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
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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

Targeting Conservatives: Watchdog Obtains IRS - FEC Email Exchange

Watchdog obtains IRS-FEC email exchange

 October 31, 2013, 08:00 pm @TheHill escerpt:

A conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch, said it obtained an email chain from the Internal Revenue Service in which the department provided confidential tax information to the Federal Election Commission.

The watchdog group obtained the exchange from a freedom of information request made shortly after congressional investigators began prodding the agency on whether it inappropriately shared confidential tax information about a conservative group applying for tax-exempt status. 

 Leaking Information about conservatives isn't new for Obama's IRS

Lois Lerner, then-IRS director of Exempt Organizations, who was quoted in the emails has since retired.

Judicial Watch said the IRS sent the FEC annual tax returns, request forms for tax-exempt status, and articles of organization. The watchdog received the information from the FEC. It said the IRS had not yet complied with its request for information.

Sharing taxpayer returns would violate federal law. 

The White House Lied and blamed a few 'rogue agents in the Cincinnati office'

The House Ways and Means subcommittee on Oversight released a portion of the email exchange in July questioning whether the IRS had shared confidential information. Congressional investigators had since requested more information. The exchange between Lerner and the FEC dates back to 2009.

“These extensive emails and other materials provide a disturbing window into the activities of two out-of-control federal agencies: the IRS and FEC,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement accompanying the release. “And there is the very real question as to whether these documents evidence a crime.”

Lois Lerner earns a 'bushel of Pinocchios' from the Washington Post
An IRS Political Timeline @WSJ


Other Links:
Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info
Democrats Justify Using IRS to Target Political Opponents
Lerner Statement - Fuller Clip
Lois Lerner Invokes the 5th Amendment @CSPANVL
A bushel of Pinocchios for IRS's Lois Lerner
IRS released confidential info on conservative groups to ProPublica
Supporters of Propublica
Planted question gambit backfires on IRS officials
IRS Targeting Conservatives is 'Poor Customer Service' that Leads to Promotions
Strassel: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top
IRS's Lois Lerner's Own Words

IRS Commissioner's Opening Statement:

Emails Undercut the Official IRS Story on Targeting Conservative Groups

The IRS's targeting of conservative groups needs to be ignored by the left and the Obama sycophants in the media. Another textbook case of cognitive dissonance by the leftists.  Keep repeating phony scandal, or they were all targeted just the same.

Lois Lerner's Own Words

Emails undercut the official IRS story on political targeting.

A version of this article appeared September 11, 2013, on page A18 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Lois Lerner's Own Words.
Excerpted:

Congress's investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it's turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn't politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation.

In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff—including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz—that a Tea Party matter is "very dangerous," and is something "Counsel and [Lerner adviser] Judy Kindell need to be in on." Ms. Lerner adds, "Cincy should probably NOT have these cases."

That's a different tune than the IRS sang in May when former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said the agency's overzealous enforcement was the work of two "rogue" employees in Cincinnati. When the story broke, Ms. Lerner suggested that her office had been unaware of the pattern of targeting until she read about it in the newspaper. "So it was pretty much we started seeing information in the press that raised questions for us, and we went back and took a look," she said in May. 

 Earlier this summer, IRS lawyer Carter Hull, who oversaw the review of many Tea Party cases and questionnaires, testified that his oversight began in April 2010. Tea party cases under review are "being supervised by Chip Hull at each step," Ms. Paz wrote to Ms. Lerner in a February 2011 email. "He reviews info from TPs, correspondence to TPs etc. No decisions are going out of Cincy until we go all the way through the process with the c3 and c4 cases here." TP stands for Tea Party, and she means 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups.

The emails also put the targeting in the context of the media and Congressional drumbeat over the impact of conservative campaign spending on the 2012 elections. On July 10, 2012 then Lerner-adviser Sharon Light emailed Ms. Lerner a National Public Radio story on how outside money was making it hard for Democrats to hold their Senate majority.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had complained to the Federal Election Commission that conservative groups like Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity should be treated as political committees, rather than 501(c)(4)s, which are tax-exempt social welfare groups that do not have to disclose their donors.

Background testimony and video on the IRS scandal











More blogs on the IRS targeting of conservatives:
Democrats Justify Using IRS to Target Political Opponents
Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info
Targeting Conservatives: An IRS Political Timeline

Barack Obama's Organizing for Action operates as a 501C4 tax exempt organization

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. 

IRS Scandal - Lois Lerner SPUN as Bush APPOINTEE

Lerner gets 4 Pinocchios in Fact Check.

  The I.R.S. scandal hits the press and the left needs to provide cover for Barack Obama. Lois Lerner headed the division of the I.R.S. that targeted conservative groups. Lerner's previous testimony and the Obama Administration's story doesn't appear to be completely honest.  Denials and distractions are in order. What talking points will the Left use?

 

 

Does Bush Appointee Lois Lerner Have A Political Agenda?

 Surprising headlines from foxnewsradio.com ? Not so surprising to find out it is empty-suit
leftist Alan Colmes's posting.  It starts....  

"Sarah Jones at PolticusUSA makes the case that Republican blocking of Obama appointees keeps Bush appointees in place and that is what can be wrecking havoc."

Alan Colme's first sentence sends us out into the LEFTIST Blogosphere to PoliticusUSA- Real Liberal Politics.  The Obama propaganda machine relies heavily on Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) to push most of their 'message'  Five years into Obama's presidency, the dear leader's agenda and 'legacy' is to be protected at  ANY cost.  The leftist spin machine churns out the progressive pablum for consumption by the collective.  Intellectual dishonesty is a hallmark of the 'new left'. Only reality can inoculate an individual from BDS, thus explaining the pandemic in the left wing.

The POTUS does not appoint lower level employees to jobs. Lois Lerner WAS NOT APPOINTED by Bush to her Job.

Lois G. Lerner Selected as Director of IRS Exempt Organizations Division

IR-2005-148, Dec. 22, 2005
WASHINGTON — Lois G. Lerner has been selected as the director of the Exempt Organizations Division of the Internal Revenue Service. In this position, she will be responsible for administering and enforcing the tax laws that apply to more than 1.8 million organizations recognized by the IRS as exempt from tax.
“Protecting the integrity of tax-exempt organizations is an important part of our enforcement program,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “Lois’s background, including her work for the Federal Election Commission, qualifies her for this new assignment.”
Before this appointment, Lerner had been the director of the Exempt Organizations Rulings & Agreements Division, where she was responsible for the EO determinations letter program, public guidance and technical assistance for IRS agents conducting examinations of tax-exempt organizations. Lerner came to the IRS in 2001 from the Federal Election Commission, where she was Associate General Counsel for Enforcement and Acting General Counsel. She replaces Martha Sullivan, who will retire from the IRS at the end of December.
“Lois is an integral part of the EO team and has successfully increased the IRS presence in the exempt community,” said Steven T. Miller, Commissioner of the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, of which EO is a part. “Her integrity, skills and judgment are exceptional and will allow us to continue to provide improved service and enhanced enforcement of the tax laws.”   Lois G. Lerner Selected as Director of IRS Exempt Organizations Division

The site called 'Daily Progress' phrases it like this:

Lerner was appointed in 2005 to her job by the IRS commissioner, the agency's top official, appointed by the president.   IRS director signed letters to tea party 

You really mean appointed by the guy who was appointed by the president, sort of a Presidential appointment once removed.

Invoke the Fifth

White House tries Damage Control

Obama's IRS Targets Conservative Groups-Leaks Info