Oversight member on Lois Lerner coordination with DOJ: ‘Now I see why IRS is scared to give up emails’
By Patrick HowleyKey members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform expressed outrage at revelations made in newly released emails showing ex-IRS official Lois Lerner coordinating with the Department of Justice on prosecuting nonprofit groups.
One committee member said the emails prove why the IRS is “scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails.” IRS commissioner John Koskinen was recently threatened with contempt for stonewalling the committee’s investigation. Koskinen claimed in a hearing that it could take years to provide the documents requested by Oversight.
“The release of new documents underscores the political nature of IRS Tea Party targeting and the extent to which supposed apolitical officials took direction from elected Democrats,” Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa said in a statement. “These e-mails are part of an overwhelming body of evidence that political pressure from prominent Democrats led to the targeting of Americans for their political beliefs.”
“Now I see why the IRS is scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails,” said Oversight Economic Growth subcommittee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan.
“Not only do these e-mails further prove the coordination among the IRS, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Justice Department and committee Democrats to target conservatives, they also show that had our committee not requested the Inspector General’s investigation when we did, Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department would likely have been leveling trumped up criminal charges against Tea Party groups to intimidate them from exercising their Constitutional rights,” Jordan said.
The Terrifying Implications of the IRS Abuse-DOJ Connection
By Bryan Preston...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. The disclosure provides strong, compelling evidence that Obama’s re-election had emboldened many, including government bureaucrats like Lois Lerner, to believe that they could move forward unchallenged to criminalize Americans for exercising their constitutional rights.
I also believe that the players in this scam had identified a target to single out, harass, investigate, silence, destroy, and send to prison. Her name is Catherine Engelbrecht.
Lerner’s email on March 27, 2013, suggests that there was an idea moving within the bureaucracy to hit one or just a few Americans, and prosecute and imprison them, to scare others out of political engagement.
“One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff,” Lerner wrote to IRS staff. “So, don’t be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity.”
It was all about conservative 501(c)(4) orgs. Liberal groups were left entirely alone. This was to be a leftwing reign.
...The purpose of the plan that Lerner was moving on was to stifle dissent and give Democrats total control of Congress in 2014, giving President Obama full control of all of government for his last two years in office.
Alongside that plan, was a plan to destroy anyone who advocated for election integrity legislation, legislation which gained steam and widespread passage at the state level after the 2010 mid-term elections. What this tells us is that the Democrats, at least some Democrats, fully intended to weaponize government against dissent while it watered down election law and used lawfare via the Justice Department to damage and even remove state-level election law improvements.
Criminalizing conservative activism was about consolidating the Democrats’ 2012 gains and winning back the House in 2014. Destroying voter ID by whatever means Democrats deemed necessary was about 2016. There’s only one reason to make it easier to commit election fraud. You only do that if you intend to commit election fraud.
By J Christian Adams
Emails obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act reveal Lois Lerner cooking up plans with Justice Department officials to talk about ways to criminally charge conservative groups that are insufficiently quiet.
....Like bats in the belfry, they tend to congregate online at University of California at Irvine Law Professor Rick Hasen’s election blog.
Hasen runs an online meeting hall for all the would-be speech totalitarians. They post, bluster, and kibitz about the latest news on their effort to erode the First Amendment and increase federal power.
....That Hasen’s online hangout is hosted on government servers provides an interesting twist.
Judicial Watch sent the University of California at Irvine a freedom of information request demanding Hasen’s emails to the White House and other government officials including any on the topic of speech regulations. The University told Judicial Watch to pound sand, and still hasn’t provided anything.
Yesterday’s IRS email revelation makes you wonder what Cal-Irvine is hiding.
So who are some of the other speech regulators who haven’t shown up on IRS scandal documents yet?
One of the top speech regulators is former White House counsel and Obama campaign lawyer Bob Bauer. As I noted at PJ Media:
Robert Bauer had the motive to direct IRS policy against Tea Party groups. He is a longtime opponent of First Amendment freedoms and an advocate of government-speech regulation. He also can’t stand the work the Tea Party is conducting to monitor and eradicate voter fraud, work the Republican Party and national campaigns have utterly failed to perform.There’s that jail thing again. They just can’t resist that totalitarian impulse against political opponents.
During the 2008 election, while representing the Obama campaign, Bauer sent a threatening letter to the Justice Department demanding criminal investigations of people who had the audacity to speak about voter fraud. Bauer even singled out Sarah Palin in the letter. Anyone who “developed or disseminated” information about voter fraud, to Bauer, deserved the heavy boot of a criminal investigation. Read the letter; it reveals a nasty, thuggish, and lawless attitude toward political opposition.
Other campaigns have had speech regulator attorneys — even Republicans. Trevor Potter was John McCain’s head lawyer in 2008, and he founded the now Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center. He helped cook up the McCain-Feingold speech regulations.
Scads of well-funded groups also exist to stamp down free speech, groups like Common Cause and Demos.
The new, more sinister IRS scandal is deadly dangerous to Democrats. It isn’t dangerous because bureaucrats took too long to approve tax exemption applications. It’s dangerous because it reveals the authoritarian impulses of powerful Democrats. First they tried to shut up political opposition through threats and bureaucracy. Then we learn yesterday that Democrats and leftists at the Justice Department, the United States Senate, and the Internal Revenue Service were discussing jailing political opponents.
Poll: 60 Percent of Americans Think Obama Lies on Important Issues
By Katie Pavlich
According to new polling released by Fox News, the vast majority of the country believes President Obama lies on important issues.
Is there anything the U.S. government doesn’t take taxpayer dollars to do?
Here’s a lesser-known function of your hard-earned money: providing backing for people in other countries to buy things from America.
Come again? Yes, that’s right. Let’s say Air China wants to purchase some Boeing jets. To encourage that purchase, America’s Export-Import Bank could loan Air China the money. If Air China were to default on the loan, U.S. taxpayers would be left on the hook.
Put simply, taxpayers should not be financing this kind of “bank”—which is “little more than a fund for corporate welfare,” as candidate Barack Obama described it in 2008.
The Ex-Im Bank, as it is called, is scheduled to expire in September—giving Congress an opportunity to end this program and focus on issues that matter to Americans, like lowering taxes and reducing burdens on businesses here at home.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently wrote that the Ex-Im Bank primarily helps big businesses that have friends in Washington.
Ex-Im loans can subsidize purchases by foreign governments as well as businesses in their countries—and those businesses may be competing with U.S. firms. This doesn’t help the U.S. economy. Heritage expert Diane Katz explains:
About six in ten American voters think Barack Obama lies to the country on important matters some or most of the time, according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.It isn't just Obama's typical foes who think he's less than honest, Democrats and single women aren't too confident in his truth telling abilities either.
Thirty-seven percent think Obama lies “most of the time,” while another 24 percent say he lies “some of the time.” Twenty percent of voters say “only now and then” and 15 percent “never.”
The number of voters saying Obama lies “most of the time” includes 13 percent of Democrats. It also includes 12 percent of blacks, 16 percent of liberals, 31 percent of unmarried women and 34 percent of those under age 30 -- all key Obama constituencies.For President Obama, these numbers don't matter much, but they do matter for Democrats up for election this year who have been avid supporters of Obama's policies. Democratic support for Obamacare in particular continues to weigh on the minds of voters, especially voters who have lost the healthcare plans they were promised they could keep.
We Give Foreigners Taxpayer Money to Import Stuff from America. What?
By Amy PayneIs there anything the U.S. government doesn’t take taxpayer dollars to do?
Here’s a lesser-known function of your hard-earned money: providing backing for people in other countries to buy things from America.
Come again? Yes, that’s right. Let’s say Air China wants to purchase some Boeing jets. To encourage that purchase, America’s Export-Import Bank could loan Air China the money. If Air China were to default on the loan, U.S. taxpayers would be left on the hook.
Put simply, taxpayers should not be financing this kind of “bank”—which is “little more than a fund for corporate welfare,” as candidate Barack Obama described it in 2008.
The Ex-Im Bank, as it is called, is scheduled to expire in September—giving Congress an opportunity to end this program and focus on issues that matter to Americans, like lowering taxes and reducing burdens on businesses here at home.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) recently wrote that the Ex-Im Bank primarily helps big businesses that have friends in Washington.
Most of the benefits go to large corporations that are perfectly capable of securing private financing anywhere in the world. That is to say, Congress allows Ex-Im Bank to risk taxpayer money unnecessarily to subsidize well-connected private companies.It matters where the money is going, too. A look at the countries getting loans shows that they’re not all America’s biggest fans: They include Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China.
This kind of public policy privilege, best described as “crony capitalism,” is a threat to the free market and its moral underpinnings.
Ex-Im loans can subsidize purchases by foreign governments as well as businesses in their countries—and those businesses may be competing with U.S. firms. This doesn’t help the U.S. economy. Heritage expert Diane Katz explains:
Ex–Im officials assume that the economic activity they subsidize would not occur absent bank financing. That is an absurd notion, but it is prevalent among bureaucrats who cannot fathom that business actually functions without them.American taxpayers don’t need to fund any more cronyism, much less loans to hostile nations. We don’t need the Export-Import Bank.
Progressives are wrong about the essence of the Constitution
By George F Will....The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders’ premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when “instituted” to “secure” natural rights.
Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefur’s formulation, “spaces of privacy” that government chooses “to carve out and protect” to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.
With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. “In Europe,” wrote James Madison, “charters of liberty have been granted by power,” but America has “charters of power granted by liberty.”
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