April 21, 2014

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John Hinderaker of Power Line reproduced some of the IRS emails dredged up by FOIA requests by Judicial Watch. Here we find Lois Lerner suggesting “one IRS prosecution would make an impact” as she goaded DOJ and the FEC, pushing them towards criminal filings against Tea Party groups. This from the women who said all this came from “rogue agents” in Cincinnati. See for yourself the face of modern American tyranny. This woman is a liar who needs to see the inside of a cell.

Earlier today, Judicial Watch made public a batch of documents that it received from the IRS in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents consists of a series of emails relating to the IRS’s treatment of applications for 501(c)(4) status from “Tea Party” or otherwise conservative organizations.

I am still working my way through the emails, but have a few preliminary observations. First, the most significant ones I have seen so far have already been widely discussed. The email below documents a call from the Department of Justice about whether non-profits that “lied” about doing political activity can be criminally prosecuted. This was an idea that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse raised at a committee hearing. It was picked up on by DOJ, and there was some coordination among DOJ, the IRS and the FEC. …

 

 

More from US News & World Report.

The so-called “smoking gun” proving the Internal Revenue Service played politics with conservative groups seeking official non-profit, social welfare status over the last several years may finally have been found.

In a rash of documents provided under the Freedom of Information Act to Judicial Watch, a non-partisan public interest law group, is an April 2013 email written by David Fish, acting manager of IRS Exempt Organizations Technical Guidance and Quality Assurance and sent to, among others, former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner. It was part of a thread discussing a recent U.S. Senate hearing on the potential for the abuse of the 501(c)(4) tax status by organizations intervening inappropriately or improperly in candidate elections.

Responding to a message “What can I say?” from Lerner, Fish responds, “Tell Ruth she needs to get on the stick and that the next election cycle is around the corner. This is obviously a wonderful idea (that’s why we suggested it). I think you told Greg all you can tell him, unless you want to tell him that we’re taking guidance plan suggestions.”  

The email is dated April 15, 2013 – well after initial allegations that the IRS had “slow-walked” the applications of conservative groups had been made and, by the agency, denied.

The “Ruth” mentioned in the message refers to Ruth Madrigal, an official at the U.S. Treasury Department. The “Greg” mentioned in Fish’s message is apparently a San Francisco-based attorney named Gregory Colvin, who started this chain with an e-mail to Lerner and Madrigal letting them know he has just testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on the issue of whether officers of (c)(4) organizations who made false statements under penalty of perjury on tax returns “could be criminally prosecuted.”

The Obama administration has insisted from the beginning that conservative groups were not singled out and that electoral considerations did not factor into what clearly went on. They prefer to adhere to the fiction that anything untoward that occurred generated spontaneously in branch offices among low level staff and not at the direction of anyone in Washington.

The particular mention by Fish of the idea that “the next election cycle is around the corner” seems to any reasonable person to confirm or at least suggest higher-ups at the IRS including Lerner knew exactly what they were doing, had used their positions for partisan political purposes, and were continuing to do so even though the word about what they were doing had leaked out.  …

 

 

Bryan Preston of PJ Media posts on the terrifying implications of all this. 

Thank God for Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George. His investigation of what turned out to be the IRS abuse scandal may well have saved the Constitution and the nation.

For his fair and impartial investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse of Americans who dissent from President Obama’s agenda, Democrats have called for an investigation of him. George should not be investigated, but perhaps the Democrats who want him investigated — Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA) — should be. Their call for an investigation of the investigator might constitute interference with the ongoing investigation of the IRS abuse scandal. That would be obstruction of justice, in what may turn out to be the most widespread and damaging scandal in American history.

The implications of today’s email disclosure are stunning and terrifying.

Lois Lerner intended to use her position atop the IRS’ tax exempt approval office to coordinate the prosecution of political speech. The Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder had at least tentatively bought into that. The Federal Elections Commission was being roped in as well. Lerner’s emails prove that beyond doubt.

Democrats in Congress were involved. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) appears to have led the anti-constitutional attack on free speech in the House. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) led it from the Senate.

Two days before Lerner was forced to publicly disclose the scandal, she was moving forward with an insidious plan to stamp out conservatives and Tea Party activists’ ability to organize and raise money, by working with the IRS commissioner’s office and the Department of Justice. At the same time, there was no plan for any government crackdown on groups who agreed with President Obama. The traffic was entirely one-way. It was nakedly political, and everyone involved knew it. They also had reason to believe that they would succeed, or they would not have engaged in it. DOJ would serve two roles: Prosecute conservatives, and protect the bureaucrats who were pushing those prosecutions.

Was there a full-fledged plan to use the full power of the federal government to take the abuse, delay and invasive questioning of conservatives to a new level after President Obama’s re-election? Was there a plan to criminalize the mere act of being a conservative activist? Was there a plan to drum up false charges of “lying” on applications in order to put conservatives in jail?

Lois Lerner’s communications with the Justice Department strongly suggest that there was. …

 

 

Jonathan Tobin posts on yet another spineless obama move on the Keystone Pipeline.

After a lengthy study of the plans for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the U.S. State Department issued an 11-volume report back in January confirming what most experts had already concluded long before then: the vital project would not damage the environment or increase the rate of carbon pollution. But liberal activists weren’t happy and have used the 90-day automatic review process that followed that report to furiously lobby the administration to stop the construction of the 1,700-mile pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast refineries. The key player in that effort was Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental extremist who has pledged to give $100 million to Democratic candidates who do his bidding. Though President Obama has flirted at times with doing the right thing and letting the project proceed, the result of the push from Steyer and the rest of the global warming alarmist crowd was as predictable as it was politically motivated. In a Friday afternoon news dump to guarantee minimal news coverage, the State Department announced that it would indefinitely postpone the decision on approval of Keystone. …

… The Keystone delay is also symbolic of the way Obama’s indifference to energy independence has hindered U.S. foreign policy. At a time when European dependence on Russia as well as the Middle East has hampered efforts to defend Ukraine’s independence or to rally the world behind the cause of stopping Iran’s nuclear quest, the administration’s politically-motivated foot-dragging on Keystone is more evidence of how an unwillingness to lead by example has hamstrung Obama.

But the bottom line of the Keystone delay is that for all their talk about the Kochs and the supposedly malevolent forces financing the right, there is no longer any doubt that this administration is far more dependent as well as more in the pocket of men like Steyer than the Republicans are on any single contributor or group. When faced with a choice between Steyer’s $100 million and doing the right thing for both the economy and energy independence, Obama’s decision was never really in doubt. Democrats who think voters are too stupid to make this connection may rue this corrupt and foolish move in November.

 

 

For some reason, author William Cohan decided to write a revisionist rehash of the Duke Lacrosse scandal of a few years back. He shouldn’t have wasted his time. Anybody who wants to issue counter-factual speculations about the case better wait until Stuart Taylor has passed, because as long as he draws breath nobody can hide from the facts. Taylor wrote his debunking piece for The New Republic. Another good essay was written by Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. Follow the link if you want, but it is long and we don’t have enough space. 

The most striking thing about William D. Cohan’s revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what’s not in it.

The best-selling, highly successful author’s 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone.

Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan’s own stunningly credulous interviews with three far-from-credible participants in the drama who themselves add no significant new evidence beyond their counterfactual personal opinions.

They are Mike Nifong, the disbarred prosecutor and convicted liar; Crystal Mangum, the mentally unbalanced rape complainant and (now) convicted murderer, who has dramatically changed her story more than a dozen times; and Robert Steel, the former Duke chairman and Goldman Sachs vice chairman, who helped lead the university’s notorious rush to judgment against its own lacrosse players.

Cohan is not deterred by the fact that Nifong admitted and Steel said, quite unequivocally, both in April 2007, that the lacrosse players were innocent of committing any crimes during the March 13–14, 2006 spring break party at their captains’ house, where Mangum and Kim Roberts were hired to strip. Nifong said on July 26, 2007 that “there is no credible evidence” that any of the three indicted lacrosse players committed any crime involving Mangum. Steel said on April 11, 2007 that Cooper’s exoneration of them that day “explicitly and unequivocally establishes [their] innocence.” Nifong has since all but retracted his admission and Steel has waffled on his.

Cohan duly but inconspicuously includes these statements in his semi-free-association narrative. At the same time, he implies dozens of times that one or more players sexually assaulted Mangum in a bathroom during the party. In recent interviews, Cohan has made his thesis more explicit: “I am convinced, frankly, that this woman suffered a trauma that night” and that “something did happen in that bathroom,” Cohan told Joe Neff of the Raleigh News & Observer. In an April 8 Bloomberg TV interview, he ascribed the same view to his three main sources: “Between Nifong, Crystal, and Bob Steel, the consensus seems to be something happened in that bathroom that no one would be proud of.” He said much the same on MSNBC’s fawning “Morning Joe” the next day.

Cohan also asserted in a Cosmopolitan interview that Mangum now “describes it as somebody shoving a broomstick up her. All I know is that the police believed her, district attorney Mike Nifong believed her, and the rape nurse Tara Levicy believed her.” This seems doubtful, since none of Mangum’s many stories in March 2006 and for years thereafter mentioned anything about a broomstick being used to assault her, a scenario also ruled out by the physical evidence.

(Disclosure: I coauthored, with KC Johnson, a 2007 book concluding that all credible evidence points to the conclusion that no Duke lacrosse player ever assaulted or sexually abused Crystal Mangum in any way. I have also become friendly with some of their parents and lawyers. I thus have both a lot of relevant information and an obvious interest in discrediting Cohan’s book. I have no complaint about its references to me.)

The rape-by-broomstick and other Cohan innuendos and assertions are not supported—indeed, they are powerfully refuted—by the long-established facts that his own book repeats, not to mention some facts that he studiously leaves out.

This has not prevented an amazing succession of puff-piece reviews in The Wall Street Journal, FT Magazine, the Daily News, Salon, the Economist, the Daily Beast, and The New York Times, whose reviewer (unlike the others cited above) at least knew enough to write that “Cohan hasn’t unearthed new evidence” and that “[t]here is still nothing credible to back up the account of an unreliable witness.” …

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