Lois Lerner Warned IRS Employees to Hide Information from Congress

A newly released email from former IRS employee Lois G. Lerner, sent just as the tea party targeting scandal was erupting, warned colleagues to “be cautious” about what information they put in emails because it could be turned over to Congress.

“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress ask asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” Ms. Lerner wrote in an April 9, 2013, message.

The message came less than two weeks after the IRS’s internal auditor shared a draft report with the agency accusing it of targeting tea party and conservative groups. A month after the email, Ms. Lerner would plant a question at a conference to reveal the scandal, just before the inspector general’s report was made public.

The email was turned over to the House oversight committee last week, more than a year after lawmakers sought it as part of their investigation into the IRS targeting.

Republicans said the email shows Ms. Lerner was aware Congress was probing the agency and that she was preparing to intentionally hide agency discussions from lawmakers.

Ms. Lerner’s emails have become a major scandal in and of themselves after the IRS revealed that her computer hard drive crashed in 2011, causing the agency to lose thousands of her messages.

The IRS went back and tried to recover some of the messages by asking others on the email chain to dig through their mailboxes, but the agency acknowledged some messages may be permanently lost.

Some Republicans have questioned whether the IRS took enough steps to try to recover the emails from the hard drive in 2011.

Read More at the Washington Times:
 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/9/gop-lerner-warned-irs-employees-hide-information/#ixzz370hQu61s
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lois Lerner Invokes the 5th Amendment



IRS agents testify before Congress. The orders came from Washington.


 The IRS's evolving Story on targeting conservatives. 


 Part of the targeting involved leaking confidential information about conservative groups  to the press


The Democrat Party used the agencies of the government to silence and intimidate it's political opponents.

Read More:
 Senate Dems Have as Much to Explain as the IRS 
Key Senate Democrats publicly pressured the IRS to target groups that held differing political views.
IRS Office That Targeted Tea Party Also Disclosed Confidential Docs From Conservative Groups

Emails Show Lois Lerner Fed True the Vote Tax Information to Democrat Elijah Cummings

JW Obtains Records: IRS’ Lerner Disclosed Confidential Information about Tax Status of Conservative Groups to FEC
 The videos in my blog also have links to many articles on the IRS scandal

House Committee Votes to Refer IRS's Lois Lerner for Criminal Charges

House Ways and Means Committee Votes to Refer Lois Lerner For Criminal Charges

Katie Pavlich | Apr 09, 2014

The House Ways and Means Committee has voted to 23-14 along party lines to refer former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner to the Justice Department for prosecution. Although the details about exactly what charges will be have not yet been released, lawmakers are arguing Lerner has not been truthful with Congress or the IRS inspector general and leaked confidential tax information.

Last time a referral like this happened, it was to Major League Baseball player Roger Clemens, who was pursued by the Department of Justice for lying to Congress but was exonerated in court.

This is a test for the Department of Justice and the Obama administration. What's more important? Baseball and steroids? Or the most powerful federal agency abusing its power to target innocent conservative groups? 

Last summer President Obama called the targeting "outrageous" and promised to hold people responsible and accountable for what happened. If the Justice Department refuses to pursue charges against Lerner, it's fair to say one reason is because they don't want information leading back to the administration coming out in court.

Tomorrow the House Oversight Comittee will vote on whether to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress.

Watchdog: Obama Should Abandon Organizing For Action

Watchdog: Obama should abandon Organizing For Action

 March 11, 2014, by Justin Sink @ The Hill

A campaign finance reform group is calling on President Obama to shut down the political advocacy organization born out of his reelection campaign, after it admitted last week to violating its own fundraising standards.

In a letter sent to President Obama on Tuesday, watchdog group Democracy 21 called Organizing for Action (OFA) "a direct threat to the integrity" of Obama's presidency and said reports about the fundraising missteps "raise multiple, serious concerns" about the influence of the group.

"Democracy 21 strongly urges you to shut down Organizing for Action or, alternatively, to end any relationship that you and your Administration have with OFA," the group wrote.

Last week, OFA announced it was revamping its solicitation practices and had fired a top fundraiser after an NBC News report revealed emails between the group and New Jersey businessman Munr Kazmir explicitly listing prices to attend a summit last week with the president.

The emails conflicted with a pledge from former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who wrote in an op-ed last year that “we can't and we won't guarantee access to any government officials.”

While Kazmir ultimately did not donate to the group, the NBC News investigation revealed he did attempt to deliver a $100,000 donation from a New Jersey physician, Dr. Joseph Piacentile.

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The check was returned because Piacentile has been convicted of Medicare fraud, but Kazmir was asked to have Piacentile donate the money instead to America Votes, a partner organization that, unlike OFA, does not disclose its donors.

The organization subsequently admitted it was the third time fundraisers had asked for donations to be diverted to other progressive groups.

OFA Director Jon Carson also arranged for Kazmir to meet with White House aide Yohannes Abraham, the chief of staff of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Ashley Green, who works on international education issues at the Agency for International Development.

In response to the revelations, OFA sent an internal memo to staff earlier this month reiterating that no member of the group is authorized to offer supporters opportunities to meet with administration officials or to suggest that a donation to the group is a prerequisite to summits featuring the president or other administration officials.

The memo also outlined a new policy under which OFA will no longer recommend to supporters that donors make a financial contribution to another political organization.
In a statement, Carson said he “fell short” in meeting his responsibility “to assure that no question about our standards could even be reasonably raised.”

“We have strengthened our policies to prevent an issue like this from ever reoccurring and to ensure that our sole focus in cities and states across the country is promoting the issues the American people voted for in 2012 and accomplishing a national progressive agenda,” Carson said.

 Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for the group, stressed that OFA never accepted a donation from Kazmir and noted Piacentile did not attend the event late last month featuring Obama. She also stressed that, under OFA policies “no one is or has ever been authorized to offer opportunities to meet with administration officials in exchange for a donation to the organization.”

 But Democracy 21 charges in its letter that the missteps "constituted a fundamental violation of the integrity of the office of the presidency."

"The public has no way of knowing how many other occasions there have been since OFA was created where OFA may have sold access to the White House or to government agencies," the group writes. "Under current circumstances, there is also no way to ensure that the sale of access by OFA will not happen again in the future."
This is not the first time OFA has faced scrutiny from watchdog groups for its fundraising practices and ties to the White House.

After a disputed report last year in The New York Times claimed that donors who gave $500,000 would be guaranteed quarterly access to the president, and a $50,000 donation was required to attend a founder's summit, Common Cause President Bob Edgar accused Obama of perpetuating “the pay-to-play politics he has reportedly deplored.”

IRS Scandal: Salon Pushes Discredited Talking Points

Look at that impressive headline below from Salon.  An Issa smear / White house propaganda piece disguised as a credible news story by an Obamabot named Alex Pareene

Issa saved by the news cycle

Another lying miss for the Oversight Committee chair, though this one couldn't have fallen apart at a better time 

 Thursday, Jun 27, 2013 07:27 AM CST

There has been so much news this week, from the Supreme Court to the racist television cooking lady to the return of Crossfire, that some of the political media’s old favorite stories have almost entirely disappeared from cable news and the blogosphere. Victims of the news cycle include the trio of “scandals” that gripped official Washington for weeks beginning last month. In particular, the controversy over IRS scrutiny of Tea Party groups has largely disappeared from the headlines. Considering how much of a political gift that particular controversy was to Republicans, you’d expect them to be upset about this fact. But recent revelations have actually given them cause to celebrate the nation’s short attention span. 

It was revealed this week, in fact, that the entire scandal was essentially a set-up. First, acting IRS commissioner Danny Werfel testified that the IRS also scrutinized and challenged groups with names that included “Occupy” and “progressive.” IRS documents released by House Democrats supported his testimony. The IG didn’t uncover targeting of liberal groups because it wasn’t asked to.

The spokesman for the Treasury inspector general noted their audit acknowledged there were other watch lists. But the spokesman added: “We did not review the use, disposition, purpose or content of the other BOLOs. That was outside the scope of our audit.”

We then learned that the entire reason the Treasury Inspector General highlighted IRS scrutiny of conservative groups, but not liberal groups, was because the IG had been instructed to do so by Issa.

The article ends with more humor:

 Conservatives will still trust Issa. They didn’t give up on him when Fast & Furious failed to lead to impeachment, and they certainly won’t give up on him now. And like I said, the scandal already sort of served its purpose: It hurt Obama politically. The question, still, is whether the objective press will continue to treat Issa’s claims seriously, after a month in which he trumpeted the results of a purposefully limited IG audit, released selectively edited transcripts of testimony and generally took everyone for a ride that led nowhere. Alas, you can lie to the political press dozens of times over the course of years and still remain a trusted source, so don’t expect much additional skepticism the next time Issa promises something huge.

Now we leave the leftist spin machine at Salon and head back to reality. 

Treasury IG: Liberal groups weren't targeted by IRS like Tea Party

 By Bernie Becker - 06/27/13 09:06 AM ET

Liberal groups seeking tax-exempt status faced less IRS scrutiny than Tea Party groups, according to the Treasury inspector general.
Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, told Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) in a letter dated Wednesday that the IRS did not use inappropriate criteria to scrutinize groups with “progressives” in their name seeking tax-exempt status.

“Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill. 

The inspector general also stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention.

“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, e-mails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention,” George wrote to Levin, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. 

George and his office have faced criticism in recent days after it emerged that its audit was tasked with looking into merely whether conservative groups faced tough IRS scrutiny. Documents released this week showed other groups — including liberal and non-partisan organizations — also received scrutiny from the IRS, and Democrats have suggested this wasn't noted in the ensuing scandal because of the IG's focus on conservative groups.

George insisted that his office did not limit its audit to Tea Party groups. 

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/308131-ig-liberal-groups-not-targeted-like-tea-party#ixzz2XQcXixJY

Other Links on the IRS Scandal
Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info


IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo 

Trust in government continues to plummet so leave it up to the leftist praetorian media and apparatchiks to distract and dis-inform for the Obama administration and continue to provide cover for a BIG government that targets American citizens. 
 

Targeting Conservatives: An IRS Political Timeline

An IRS Political Timeline

President Obama spent months in 2010 warning Americans about the 'threat' to democracy posed by conservative groups, right at the time the IRS began targeting these groups.

• June 6, 2013, 7:40 p.m. ET 
  

Perhaps the only useful part of the inspector general's audit of the IRS was its timeline. We know that it was August 2010 when the IRS issued its first "Be On the Lookout" list, flagging applications containing key conservative words and issues. The criteria would expand in the months to come.
What else was happening in the summer and fall of 2010? The Obama administration and its allies continue to suggest the IRS was working in some political vacuum. What they'd rather everyone forget is that the IRS's first BOLO list coincided with their own attack against "shadowy" or "front" conservative groups that they claimed were rigging the electoral system.
Below is a more relevant timeline, a political one, which seeks to remind readers of the context in which the IRS targeting happened.

Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Aug. 11: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups."

Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.

 Barack Obama address August 21 2010

Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."

Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax." The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.
This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status. 

 Read More:
 An IRS Political Timeline @WSJ


WSJ Reporter Discusses the Targeting of Conservatives

The IRS and the 'evolving' story


Related Blog:
Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info

Democrats Justify Using IRS to Target Political Opponents

The targeting of conservatives by BIG GOVERNMENT and it's apparatus the Democrat Party is on full display in the I.R.S. scandal.  The perpetual leftist propaganda campaign against the Tea Party and the left's astro-turf distraction Occupy were just a few of the overt tactics used to control the messaging  and target it's 'opponents'. Chicago gutter politics always borders on criminal and we all know that borders mean nothing to the left. Winning the election means amnesty from prosecution. Speaking of Illinois.   

From The Hill:

Durbin: No regrets calling out Crossroads to the IRS

Durbin: No regrets calling out Crossroads to the IRS 

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Sunday defended his decision to single out a key GOP group in a 2010 letter to the IRS.

Durbin said Crossroads GPS, co-founded by Karl Rove, had been boasting about how much money they had been raising, and the role they were playing in the 2010 midterms.“Citizens United really unleashed hundreds, if not thousands of organizations, seeking tax-exempt status to play in political campaigns,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Durbin said he didn’t mention any liberal groups in his letter because an IRS examination into Crossroads would have put organizations across the political spectrum on notice.

During the current IRS scandal, Democrats like Durbin have said there need to be broader questions raised about how and if political groups like Crossroads and Tea Party groups should be allowed the tax-exempt status reserved for social welfare groups.
“There is no basis for targeting within the IRS,” Durbin said. “What we basically need to say is all groups need to have the law applied to them equally.”

From The Atlantic:

Congress Put Pressure on the IRS to Investigate Conservative Tax-Exempt Groups

" Peter Welch is a Democratic congressman from Vermont and sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by California Republican Darrell Issa. Welch's March 2, 2012 letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman explicitly called on the IRS to crack down on 501(c)(4)s: "

"In a statement accompanying the letter, Welch's office urged the IRS to "investigate whether nonprofit 501(c)(4) organizations affiliated with Super PACs—such as Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-backed group spending millions of dollars in campaigns across the country—are in violation of federal law and IRS regulations.' " Congress Put Pressure on the IRS to Investigate Conservative Tax-Exempt Groups

 From The Hill:

Report: IRS leaked confidential documents to investigative media

Report: IRS leaked confidential documents to investigative media

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) leaked confidential materials submitted by some conservative groups to investigative journalists at ProPublica, the group reported on Tuesday.

Last year, ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet, was researching “how dozens of social-welfare nonprofits had misled the IRS about their political activity on their applications and tax returns.”

As part of the investigation, “ProPublica regularly requested applications from the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which is responsible for reviewing applications from nonprofits.” According to the report, the same IRS office in Cincinnati that has admitted to targeting conservative groups provided confidential documents submitted by some of those nonprofit organizations to ProPublica.

“In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups,” ProPublica reports. “Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)”

Among the applications sent to ProPublica was one for Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-backed group and one of the biggest spending conservative groups in the 2012 election cycle. Applications are supposed to remain confidential until a group’s status has been determined.
ProPublica says it followed up with the IRS at the time to find out why it had been provided the confidential materials. The IRS responded by saying it would be illegal for ProPublica to publish the documents.

ProPublica published the materials but redacted some financial information.
The ProPublica report expands the scope of what has become a political firestorm in Washington. The IRS apologized last Friday for targeting conservative groups, including those with the words “Tea Party” and “patriot” in their names, for extra scrutiny when determining whether they were eligible for tax-exempt status.

Call for an investigation of your political opponents and then leak the private information. Nothing to see here? A special prosecutor INDEPENDENT of the partisan Eric Holder's Justice Department is required to investigate the I.R.S. and those involved in the abuse of power and corruption. 

Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info

IRS Released Confidential Info on Conservative Groups to ProPublica 

excerpt:

"ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status.
That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved.
Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had asked Lerner in March 2012 to provide a list of all organizations that the IRS had subjected to special scrutiny.

(Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

Lerner replied that she could not legally reveal information about groups that were not approved and that identifying targeted applicants that were already approved would require additional work, specifically a “manual review of each file.” She did not identify any of the organizations.
Below is an excerpt of Lerner’s response:

“Section 6104(a) of the Code permits public disclosure of an application for recognition of tax exempt status and supporting materials only after the organization has been recognized as exempt. Consequently, we cannot provide a list of organizations that have received [additional scrutiny] from the IRS, until those applications have been approved.”

ProPublica reported that the Lerner’s division released “nine pending confidential applications of conservatives groups” in response to a request from the investigative-reporting organization for the applications of 67 nonprofits in November 2012. "

Soros's Open Society Funded Propublica

Planted question gambit backfires on IRS officials

excerpt: 

"It was an unusual way to deliver bad news, even in a town known for its selective leaks, Friday-night news dumps and wag-the-dog distractions.

The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.
Details of the now-infamous planted question emerged Friday after acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted the gambit under questioning from members of the House Ways and Means Committee.
STORY: IRS chief denies politics drove Tea Party screening
It was the day after Lerner had testified to Congress last week, failing once again to disclose the extent of the Tea Party targeting even under direct questioning. The damning inspector general report would come out any day, and Lerner and Miller wanted to figure out a way to disclose the news publicly.
Miller testified about the thought process behind the release strategy Friday. "Now that the (inspector general) report was finalized, now that we knew all the facts, now that we had responded in writing and everything was done, did it make sense for us to start talking about this in public," he said.
The plan, he said, was to simultaneously notify Congress, but that never happened."

IRS cases were referred to ‘Group 7822’

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/18/194248/irs-cases-were-referred-to-group.html#storylink=cpy

By David Lightman and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Washington Bureau - Tuesday, June 18, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service diverted applications for tax-exempt status from tea party and like-minded organizations to a special track known as Group 7822 for special scrutiny, according to transcripts of an interview by congressional interrogators with a key IRS official.

The lengthy interview with John Shafer, a senior manager in the screening department of the IRS division in charge of tax-exempt designations, was shared with reporters by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

Staffs from several congressional committees have been interviewing employees in the Cincinnati-based IRS office that handles applications for exempt organization status.
Cummings’ aim was to refute assertions by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that the special scrutiny was part of a Washington-based conspiracy. Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, said the transcript of five hours of interviews on June 9 “debunks conspiracy theories about how the IRS first started reviewing these cases.”

Issa said he was “deeply disappointed” in Cummings. He said Cummings “has wrongly argued that questions about IRS conduct are somehow not legitimate. His own previous release of excerpts from this very same transcript undermines his claims that the committee is somehow trying to keep some specific revelation from public view.”
The IRS transcript helped fill in blanks about information that was generally known but not well understood. For example, Shafer confirmed that his boss, Holly Paz, was present when a Treasury Department auditor queried him about treatment of tea party applications. “I wasn’t sure why she was there,” he said. Shafer said her presence did not change his answers.

Shafer described himself as a conservative Republican and explained how applications that met criteria that the IRS has since called inappropriate were selectively screened. The criteria included buzzwords such as constitution, Bill of Rights and other tea party themes referring to the Founding Fathers. These words caused applications to be pulled aside and sent to what’s called Group 7822. He did not say how the criteria were developed or by whom.

He said the tea party cases were called “emerging issues” by agency officials, apparently because they had received media attention.
“Each case is again reviewed and the determination is made on the facts and circumstances within that case,” he said. Asked what caused an emerging issue, “I 100 percent do not know, OK?” he answered. “What I would do is go into the electronic system and I would transfer these cases to Group 7822.”

Other Blogs on the IRS Scandal

Democrats Justify Using IRS to Target Political Opponents

Targeting Conservatives: An IRS Political Timeline