these groups from the public forum, is simply unacceptable.
Reminder: Obama joked about auditing his enemies.
Reminder: Obama wanted it fixed before the election.
Reminder: Lois Lerner took the Fifth.
Reminder: IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkins suffered amnesia 80 times in House testimony about his visits to the White House.
Reminder: Obama audits cancer patients
Reminder: Obama: “I can do whatever I want”
The IRS has become a cancer in the democrat party and the cure for cancer is to excise it.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.