Irs Explodes Into A Huge Scandal Now
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A week after he released partial transcripts of interviews with IRS officials involved in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservative groups, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darell Issa said releasing the full transcripts would be "reckless" and "irresponsible."
Oh, Darrell.
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Full transcripts would contain private information, knucklehead.
Why is that only a good thing when YOU want it to be?
What a dim bulb.
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No, it wouldn't. These are interviews with IRS officials. And if it did contain private information, you could just redact those parts.
Issa has been leaking parts of the record to give the impression that this is a big scandal that goes all the way to "Washington" so he can be a hero to people like you, while withholding the parts that don't fit this narrative. So Elijah Cummings released the parts that show that the White House has nothing to do with this, and that this whole "scandal" was thought up by a "conservative Republican" who wanted to figure out a way to comb through the 501c3 groups, which is his job.
Everyone is laughing at Issa today, because he's revealing his inner bunko artist. Only the credulous buy his "I can't release the transcripts" routine.
What are you guys going to do when it turns out there's no IRS scandal either??
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And only the ignorant fools will sit by and cheerlead for IRS workers to be exonerated when we have written testimonies that there has been a hit list against pro life and tea party groups.
Your tax dollars at work on bullshit videos.
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Maybe we can get some dance lessons for free?
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Heck Translation:
"Dammit, even I can't tap dance around that..."
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I couldn't even begin to give a shit.
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Josh Green at Bloomberg Businessweek:
Darrell Issa's IRS Investigation Is Falling ApartBy Joshua GreenWhen Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Representative Darrell Issa of California was supposed to become a star. Issa, who made no secret of his ambition, took over the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, vowing to use the power of his chairmanship to stage hundreds of hearingsand hold the Obama administration to account. Anticipating what he promised would be “constant battle,” the White House hired extra lawyers and braced for the onslaught.
But Issa wasn’t the force people expected him to be. His biggest investigation, into the botched anti-gun smuggling operation that left a Border Patrol agent dead, incited right-wing talk radio listeners. Beyond that, though, it barely registered. After two years in power, Issa seemed more bark than bite.
Then came last month’s revelation that IRS agents had singled out Tea Party groups for special scrutiny. Here was an issue that seized public attention and posed a legitimate threat to Obama. Since then, nobody in Congress has pushed harder than Issa to pin the scandal on the White House.
But after a burst of attention, Issa’s investigation appears to have stalled. Although he turned up embarrassing material—has any government official been humiliated quite like the IRS commissioner in the dorky video dressed up as Spock?—Issa hasn’t made the all-important connection to the White House. And he may not be able to. The news this week that he won’t release the full transcripts of his interviews with IRS officials—interviews he selectively quoted from to imply White House complicity—suggests that what they contain may in fact exonerate the administration of the very charge Issa is laboring so hard to prosecute.
“Your push to release entire transcripts from witness interviews while the investigation remains active was reckless and threatened to undermine the integrity of the committee’s investigation,” Issa wrote in response to a letter from his Democratic counterpart, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who himself had selectively quoted the transcripts and then called on Issa to publicize the whole thing.
In theory, Issa could be building a case against the White House to rival Watergate that he just isn’t quite ready to unveil. But that’s highly unlikely. Cummings has seen the transcripts and wouldn’t call for their release if they contained information that would fell his party’s president. Issa’s weak-tea defense of why he won’t comply—witnesses might be demoted or fired, he says—only buttresses this suspicion. So does the effort by Issa’s colleague, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, to broaden the investigation’s scope to include donor audits. You don’t broaden an investigation if you’ve found the smoking gun and nailed the culprit.
“We’re not anywhere near being able to jump to conclusions,” Camp told reporters, includingBloomberg’s Richard Rubin, on Wednesday. So the IRS investigations will continue. But it’s getting harder to imagine that they’ll turn up evidence of a Nixonian plot, and if they don’t, Issa will have failed again.
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[Thy] tongue outvenoms all the worms of Nile.
and now.... Jeff Duncan questions IRS gun usage
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/jeff-duncan-irs-rifle-training-92662.html?hp=f2
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Now that we've learned that this started with a conservative Republican who worked at the IRS, and not Obama, and not someone in the White House, and it wasn't even directed out of the Washington office of the IRS, and that progressive groups were also targeted, and there seems to be no political motive here ...does someone want to explain to me what the scandal is?
What did the IRS do to one side and not the other? What's political about it? They seem to be guilty of not being able to process these applications in a timely manner.
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Issa’s claim is right on. Many organizations are still awaiting an IRS response regarding their status. A Washington, D.C. law firm that represents some of these groups says that the IRS’s claim that the system was streamlined after 2010 is demonstrably false in light of a massive increase in the amount of information the agency required of the firm’s clients. Like Fox, the firm debunk the “low-level employee” excuse because two of its clients’ applications had been referred to a “special task force” in Washington, DC.
The organization True the Vote, which applied for tax-exempt status in 2010, is still waiting for approval. They have endured three years of delays, during which time they have dealt with four different IRS agents, been subjected to six FBI inquiries, and have submitted thousands of pages of documentation to the agency, all to no avail.
As the afternoon wore on, another Democrat attempted to rescue the IRS, albeit indirectly. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) used his time to denounce the “absurd decision” by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case. He claimed it has brought so much money into the political system that it threatens the ability of Congress to do its job. This absurd notion picks up where former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) left off ten days ago, when she contended broader amounts of political activity — also known as freedom of speech — made it harder for the IRS to do its job. However, it is in fact left-wing groups that dominate the non-profit sector, long before Citizens United, while their highly politicized work is rarely interfered with.
Another key moment in the hearings occurred when Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told George that Holly Paz was present during 36 of 41 interviews conducted during the IRS audit. George contended he was unaware of the total, noting that many of the IRS auditors who produced that information are based outside Washington. This lack of knowledge, coupled with the aforementioned omission of targeted pro-life groups, and the failure to question anyone about possible White House involvement in the scandal, calls the thoroughness of the IG’s investigation into question.
After the hearing, Issa hardened his position with regard to Lerner. “When I asked her her questions from the very beginning, I did so so she could assert her rights prior to any statement,” Issa told Politico. “She chose not to do so–so she waived.” Stan Brand, general counsel for the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 disagreed. “I don’t think a brief introductory preface to her formal invocation of the privilege is a waiver,” he said. But Brand introduced the possibility that Lerner’s previous appearances before Congress may constitute a waiver of her Fifth Amendment rights. “Bottom line,” he warned, “I think we will hear no more from Ms. Lerner” unless she is provided immunity.
Thus, Lerner remains in the eye of the storm, which may be precisely the way the Obama administration wants it. As PJ Media’s Brian Preston notes, “several lefty bloggers known to be very close to the Obama White House were in fact meeting in the White House” on Tuesday, after Lerner’s attorney had announced she would be taking the Fifth. Two of them were Journolist veterans Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, and Josh Marshal of Talking Points Memorandum (TPM). In previous columns, Klein contended the IRS scandal was “a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership.” Marshal insisted the scandal was a way for Republicans to reconnect with their base, now that the “touch points” of immigration and gays are no longer as effective as they used to be.
Yesterday, within 30 minutes of each other, Klein released a piece contending ”heads should roll at the IRS,” while Marshal insisted Lerner “has to go.” Preston notes the “synchronicity,” of getting “reliably friendly bloggers and columnists on board with a story that focuses attention away from the White House.”
It is more than that. It is also Rule Number 12 in Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.”
As of now, Lois Lerner is the unsympathetic target of the IRS scandal. It behooves Darrell Issa to grant her some sort of immunity for the simplest of reasons: the American public deserves to know how deep the corruption goes within the most powerful agency of government they deal with — and how far it may extend beyond it.
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A conservative rep at the IRS ordered Ms. Lerner to tell a pro life group that
if they would promise to not picket abortion clinics, etc, ?
Or heckbunker thinks Ms lerner is a Conservative rep at the IRS? Really ???
Seriously? No. Just a really ignorant spin to see what works with stupid people.
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You mean this?
"Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood are considered educational as defined under 501
(3)." -
Thou art wither'd like an old apple-john.
It does not matter what or which political party these IRS workers support. The fact remain the same. These IRS peoples acted above the law and are being protected by the same political party that has brought us communist care and death panels.
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I find that cartoon very ironic being posted here
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Yeah, that was a classic Browns Board moment.
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So Cummings released the entirety of the IRS interview transcripts.
Again, hate to break it to you, fellas, but there's nothing here. Nothing at all. You've got pages of a conservative Republican saying, "I did this." And why? Because he thought grouping all of the Tea Party groups together would allow them to be treated equally instead of letting them go to different IRS offices.
There's your scandal, folks.
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So let's recap:
Benghazi was supposedly about how the White House, in order to help their re-election campaign, scrubbed the talking points Susan Rice then recited on the Sunday morning shows in order to obscure the reality and the embarrassment of a clear terrorist attack.
The reality: The White House had nothing to do with the talking points, which were drafted through the normal inter-agency process and then delivered by Susan Rice almost verbatim. The person who had the largest hand in the drafts was a career State Department official who last worked for Dick Cheney and is married to Robert Kagan.
The IRS scandal was supposedly about how the White House, through the political office or some other avenue, directed the IRS to target Right-wing 501c4 groups for special scrutiny in order to slow walk their applications and keep them from participating in the political process.
The reality: There is zero proof of political direction from the White House. All of these targeting mechanisms seems to have originated with the IRS itself and had no political motivation. Progressive groups were also targeted. And the man who owned up to devising the process is a self-described "conservative Republican" who believes to this day that he was just doing his job.
Will anyone in here own up to either of these realities? Of course not. And neither will the Republican base.
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I know, I know. It's very disappointing. So shoot the messenger and all that. Or tell me where I have my facts wrong.
But don't worry. This is the modern day Republican Party. You'll just continue on believing your bullshit anyway.
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