Privacy, Big Brother (State and Corporate) and the 4th & 9th Amendments

[G M]

The IRS admits to ‘targeting’ conservative groups, but were they also ‘leaking’?
 
9:42 AM 05/13/2013
 

Matt K. Lewis
 
A little over a year ago, I reported that, ”It is likely that someone at the Internal Revenue Service illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to the National Organization for Marriage, says the group.”
 
Now — on the heels of news the IRS’s apology for having targeted conservative groups — NOM is renewing their demand that the Internal Revenue Service reveal the identity of the people responsible.
 
“There is little question that one or more employees at the IRS stole our confidential tax return and leaked it to our political enemies, in violation of federal law,” said NOM’s president Brian Brow, in a prepared statement. “The only questions are who did it, and whether there was any knowledge or coordination between people in the White House, the Obama reelection campaign and the Human Rights Campaign. We and the American people deserve answers.”
 
Recent reports indicate the IRS may have begun targeting conservative groups as early as 2010.
 
In a 2012 speech, Sen. Mitch McConnell noted, “The head of one national advocacy group has released documents which show that his group’s confidential IRS information found its way into the hands of a staunch critic on the Left who also happens to be a co-chairman of President Obama’s re-election committee. The only way this information could have been made public is if someone leaked it from inside the IRS.”
 
And so, the next question may be this: If the IRS was targeting conservative groups — as they now admit to doing — were they also leaking information?
 
UPDATE: In December of 2012, ProPublica wrote that they had obtained the application for recognition of tax-exempt status for Crossroads GPS, filed in September of 2010.
 
As the ProPublica story noted:
 
“‘As far as we know, the Crossroads application is still pending, in which case it seems that either you obtained whatever document you have illegally, or that it has been approved,’ Jonathan Collegio, the group’s spokesman, said in an email.
 
 
 
“The IRS sent Crossroads’ application to ProPublica in response to a public-records request. The document sent to ProPublica didn’t include an official IRS recognition letter, which is typically attached to applications of nonprofits that have been recognized. The IRS is only required to give out applications of groups recognized as tax-exempt.
 
 
 
“In an email Thursday, an IRS spokeswoman said the agency had no record of an approved application for Crossroads GPS, meaning that the group’s application was still in limbo.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/13/the-irs-admits-to-targeting-conservative-groups-but-were-they-also-leaking/

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/05/13/a-few-of-the-crazy-things-the-irs-asked-conservative-groups-to-divulge/

A Few of the Crazy Things the IRS Asked Conservative Groups to Divulge Add Up to a Pattern and Purpose





by
Bryan Preston

Mary Katherine Ham rounds up 10 of the crazy things that the IRS sought from conservative and Tea Party groups during its abusive phase. I’ll focus on a few of those.
 
1. The IRS wanted every bit of information that these organizations had on their members.

 




Much of that information would allow the IRS to identify individual members of the targeted groups. Not just staff and donors, but members.
 
2. The IRS wanted information on the groups’ past and present employees and their relationships, with a special focus on familial relationships.
 



3. Just in case Point 2 wasn’t clear enough, yes, family members must be included.
 



4. Everything you turn over to the IRS will go public.
 



The information that the IRS sought went well beyond what it could reasonably have been seeking in the name of determining whether the groups qualified for the tax exemption. It was seeking enough information to build out a full network of every one of the conservative groups and be able to database them and cross-link them with each other. That the information would have been public is a tell of one place it would have ended up: In the computers of the data-driven Obama campaign and its allies. Anyone else seeking it would probably have had a tougher time getting their hands on it, but the Obama campaign, the Media Matters crew, any Democrat opposition researcher — they would have gotten it.
 
Based on the Obama campaign’s love of all things data and its behavior toward Romney donors, it’s pretty clear that gathering the information through the IRS was not the end game, it was a stop on the way to an end: Public exposure, humiliation and attack against the individuals that the IRS had scooped up on these forms — donors, staff, members, and their families. Secondarily, anyone thinking about donating to or working with any of the targeted groups would have to think twice about the consequences that might follow their exercise of their free speech rights. There are a lot of people out there with messy divorces, bankruptcies and other skeletons in their closets. Just ask Jack Ryan how sensitive Obama and company are with unflattering private information.
 
It’s clear from the questions above that while the IRS may not have had an enemies list when its intrusive questioning regime began in 2010, it was building one, and a very large and sophisticate one at that.

[Crafty_Dog]

That fleshes things out quite a bit GM.


Wonder why some of us are suspicious about Big Brother , , ,

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/13/most-transparent-administration-in-histo

[G M]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/05/13/meet-the-irs-team-in-charge-of-exempt-organization-reviews/?singlepage=true

Meet the IRS Team in Charge of Exempt Organization Reviews

May 13th, 2013 - 3:00 pm





Their work is in the news, so let’s meet the leadership team at the Internal Revenue Service that was in charge of reviewing those Tea Party applications for 501 (c) status.

Lois Lerner is the director of Exempt Organizations.  All of the mischief which occurred at the IRS took place under her supervision.

 
 

Prior to joining the IRS, Lerner was a bureaucrat at the Federal Election Commission.  Beginning in 1981, she served as an assistant general counsel, and was appointed in 1986 to head the Enforcement Division. Prior to joining the FEC, she was a staff attorney in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice. She is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston and received her Juris Doctor from Western New England College of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Nan Downing is the director of Examinations.  She helped implement a “Fast Track Settlement” process for 501(c) applicants.



It must not apply to any conservative or Tea Party groups because they have been waiting for determinations for years after multiple intrusive questions about volunteers and donors.

David Fish is the acting director of Exempt Organizations Rulings and Agreements at the IRS.



Fish helped implement electronic applications for exempt status.  The electronic applications apparently didn’t speed up the process for Tea Party groups who have been waiting years for determinations.

Melany Partner is the IRS director of Customer Education and Outreach for Exempt Organizations.



Her job is (presumably) to help applicants like the many dozens of Tea Party groups understand and navigate the IRS 501(c) application process. Obviously there’s some room for improvement, to say the least.

Also read: White House Counsel Knew in April of IRS’s Targeting of Conservatives

[Crafty_Dog]

Once again GM brings his strong google fu skills to finding for us particularly pertinent information.

[DougMacG]

The Obama administration has been lying about the scope of the IRS’s harassment of conservative-leaning non-profits. The Washington Post has obtained documents that show the anti-conservative effort was directed from Washington, D.C., and was not a rogue operation out of the agency’s Cincinnati office, as the administration has claimed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-denounces-reported-irs-targeting-of-conservative-groups/2013/05/13/a0185644-bbdf-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/05/14/irs-released-confidential-info-on-conservative-groups-to-propublica/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/irs-scandal-about-to-blow-wide-open.php

Does anyone know when Eric Holder gets out of jail from his Contempt of Congress citation?  Maybe he can get to the bottom of this - like he did with Fast and Furious.

I wanted this administration to fall based on failed economic policies, but their arrogance and duplicity was bound to catch up with them too.

[Crafty_Dog]

TARGETED - President Obama said Monday that if any Internal Revenue Service staff targeted groups based on their political leanings, they would be held "fully accountable" for their actions, in remarks that came as both Republican and Democratic lawmakers continued to express anger over the revelations.
•   But President Obama also dismissed a reporter’s question about the IRS intimidating conservative groups during the election with a wave of his hand on Monday morning.
•   Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved in the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
•   The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee announced Monday that it will hold a hearing on the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups for tax exempt status. The hearing will take place Friday morning.
•   The Internal Revenue Service says acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller was first informed in May 2012 that tea party groups were inappropriately targeted for scrutiny. A month later he wrote a member of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without mentioning the controversy.
•   An attorney for a Tea Party group that believes the IRS targeted it for special scrutiny while applying for nonprofit status said an IRS analyst told him over a year ago that the agency had a “secret working group” devoted to investigating conservative organizations.
•   Attorney Dan Backer, whose client TheTeaParty.net has been trying to obtain tax-exempt status since 2010, said an IRS analyst mentioned the alleged working group during a phone conversation about one of Backer’s other client organizations.
•   While the Internal Revenue Service has apologized for targeting Tea Party groups, a number still have not received their tax-exempt status. Some have not even heard back from the IRS.
•   The following, based on questionnaires made public by Tea Party groups, are examples of the requests made by the IRS as part of the application for tax-exempt status.
o   Copies of current web pages, including blog posts and social networking site pages
o   Copies of all newsletters, bulletins and flyers
o   Names of donors and amounts they gave
o   Names of those who received donations and amounts received
o   Dates of community events including rallies
o   Contents of speeches delivered at sponsored events
o   Names of event organizers
o   Copies of documents that rate political candidates
o   Amount of money spent on publishing materials
o   Membership agreement and rules that govern members
o   Salary information
•   Despite the administrations’ claim to find the truth, many believe the White House was not an innocent bystander. Austan Goolsbee, who was Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, entered the fray at an August 27, 2010, press briefing where he let slip that he knew that Koch Industries had paid no income taxes.
•   Koch Industries is a privately held company and therefore their tax returns and tax payments are not normally publicly available.
•   The Obama administration then switched to a second line of defense: that Mr. Goolsbee simply misspoke, that he didn’t mean to say what he said, and that it was merely a coincidence that he had just happened to guess their tax information. But it was quite a lucky guess. The IRS’s Inspector General promised to look into whether Goolsbee had illegally gotten confidential tax information, but a report was never released.
•   Democratic Montana Senator Max Baucus is leading an investigation into why the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny despite the fact that Baucus once wrote a letter urging the IRS to do exactly that.
•   According to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, IRS employees donated over two-and-a-half times more to Barack Obama than to Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
•   The National Organization for Marriage is renewing their demand that the Internal Revenue Service reveal the identity of the people responsible illegally leaked confidential donor information showing a contribution from Mitt Romney’s political action committee to National Organization for Marriage.
•   U.S. Representative Mike Turner(R-OH) introduced a bill Monday that would make it a crime -- punishable by jail time -- for an IRS agent to target groups based on their political beliefs.
•   U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said Monday the head of the Internal Revenue Service should resign in the wake of reports that the agency has been targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
•   MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tore into the federal government over the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups.
•   In addition to calling the admitted actions “mind-boggling,” the personality highlighted the assertion that “this government is using the Internal Revenue Service to target people with whom they disagree.” Others, like co-host Willie Geist, jumped in say that the collective actions constitute ”tyranny.”

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/14/Obama-campaign-co-chair-attacked-Romney-conservative-group-in-2012-with-leaked-IRS-scandal-documents

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/15/exclusive-prominent-catholic-prof-claims-irs-audited-her-after-speaking-out-against-obama-and-demanded-to-know-who-was-paying-her/