Source: https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/irs-scandal/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 08:35:34+00:00

Document:
Red State, John McCain’s Staff Director Urged Lois Lerner To Use The IRS To Punish Tea Party Groups And Where Is He Now?
There has been a politically charged debate in academic circles for a while now about events that happened in 2013 regarding IRS investigations into groups purportedly because of the use of the term "Tea Party" in their name.
Paul L. Caron on the TaxProf Blog has been running a mostly continuous post (up to around day 1830) about "The IRS Scandal." The blog series is controversial in academic circles because it frames the issue of alleged IRS targeting of a typology of groups as a definite scandal. As Professor Philip Hackney wrote, "This so-called scandal over what conservatives saw as the persecution of right-leaning nonprofits erupted at a meeting of Washington tax lawyers in May of 2013." To be sure, it would be true if there was a direct use of the IRS to harm opposition groups. For example, it was a clear scandal when Nixon used the IRS to target his political enemies. Yet, as we saw over the weekend, the facts associated with this particular allegation are not so certain and open to debate even after many Congressional, internal IRS, and other investigations.
This weekend an interesting feud between Bradley A. Smith (and others) and David Cay Johnston (and others) percolated over the facts associated with Professor Smith's Wall Street Journal Op-ed. In a series of posts on the TaxProf Blog, Mr. Johnston, Professor Smith, and others, continued to debate and litigate the underlying facts related to the IRS investigations.
Professor Smith and others are of the belief that there was a clear scandal and targeting of right leaning groups. Mr. Johnston, is of the belief that the issue is less opaque. After all, the IRS did not just use right leaning terms to identify groups for targeting. What is clear from the series of posts is that even armed with a series of documents, either side in the debate can find clarity in their position and fault in the opposition.
How one interprets the facts, seems to be based on the lens of one's glasses. But, missing in a dispute over the facts, is what they mean. Rather that continue the downward spiral of arguing over the facts of what happened, here I want to offer a more productive use of the spot-light. We should be focused on two important points.
I’m glad that Michael Wyland weighed in, though he begins with diversionary nonsense by asserting that I forgot that others would critique my critique. Then Wyland falsely asserts that I “persist in denying a scandal ever happened” when I explicitly state there was a scandal and, as a Tax Notes columnist back then, was the first person to call on Lois Lerner to resign.
Wyland also faults me for not addressing C3 application scrutiny. Professor Bradley Smith didn’t write about C3s, only C4s.
Let’s stick to the issue — did the Obama Administration target conservatives, exclusively or nearly so, in reviewing gratuitous C4 applications, blocking their engagement in the 2012 elections? Or is this scandal’s nature quite different?
Taxes are the core of our democracy and the very reason (along with the power to regulate commerce) that we live in the Second American Republic under our Constitution. I hope more people weigh in because our democracy will benefit from a full airing of the tax law enforcement issue at hand. My purpose is to show verifiable facts that reveal as false the meme that Rep. Daryl Issa, Smith and now Wyland perpetuate.
False memes damage our democracy. Facts matter.
Demolishing a key aspect of this meme is easy — the blocking part. No one needs IRS approval to open shop as a C4. Only after-the-fact filings are required. That means no one was blocked or could have been. When Smith and others state otherwise they are ill-informed or deceitful. Smith should know the law given his occupation.
There is, also, a larger issue about politics and money and what role Congress should define for the IRS, our federal tax police.
Those issues will be addressed in my next book, tentatively titled The Prosperity Tax, which proposes an entirely new and simplified tax system aligned with the 21st Century economy. My plan would shrink the IRS, use a privatized but licensed system to make cheating extremely difficult (and very painful), level the tax playing field and encourage much more savings and investment more wisely deployed. And is wipes away all the tax code filigree.
For now, let’s stick to the issue at hand.
In his op-ed Bradley Smith's WSJ Op-Ed Is A 'Breathtaking' Distortion Of The Facts Of The IRS 'Scandal', Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author David Cay Johnston has forgotten an old aphorism. When one points an accusing finger at someone, three fingers of the same hand point back at oneself. In short, Johnston’s response to Bradley Smith’s Wall Street Journal commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the IRS scandal contains a number of breathtaking distortions and omissions of its own.
I have written more than 25 articles and features for the Nonprofit Quarterly addressing aspects of the IRS scandal since it became public. In addition, I presented a paper titled “Nonprofit Political Speech in a Post-Citizens United and IRS Scandal Environment” at the 2014 national ARNOVA conference in Denver. In short, I have had an interest in this continuing saga since it became public.
The apology was made, in large part, to get the news out ahead of the U.S. Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration’s report on the IRS’s practices from 2010 to 2013.
There was a 2017 TIGTA audit report that indicated IRS review of applications for tax exemption that included other types of suspected political activity besides conservative, but that report covered a time period that began in 2004, six years before the 2010 inception of the “tea party cases” activity by the IRS. The Treasury press release (link above) identifies several of the problems associated with attempting to compare the 2017 TIGTA audit report with the seminal 2013 TIGTA audit report.
Those who point to the 2017 report conveniently ignore a prior 2014 TIGTA report issued in response to assertions by Democratic members of Congress who sought to document the ecumenical nature of the IRS activity. That report confirmed that the overwhelming majority of the applications flagged were indeed from conservative-sounding organizations, and that the small minority of applications that were also flagged during that time appeared to be included in the group accidentally for reasons not related to their presumed political ideology or assumed activities.
Another error in Johnston’s piece is his implication that the scandal affected applications for exemption by 501(c)(4) groups only. In fact, about a third of the applications from groups subjected to delays and inappropriate questioning came from organizations seeking exemption as 501(c)(3) public charities. This widespread confusion, whether accidental or intentional, obscures the difficulties inherent in regulation of political activity by nonprofit groups seeking federal tax exemption.
The events of 2010-2018 related to the flagging of tax exemption applications, as well as the actions by the IRS, Congress, and the Obama administration after Lerner’s apology and the release of the first TIGTA report are of historical interest and should influence federal policymaking. For history, I recommend the 223-page December 23, 2014 final staff report issued by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Although overreaching in a couple of places, the report’s chief virtue is its unrelenting reference to primary source material as it builds its case. At this point, however, time, partisan overreach by both Republicans and Democrats as well as changes in both presidential administrations and key Congressional leaders indicate that planning for the future is more important that rehashing the past.
Bradley Smith’s solution to the issue is to house exclusive investigation of political activity by tax-exempt entities with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). David Cay Johnston correctly points out that there have been instances of what appears to be impermissible political activity by both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups for decades and chastises the IRS for doing nothing.
The IRS did attempt to address the issue in 2013 by issuing proposed regulations governing permissible and impermissible political activity by 501(c)(4) groups. The proposal ignited a firestorm of opposition from all points of the political spectrum. In fact, the Treasury Department received more comments on the proposed rule — almost all in opposition — than it had received for all rules in the preceding six years combined. The proposed rule was never moved forward.
Regardless of the future of federal regulation – and how such regulation might be tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in a post-Citizens United, post-McCutcheon environment – it is crucial that policymakers have a broader awareness of the issues and history involved. Johnston needs to take to his own heart the admonishment he gave to Smith and review the entire record rather than be selective in drawing his opinions and lessons.
Lois Lerner, the career official at the center of the IRS scandal, retired on full pension after invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before Congress. John Koskinen, appointed IRS commissioner by Mr. Obama to lead the agency “in difficult times,” served his full term, spending the better part of four years stonewalling congressional requests for information. On his watch, the IRS destroyed evidence subject to subpoena.
The Federal Election Commission—a bipartisan agency staffed by experts and created to oversee election-related activities—is the proper authority to determine whether an organization should be subject to regulation under campaign-finance laws. The IRS—an agency under control of the president, with no bipartisan checks, subject to congressional pressure, and tasked with collecting revenue—is not.
There is a long history of presidents from both parties using the IRS to harass political opponents. Democrats and Republicans alike should recognize that, fix the law, and get the IRS out of politics.
The IRS Scandal, Day 1813: Did The IRS Buy Off The Tea-Party?
Just after Labor Day 2016, when the U.S. presidential race was entering full swing, columnist George F. Will urged Congress to undertake a seemingly futile gesture: He wanted the House to impeach John Koskinen, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Koskinen had taken over as head of the IRS after it had been exposed for singling out for mistreatment conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. He lied to Congress when he said he had produced all of Lois Lerner’s emails, allowed documents under subpoena to be destroyed, and generally behaved in a way that helped ensure there would be no hard consequences for the abuses. Though Mr. Koskinen had only a few months left on the job, Mr. Will argued that impeaching him might help Congress restore its much diminished standing as a coequal branch of government.
Congress has its own ways of showing its displeasure, including cutting the budgets of recalcitrant agencies. Given budget rules, this would require the cooperation of some Democrats, who are unlikely to go along. Nevertheless, the power of the purse remains a tool Congress can use to make the executive branch pay a price for its actions.
Above all, there is impeachment. The constitutional power to remove officials from office for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” is a writ far broader than anything a special counsel enjoys.
Then again, it’s not easy to impeach a federal official, and it shouldn’t be. As Mr. Will pointed out in his column calling for Mr. Koskinen’s impeachment, “no appointed official of the executive branch has been impeached in 140 years.” Mr. Koskinen was not impeached, and he and Ms. Lerner rode off into the sunset without having to answer for their actions and deceits.
Ask yourself this: Is it likely our federal agencies would be so haughty about Congress and its subpoenas if Mr. Koskinen had been impeached?
So instead of whingy calls for another special counsel, a Congress that behaved as a branch of government coequal to the presidency would use its own powers to force oversight on resisting federal officials. Even if this might ultimately include impeaching FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the Trump administration was wrong to have apologized to tea party groups snared in the IRS’s targeting scandal, saying it was another example of the new team undercutting career people at the Justice Department who’d initially cleared the IRS of wrongdoing. “That apology was unnecessary, unfounded and inconsistent, it seems to me, with the responsibilities that somebody who would seek to lead the Justice Department should have done,” Mr. Holder said.
He’d ordered a criminal probe into the IRS’s handling of tea party applications after the 2013 revelation by an inspector general that the tax agency had subjected conservative groups to intrusive and inappropriate scrutiny when they applied for nonprofit status.
That probe eventually cleared the IRS, saying that while there was bungling, there was no ill intent. the probe specifically cleared former IRS senior executive Lois G. Lerner, saying rather than a problem, she was actually a hero, reporting bad practices when she spotted them.
The Justice Department reversed that finding, though, in settlements reached with tea party groups over the last year that singled Ms. Lerner out as having approved of the intrusive behavior and yet hidden the practices from her supervisors in Washington.
The IRS Scandal, Day 1735: The End Of IRS Targeting?
It can be hard to keep track of Obama-era targeting of the political opposition by federal administrative agencies. But this week brings fresh hope that such abuses will not be repeated.
President Donald Trump will nominate Charles Rettig, a California tax lawyer, to run the Internal Revenue Service, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Rettig will take one of the most thankless jobs in Washington.
Of course in recent years it has been thankless for especially good reason. During the Obama administration, the tax agency targeted conservative organizations for exceptional scrutiny and even harassment. Last year the IRS settled lawsuits brought by organizations that had been mistreated simply because they advocated for limited Constitutional government. The government shelled out millions of dollars to settle one suit involving 428 organizations, according to an October report in the New York Times. In a separate case brought by different organizations, an apology for the IRS’s egregious conduct was enough to resolve the litigation.
The settlements were the conclusion of two legal battles that have dogged the I.R.S. since the initial lawsuits were filed after a 2013 treasury inspector general’s audit that found groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names received more scrutiny over their applications for tax-exempt status. The revelations plunged the I.R.S. into a firestorm that ultimately led to the ouster of its acting commissioner and prompted accusations that the agency was being used as a political weapon by the Obama administration.
While Mr. Obama did force the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner in the wake of the scandal in 2013, he made no serious effort to reform the agency and proclaimed that the targeting had involved “not even a smidgen of corruption” long before his government had finished investigating.
In February 2014 Congress instructed Mr. Koskinen to supply all emails related to Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS Exempt Organizations division during the targeting. We now know Mr. Koskinen made little or no effort to preserve or track these communications and that, only a few weeks after the subpoena, IRS employees in West Virginia erased 422 backup tapes, destroying up to 24,000 Lerner emails.
A man who has spent a career across the table from the IRS, sometimes clashing with the agency in court, would seem to possess some useful experience. Here’s hoping he chooses to be a reformer.
The Department of Justice today announced that it has entered into a settlement with Z Street, a non-profit corporation dedicated to educating the public about various issues related to Israel and the Middle East, pending approval by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Z Street alleged that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) applied heightened scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status received from organizations connected in any way to Israel, and applied this policy to Z Street’s application, resulting in delay. The settlement agreement includes an apology from the IRS to Z Street for the delayed processing of the group’s application for tax-exempt status.
This is the final settlement in a series of cases brought by groups alleging that their tax-exempt status was delayed by the IRS based on inappropriate criteria, including names and policy positions. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia recently approved settlement agreements in Linchpins of Liberty v. United States and True the Vote v. IRS. In Norcal Tea Patriots v. IRS, the United States agreed to a settlement in this class action lawsuit which is currently pending approval in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. In Freedom Path v. IRS, the United States entered into a settlement resolving a wrongful disclosure claim and dismissing other claims, including allegations of improper IRS targeting. A single regulatory challenge remains following the settlement. Freedom Path lost this challenge at the District Court and the issue is currently on appeal to the Fifth Circuit.
Announcement and quote from Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Linchpins of Liberty v. United States and Norcal Tea Patriots v. IRS can be found here.
Her former IRS colleague, Holly Paz, seeks the same after they targeted groups with “tea party” names and groups that didn’t like how the government was run.
As Donald Trump finishes the first year of his presidency, the greatest political scandal story of the last generation is being mostly ignored.
In May 2013, then-IRS official Lois Lerner admitted the Internal Revenue Service had been targeting conservative groups in general, and Tea Party groups in particular. Mrs. Lerner was not trying to clear her conscience. The Treasury Department’s Inspector General was about to release a damning reporting on the politicization of the IRS and how that agency was targeting political opponents of the Obama regime.
If Republicans are serious about their commitment to liberty and freedom, there is only one option. The swamp must be drained. There must be a wholesale elimination of government departments and agencies. Civil service must be abolished and a lot of government workers need to be told to find other jobs.
If the Republican Party once again, haul up their freshly laundered white flag of surrender on the issue of a weaponized government that can be used against the enemies of the Democrats, America’s days as a free nation are over.
Civil-service reform’s bipartisan appeal means it has a shot in the Senate. The Chuck Schumers and Elizabeth Warrens will fight for their federal union buddies. But will Democrats like Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill, Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly —who represent conservative or right-to-work states—go to bat for the likes of Lois Lerner?
Conservatives who long sought to restrain the Internal Revenue Service have managed to throw a wrench into an IRS division that is supposed to regulate tax-exempt nonprofits and charities, just at a time when these groups are becoming more partisan and complex.
In a Dec. 18 article in The Post, reporter Robert O’Harrow Jr. offered a disturbing picture of the besieged Exempt Organizations division of the IRS, which regulates charities and nonprofits such as those allowed under sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the tax code. The former may not directly or indirectly support a political candidate, but they are allowed to participate in educational debates about the issues; the latter are social-welfare groups that can be involved in politics only so long as it is not their primary activity. The number of applications from new charities has exploded in recent years, and the law is a bit of a gray zone — vaguely written and hard to enforce.
[A]s it prepares to implement the most sweeping tax overhaul in 30 years, the I.R.S. is perhaps weaker than it has ever been. In 1986, the last time Congress passed major changes in the tax code, it included a budget increase for the agency, allowing it to hire 2,100 more employees to carry out the changes. Earlier this year, as the agency struggled to do its job with a decimated staff, a shrinking budget and decrepit computers, its commissioner pleaded with Congress to at least give it time to prepare for the big tax overhaul Republicans wanted.
There is no permanent commissioner leading the I.R.S. Its last one, John Koskinen, left in November at the expiration of his term. Mr. Koskinen had spent a big chunk of his time on Capitol Hill, being lambasted by Republicans over allegations that the Obama-era I.R.S. unfairly targeted conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status. A report released in October by the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that the I.R.S. had also scoured left-leaning groups’ applications for tax-exempt status as part of its effort to identify groups focused on politics, not “social welfare,” as the rules for tax-exempt status require.
Pounding a perennial punching bag like the I.R.S. scores easy political points among Americans who associate the agency with an unpleasant April deadline. We get it. But if the agency that collects more than 90 percent of the government’s money stumbles, all Americans pay, and they can look to Congress, not just the I.R.S., in assigning the blame.
Under the federal tax code, charities may not directly or indirectly support a political candidate, but they are allowed to participate in educational debates about the issues. Other nonprofits known as social welfare groups may be involved in politics, but only as long as it is not their primary purpose.
At a moment when the special counsel’s team is busy calling its own fairness and impartiality into question, why would Donald Trump even think of firing Robert Mueller?
When the special counsel picked his team, almost half the lawyers he selected had donated to Hillary Clinton. Legally that may not be disqualifying. It was, however, highly imprudent for a man presiding over the nation’s most sensitive investigation. Not a single Mueller prosecutor had contributed to Mr. Trump.
These developments, alas, have encouraged two horrible responses from Republicans. The first is the call for Mr. Trump to sack Mr. Mueller, an idea news reports say is gaining traction inside the White House. The other is for a new special counsel to investigate the existing special counsel.
Then there’s Congress, which has been rightly frustrated to find the Trump Justice Department as obstructionist as the Obama Justice Department. In testimony last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray advanced the extraordinary claim he can hold back information from the elected representatives of the American people on the grounds that it is classified or that he’s waiting for an inspector general’s report and so, presumably, should they.
The message for Congress is this: Why should an FBI director take you seriously when you don’t take yourselves seriously? During the IRS scandal, Lois Lerner rode off into the sunset without testifying because Congress allowed the Obama Justice Department to determine her fate. Ditto for John Koskinen, the IRS commissioner who happily served out his time when Congress should have impeached him for his falsehoods and obstructionism.
n its 1821 decision affirming the right of the House to hold people in contempt and jail them, the Supreme Court noted that depriving Congress of this authority would mean “the total annihilation of the power of the House of Representatives” to prevent people from just flipping it the bird. Isn’t that just what government officials from Ms. Lerner to Mr. Wray have been doing?
So forget firings and new special prosecutors. Let the president use his executive authority to make public the evidence that would tell the American people what really happened. And let Congress start acting like the coequal branch of government the Founders intended—and get to the bottom of a story that involves the legitimacy of the presidency, the 2016 election and our federal institutions.
If only the National Security Agency were as good at keeping secrets as Lois Lerner. When news that the IRS had targeted conservative groups led to congressional hearings, the former director of the Exempt Organizations division declared her innocence and then clammed up. Now she and her former IRS associate, Holly Paz, are asking a federal judge to seal forever their depositions in a lawsuit that the IRS settled last month for $3.5 million.
Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say they or their families have endured harassment or death threats. But Edward Greim, the attorney for the roughly 400 tea-party clients who sued, notes in reply that the last threat Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz cited was from early 2014.
American taxpayers who will fork out $3.5 million for Ms. Lerner’s actions have a right to hear how she justified what she did at the IRS.
[I]n this case the plaintiffs, the government and a newspaper all say they are for disclosure. Is a judge really going to buy Ms. Lerner’s argument that the American people can’t handle the truth?
The Justice Department entered into proposed settlements with groups that alleged in 2013 they had been subject to discriminatory treatment in applying for tax-exempt status. The move largely puts an end to a saga that had engulfed the IRS for years.
Conservatives have been seething since 2013 over what they say was an unfair and imbalanced effort by the IRS to scrutinize right-leaning organizations more closely than other groups seeking nonprofit status.
As a new report from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration shows, the IRS did flag some conservative groups out of concern that they might be problematic. But it also paid the same kind of extra attention to liberal organizations with words like “occupy” and “progressive” in their names between 2004 and 2013.
So it’s now official. There was extra scrutiny but there was no liberal bias among the federal employees who determine whether new organizations that want to operate as nonprofits are legitimate – and therefore eligible for the tax-exempt status that goes with that designation.
The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency, recognized in 2014 that the tax agency’s budget and staff were too small to handle its nonprofit oversight responsibilities. The situation has only deteriorated since then.
The overall IRS budget fell by about 18 percent in inflation-adjusted terms from 2010 to 2017, from US$14 billion to roughly $11.5 billion. Today, the agency employs fewer people than it did in 2010. The number of its employees dedicated to auditing and vetting the nonprofit sector fell about 5 percent from 2010 to 2013, the GAO found.
A federal watchdog investigating whether the Internal Revenue Service unfairly targeted conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status said that the agency also scrutinized organizations associated with liberal causes from 2004 to 2013.
Ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans regularly used the scandal to bludgeon Democrats and paint the Obama administration as corrupt. But now it appears that the I.R.S. was an equal offender. “This report shows the I.R.S. deep scrutiny of political groups is in fact bipartisan, it is liberal and conservative groups that the I.R.S. has been targeting,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Rather than condemn the I.R.S. actions, Democrats on Thursday celebrated the findings as evidence that Republicans were wrong to claim bias at the I.R.S. Democrats had previously been critical of the 2013 Treasury report since it only looked at two years of applications. “After years of baseless claims and false accusations it is my hope Republicans will finally put an end to this witch hunt and admit that their attacks on the I.R.S. were nothing but political grandstanding on behalf of special interests at the expense of American taxpayers,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
The controversy over political targeting at the I.R.S. was the genesis of many congressional hearings and probes, and it has continued to haunt its current commissioner, John Koskinen, whom Mr. Obama tapped to stabilize the agency. As recently as April, House members called for the firing of Mr. Koskinen for the “gross mishandling” of its investigation into the targeting of political groups. Despite the uproar from Republicans, President Trump has not taken any steps to fire Mr. Koskinen, whose term ends next month.
[T]he new TIGTA report “identified 146 cases in which the IRS examined groups for suspicion of engaging in disallowed political activity using those criteria.” This finding is not a surprise. The fact that IRS employees were using keywords to identify progressive as well as conservative organizations doing too much political activity to qualify under 501(c)(4) should have been clear to anyone who dug into the public documents. But it wasn’t the message that the House Oversight Committee — and thus many media stories — disseminated. The real scandal was the d amage the resulting witch hunt did to the IRS. I wrote about that in [IRS Reform: Politics As Usual?, 7 Colum. J. Tax L. 36 (2016)] and in a related, short article I published in Tax Notes, The IRS, Politics, and Income Inequality, [150 Tax Notes 1329 (Mar. 14, 2016),] focused in part on IRS underfunding. I hope that TIGTA’s new report helps set the record straight.
Media Matters, Right-Wing Media “Scandals” Never End, They Just Fade Away: A New Report Should End the Conservative Fixation on the "IRS Scandal." It Probably Won't.
Nonprofit Quarterly, About That Nonprofit IRS Tax Scandal … Never Mind!
That earlier report found that 96 groups with names referencing “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12” were selected for intensive review between May 2010 and May 2012, and the House Ways and Means Committee later identified another 152 right-leaning groups that were subjected to scrutiny. Those findings fueled accusations by Republican lawmakers that the Obama administration engaged in politically motivated targeting of conservatives.
The IRS used the political views of conservative "tea party" groups trying to get nonprofit status as a reason for extra scrutiny and continued delaying applications until 2013 — long after they said they'd stopped — new federal court filings allege.
The new accusations counter previous IRS claims that agents did not consider political beliefs when slowing down tax-exempt applications from right-leaning groups in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election.
The IRS had instead argued that it was merely monitoring whether the groups were conducting more political activity than was allowed.
[O]thers testified in depositions that Lerner ordered IRS agents to send requests for additional information from the affected groups following that 2011 meeting. That included requests for donor information, normally considered off-limits. Lerner "wanted everyone to know that we are handling the cases as we should," testified Cindy Thomas, the top nonprofit official in Cincinnati at the time.
"So after they were told that this was possibly improper, they doubled down and kept going," Greim said. "This goes well beyond the narrative of what's been reported before."
Greim also said that the IRS removed two Washington agents who had raised questions about the extra scrutiny on the tea party cases. "These two found that ideology was indeed being used, raised questions about it and told their superiors about it and that it was going to cause delay," Greim said. "And wouldn't you know it, they were moved off the matter soon thereafter."
Republicans are furious. But this mess happened because the Obama Administration used federal bureaucracies for raw political purposes. If Mr. Sessions’s Justice Department has found no way to prove criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt, Republicans could begin the road back to accountability by respecting that decision.
What House Republicans should do now is create a structure that will stop assaults by bureaucrats on political activity. They’ve been putting riders in spending bills to bar the IRS from imposing restrictions on nonprofit speech. But this thumbs-in-the-dike approach does nothing about powers that IRS functionaries already have over political activity.
The solution is to get the IRS out of the political arena by limiting its role to the most basic administrative task of giving initial approval to nonprofits. Transfer to the Federal Election Commission the job of deciding whether a nonprofit is abiding by the existing rules governing political spending. The FEC’s commissioners would decide if complaints against the political activities of nonprofits had merit.
Democrats will rebel because the design of the FEC makes it difficult to sic the commission on political enemies. That’s why they made the IRS their political enforcer. Legislators designed the FEC to prevent partisans from turning it into a political weapon.
It takes a majority vote among its six bipartisan FEC commissioners to proceed with a judgment. Commissioners are confirmed by the Senate and operate in the open. The status quo gives this job—and power—to the IRS’s unconfirmed, unseen federal bureaucrats.
Campaign-finance fights make Republicans nervous, but they’ve got a political self-interest in permanently transferring this job to the FEC. Once back in power, Democrats will mobilize a crackdown against their single biggest obsession—“dark money.” Meaning the conservatives who fund their opposition.
Lois Lerner’s IRS operation was the swamp at its worst. The GOP would do the country’s politics a favor by draining these bureaucrats of partisan political power.
Judicial Watch, which is still pursuing documents related to the IRS targeting scandal and has for years, proving Lerner was at the heart of the targeting, is buying none of it and calling on President Trump to intervene.
Slate, Today in Conservative Media: Lock Lois Lerner Up!
The IRS Scandal, Day 1582: Is The IRS Scandal About To Break Wide Open?
Engelbrecht ... said just learning the names of those involved isn't enough for her. Instead, she wants the IRS to enact a policy prohibiting viewpoint discrimination. "That's our whole goal — it's to make sure this viewpoint discrimination can never occur again. It is procedurally prohibited," Engelbrecht said. "That they admit what they did was unconstitutional and won't happen to an organization, an individual, doesn't matter your political party preference. The IRS has been weaponized and needs to be put back in the box."
The IRS Scandal, Day 1576: Will Justice Come For IRS Lawbreakers At Last?
The IRS scandal seemingly has lain dormant now for months, all but forgotten amid the spate of recent anti-Trump media spasms, the ongoing violent antics of the antifa leftists and, now, Hurricane Harvey's devastation. But even if much of Washington has forgotten about it, a Washington judge hasn't.
As reported by the Washington Examiner, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Washington, D.C., District Court last week revived legal attention to the scandal, telling the IRS it has to reveal the names of IRS employees who targeted conservative, libertarian and Tea Party groups.
But Walton didn't stop there. He also gave the IRS until Oct. 16 to find all the records in IRS databases from May 2009 to March 2015 that are relevant to the case and to explain just why these groups were targeted.
Paul Caron, dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law and himself a tax lawyer, has kept a lonely vigil at his blog on the IRS' questionable actions in all this, running a virtually day-by-day account of the news behind the scandal, which as of Monday by his count was in its 1,572nd day (and counting).
With so little action, on Monday Caron wondered plaintively, "Why did it go away?" Well, we've wondered that too.
By seeking maximum disclosure, Walton is doing yeoman's duty in making the IRS accountable. We wish him success in prying open the IRS' chest of dirty secrets.
But that's not enough. At the very least, it's time the U.S. Department of Justice stopped defending the indefensible, and started forcing the rogue tax-collection agency and its former executives to answer for its politically motivated crimes. As the old saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.
The IRS Scandal, Day 1574: Why Are Trump’s Justice Department Appointees Protecting The IRS?
The Daily Signal, Why Are Trump’s Justice Department Appointees Protecting the IRS?
[T]he Tax Division of the Justice Department, which is currently headed by acting Assistant Attorney General David A. Hubbert, has put up a mulish fight defending the IRS, including doing everything it can to prevent the IRS from having to provide any of the information and documentation that the plaintiffs are seeking about the targeting.
[T]he IRS — after four years of delays — is going to finally have to tell us who (in addition to Lerner) planned, organized, and participated in the abuse of the government’s tax power to target Americans for their participation in the political process, their opposition to Obama and liberal policies, and their support for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Walton’s order is a significant victory for the plaintiffs in this lawsuit. But why were this hearing and this order even necessary in the first place?
As soon as President Donald Trump was inaugurated and the first members of the Trump transition team landed at the Justice Department, one of the first steps they should have taken was to order the Tax Division to stop its deliberate litigation strategy of fighting all attempts to ferret out what exactly happened at the IRS, and who was responsible for it.
What are the political appointees at the Justice Department doing? Why are they continuing to protect the IRS? Why are they trying to stop the efforts to find out who at the IRS was responsible for this abusive behavior?
And while we are on the subject of the IRS scandal, why haven’t Trump’s political appointees at the Justice Department reversed the refusal of Ronald Machen, former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, (who was an Obama appointee) to enforce the contempt citation issued by the House of Representatives against Lerner for her refusal to cooperate with the congressional committee investigating this abusive conduct?
The IRS Scandal, Day 1572: Why Did It Go Away?
On Friday, May 10, 2013, IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner told a stunned audience of tax attorneys in Washington that the IRS had delayed and obstructed the tax exemption applications from conservative-sounding organizations. Later that month, the U.S. Treasury Inspector General made public a report confirming and detailing the nature of the targeting. What began as a governmental investigation had become a legal battle between nonprofits seeking what they believed to be information and resolution on the one hand and the federal government asserting claims of protecting taxpayer and employee confidentiality on the other.
As NPQ has chronicled in dozens of articles, the ensuing four years and counting since May 2013 have included several Congressional and other investigations but no criminal indictments or known personnel actions against anyone involved in the targeting. ... The U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation, but in the midst of that investigation, they announced there would be no indictments. Various Congressional committees attempted to ferret out what happened and who did it but were stymied by the IRS’s slow responses to records requests and, in some cases, destruction of computer media which might have contained important information.
Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations like Judicial Watch, Cause for Action, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), and others have used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and legal challenges to aggressively pursue the facts and circumstances surrounding the actions of IRS personnel. In addition, many of the targeted nonprofit organizations (most were eventually approved for tax exemption after awaiting a decision for up to seven years) have pursued their own legal cases in federal court.
Détente in this intergovernmental cold war will likely come only when change and accommodation comes from the IRS or when Congressional control switches parties. In the meantime, the continuing lawsuits and the long memories (not to mention political interests) of some elected officials portend more budgetary and regulatory stress at the IRS for the indefinite future.
In a little noticed decision last week, federal Judge Reggie Walton ordered the IRS to answer a series of questions by Oct. 16. Notably, the tax agency must finally explain the specific reasons for the specific delays in approving each of dozens of conservative nonprofit applications—delays that stifled free speech during a midterm and presidential election. Judge Walton is also requiring the IRS to name the specific individuals that it holds responsible for the targeting.
The IRS Scandal, Day 1561: Why Hasn't Trump Drained The IRS/DOJ Swamp?
Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp, and here’s a seven-month progress report: The Washington bog is still as wide and fetid as ever. Consider that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has inexplicably continued to defend the IRS’s misdeeds under President Obama.
Voters put a Republican in the White House in part to impose some belated accountability on the scandal-laden Obama administration. And the supreme scandal was the IRS’s assault on tea-party groups—a campaign inspired by congressional Democrats, perpetrated by partisan bureaucrats like Lois Lerner, and covered up by Mr. Obama’s political appointees. This abuse stripped the right to political speech from thousands of Americans over two election cycles. To this day, no one has answered for it.
The problem is that the same old Obama-era lawyers have been left to run these cases in the same old hostile ways. Who are these people? Laura Beckerman, one of the lead lawyers defending the IRS in the Ohio class action, left government only this month. Her LinkedIn profile says she is now pro bono coordinating counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW is among the most liberal outfits in the capital, fanatically devoted to taking down conservatives. That’s the type still calling the shots in Mr. Trump’s bureaucracy.
The Justice Department’s job is to defend the government, but it is also supposed to pursue justice. And there is no question the IRS did wrong. It has been documented by the Treasury Department’s inspector general and admitted by the IRS itself. It’d be one thing if the plaintiffs were demanding a billion-dollar payout, but they aren’t. Their main request is that the IRS come clean on what happened, and the government is resisting with all its power. The real question is why the Justice Department is even fighting this suit, when it ought to be leading a renewed investigation into what happened and how it got covered up.
It’s time for some judgment. Senior leaders in the Justice Department may be wary of replacing or redirecting attorneys on the IRS cases, fearing it might provoke another round of media caterwauling. The White House may be wary of canning Mr. Koskinen, thinking it would be cast as another high-profile firing. But Mr. Trump was hired to impose exactly that sort of accountability. If he’s going to get rapped for dramatic moves, it might as well be for doing something that serves justice.
Republicans continue to call for restricting IRS funding and restructuring the agency to ensure there isn’t a repeat of a scandal caused when IRS employees stalled some applications of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions. The IRS has said it worked to resolve the issue.
NorCal Tea Party Patriots The IRS Aug. 2 defended its actions in the class action, saying it was within its rights to review exemption applications carefully, but it also acknowledged that it delayed some applications inappropriately (NorCal Tea Party Patriots v. IRS, S.D. Ohio, No.1:13-cv-00341, 8/2/17). ... A trial is set for Feb. 5, 2018.
True the Vote ... True the Vote in April withdrew two discovery requests: evidence of the IRS using viewpoint-based criteria in tax administration and evidence of the political positions of IRS employees (True the Vote, Inc. v. IRS, D.D.C., No. 1:13-cv-00734, 4/5/17).
Freedom Path The Freedom Path case is set for a June 18, 2018, trial (Freedom Path, Inc. v. IRS, N.D. Tex., No. 3:14-cv-01537, 8/9/17). ... The IRS initially said Freedom Path didn’t qualify as a social welfare group, exempt under Section 501(c)(4) because it didn’t operate just to promote social welfare. The group applied for its exemption in 2011 and sued the IRS in 2014.
The IRS Scandal, Day 1554: Why Is Trump's Justice Department Still Fighting Disclosure Of Documents Revealing IRS Targeting Of Conservative Groups?
[H]ere’s an issue on which Messrs. Trump and Sessions should be able to find common ground: The Justice Department should stop defending Obama administration corruption.

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