IRS: Internal Radical Service

 

The great David Horowitz and his colleague John Perazzo have a new pamphlet just out and you can access it for free online.  Here’s Mr Horowitz’s introduction:

How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes
illegally and unconstitutionally

On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The IRS violations include providing taxpayer subsidies to Democrat election campaigns; to underwriting Black Lives Matter riots which caused billions of dollars in property damage and led to the deaths of scores of individuals; the Internal Revenue Code's explicit requirement that all charitable activities should “promote the public good”; and the funding of racist policies which violate the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.

This booklet -- Internal Radical Service -- documents these violations and their destructive consequences. We publish it now as an appeal to Congress to investigate the abuses, and restore the integrity of an organization which has become a major threat to our democracy.

Click on the link here for access to the pamphlet. 

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The IRS Will Target You Next

So you think the IRS was weaponized under the Obama administration (think Lois Lerner)?  Thomas Gallatin at Patriot Post has more bad news for you:

Democrats aim to supercharge the agency
 to hit up the middle class for more tax revenue

Democrats are one vote away from weaponizing the Internal Revenue Service against the American middle class. With Joe Manchin doing an about-face on his opposition to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending binge, now reduced in scope and dubiously called the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS is on the cusp of a windfall to the tune of $80 billion.

To put that in perspective, the IRS’s annual budget is $12.6 billion. The additional $80 billion would be spread out over the next nine years, with the predictable Washington selling point that this IRS “investment” will reap a projected $200 billion in additional tax revenue thanks to more accurate tax collection.

And where will the lion’s share of this “lost” tax revenue come from? Despite the Democrats’ favorite talking point of making the wealthy pay their “fair share,” the vast majority of the collected tax revenue will come from hard-working middle-class Americans. . . .

Read the rest here.

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The IRS wants to spy on your bank records.

 

The IRS wants to spy on your bank records.  The last time we witnessed grotesque malfeasance by the IRS was back in 2012-13, when Lois Lerner oversaw the shameful foot-dragging on approving tax-exempt classifications; she "became the central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting controversy in the targeting of politically-aligned groups, either denying them tax-exempt status outright or delaying that status until they could no longer take effective part in the 2012 election."  I would not trust any of the claims being made to support this newest plan.  Here's Sabrina Eaton at cleveland.com:

A measure that would require financial institutions to report transactions to the Internal Revenue Service on any bank account with a balance of more than $600 has upset Ohio’s community bankers and Republican legislators, who are trying to get the provision removed from budget legislation that’s being written in Congress.

The Treasury Department says the proposal that’s drawing objections and others that would require that more information be sent to the IRS will reduce tax evasion and improve collection of taxes that are already due, generating an estimated $460 billion in tax revenue over ten years. It’s being suggested as a revenue offset for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that the Biden administration and Democrats who control Congress are drafting to spend more money on programs that they say would improve health care, education, infrastructure and counter climate change, among other things.

The Treasury Department says the extra data is being sought to target high earners who underreport their tax liabilities.

What a crock.  Improve education and ... good grief … climate change?  Targeting those who “underreport their tax liabilities”? 

Community Bankers Association of Ohio CEO Bob Palmer argues the proposal constitutes a “strong invasion of privacy,” and expressed doubt the data will help IRS catch wealthy tax evaders. He argues that people who have $600 in the bank typically are not wealthy individuals, and says his organization and its counterparts on the federal level are “pushing back at the administration and saying this makes no sense to us.”

. . .

A statement from Gibbs called the proposal “the type of big-brother style intrusion into private information we should all be worried about.

“Americans should not have to worry about the IRS looking over their shoulder whenever they loan money to family members or purchase Christmas presents for their children,” said Gibbs. “There is simply no need for the IRS to be collecting this information, and I urge the IRS to abandon their mass surveillance plans.”

Read the full report here.  

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IRS “apologizes” for targeting Tea Party and liberty groups

cartoon credit: Christopher Weyant [The Hill] via Pinterest

  

The media is reporting that the lawsuits filed against the IRS by various Tea Party and liberty organizations have been settled. This extract is from the report in The Washington Post: 

The Justice Department has reached settlement agreements with groups that alleged their constitutional rights were violated when their applications for tax-exempt status received extra scrutiny because their names contained words such as “tea party” or “patriots,” court filings show.

In one agreement, which still must be approved by a judge, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that its treatment of the organizations was “wrong” and expressed a “sincere apology” for what happened.

. . .

The targeting of tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status was a major controversy of the Obama administration, as hundreds of conservative-leaning groups received scrutiny. In some cases, it delayed the processing of applications for years.

Many felt the conduct was an example of the president punishing his political enemies.

. . .

The Justice Department, too, conducted a criminal investigation but ultimately decided not to bring charges, including against Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw tax-exempt groups.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints,” Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter J. Kadzik wrote in 2015.

“But poor management is not a crime,” Kadzik wrote. “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

"Poor management"? Weaponizing the IRS is “poor management”? And of course, nobody is going to jail, losing their job, or losing their pension. Read the rest of the WaPo story here. There’s also a report at cleveland.com.

UPDATE at 6:21pm from Rick Moran at American Thinker blog:

The settlement, as unsatisfactory to many as it is, at least closes the book on this sordid chapter in the history of the IRS.  Will it curtail the IRS from using politics to enforce tax law again?  Since no one was punished after this blatant example of political use of the tax agency, I doubt it.

Full blog post is here.

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Judicial Watch: Lois Lerner and the IRS lied

"Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications

 would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election"

cartoon credit: ulstermanbooks.com

Ali Meyer at the Washington FreeBeacon reports (h/t American Thinker):

Staff at IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., buried conservative groups’ tax exemption applications beginning in 2010 and lasting through President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, according to documents released this week by Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group.

The group released 105 pages of FBI documents, which included interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees who disclosed that applications by Tea Party groups were automatically denied approval and assigned to a special group until they heard from the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“The FBI’s 302 interviews with Cincinnati IRS employees reveal that the agency adopted a series of policies assuring that Tea Party and other conservative group tax exempt applications would not be approved before the November 2012 presidential election,” according to a statement from Judicial Watch.

The full report is here. 

Will any of the top officials be charged with anything? Perjury for starters? 

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IRS Scandal is 1000 days old

Cartoon credit: teachufr.org

A few days ago, Glenn Reynolds (Mr. Instapundit) published a column in USA Today about the IRS scandal and Tea Party groups:

Last week saw the passage of a grim milestone in government corruption: Pepperdine University Law Professor Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog marked the 1000th day of the scandal involving the IRS’s deliberate political targeting of conservative “Tea Party” groups. 

. . .

But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.

Ohio Tea Party activist Justin Binik-Thomas noticed in 2012 that the IRS was asking Tea Party organizations if they knew him. The IRS denied that it was targeting people based on their political views, then admitted that it was doing so but blamed low-level employees in the Cincinnati office.

Then it turned out that, as the Treasury Inspector General found, there was much more going on. The next day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.

There was much talk about accountability, even from President Obama, but, in the end, we got something that looked more like a whitewash. 

As Caron wrote:

"On May 22, 2013, the IRS director (of exempt organizations) asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a House committee. She was placed on administrative leave. The following month, it was revealed that she received a $42,000 bonus. She retired in September.

"On Jan. 9, 2014, it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the Justice Department revealed it would not bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted political groups complained that they had never been contacted in the investigation.

"On Feb. 2, 2014, the president stated in a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there 'were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a smidgen of corruption.'

"On May 7, 2014, the House voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation (six members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House also voted 250-168 to request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate (26 members of the president's party voted with the majority)."

Of course, nothing happened. Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that the U.S. Attorney was using "prosecutorial discretion.” That discretion protected [former IRS director Lois] Lerner from the grand jury.

Read the rest here. 

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