By Matthew Vadum —— Bio and Archives October 28, 2015
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Investigators said none of the witnesses they interviewed believed Ms. Lerner acted out of political motives and that Ms. Lerner seemed to try to correct the inappropriate scrutiny once she “recognized that it was wrong.” “In fact, Ms. Lerner was the first IRS official to recognize the magnitude of the problem and to take concerted steps to fix it,” Mr. Kadzik wrote.This sounds a lot like the saga of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), which, like the fictional Lerner that Kadzik describes, also conveniently claimed it took steps to end internal corruption after being exposed in media reports. Lerner is the Obama administration executive who famously refused to testify at congressional hearings on legally flimsy Fifth Amendment self-incrimination grounds. Despite this, House investigators found that Obama’s IRS targeted conservative 501c4 nonprofit advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. They determined that Lerner organized an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation. Meanwhile, after a series of congressional hearings and scattered media reports exposed how the feared tax agency systematically preys on political groups that resist Obama's ongoing fundamental transformation of America, House Republicans have finally initiated the impeachment process against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The defiant IRS head honcho who has presided over the agency's long-running efforts to obstruct justice, won no friends in previous appearances before lawmakers. House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and 18 other GOP lawmakers allege Koskinen misled Congress when he claimed he produced all of Lerner's emails and also orchestrated the destruction of subpoenaed backup tapes that held copies of the emails. The Washington Times reports:
The impeachment resolution says the IRS knew Ms. Lerner’s messages were missing, due to a reported computer hard drive crash, as early as February 2014, but didn’t notify Congress until June — while the backup tapes were destroyed in March.Hours before the impeachment resolution was filed, Koskinen told a Senate panel his agency has been pursuing "appropriate disciplinary review as needed" against employees. Ominously, he vowed "to have new rules to limit political activities of nonprofit organizations in place before the 2016 election, raising the specter of another major fight over the tax agency and political targeting," the newspaper paraphrased Koskinen saying. The IRS already tried to impose a rule preventing nonprofits from running voter registration drives but backed down in the face of a public backlash. J. Christian Adams warns that the Obama administration is inventing new ways to stick it to nonprofit groups. D.C. bureaucrats plan to move forward with new rules forcing conservative nonprofits to disclose the identities of their donors, whose protected anonymity has long been considered sacrosanct. The Public Interest Legal Foundation that Adams represents as counsel warns that a pending regulatory petition before the Federal Election Commission:
... is an attempt to force nonprofit advocacy organizations that are not political committees and that do not spend a majority of their time and resources on candidate-related activity to reveal their donors, something they are not required to do by federal law or IRS regulations. In fact, the fundamental rights of association, privacy, and free speech of such organizations and their donors are protected by the First Amendment, as the U.S. Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958).This kind of coerced disclosure “has no purpose other than to try to open up the donors of such organizations to harassment and intimidation for their political and social beliefs in associating with particular membership organizations,” according to Adams. The FEC “has no statutory authority to mandate such disclosure of organizations that are not political committees.” But laws are tiny little obstacles to left-wingers. The Left’s “accountability” actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting their activities, and forcing them to waste resources dealing with activists’ provocations. It is a tactic of radical community organizers, open borders fanatics, and union goons. Taking a cue from Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, they want to shut down, humiliate, and silence those who won’t quietly submit to their policy agenda. And their tactics work.
Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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