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Paul L. Caron
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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 593

IRS Logo 2Daily Caller:  BOMBSHELL REPORT: IRS Targeted ‘Icky’ Conservative Groups:

Top IRS officials specifically targeted tea party groups and misled the public about its secret political targeting program led by ex-official Lois Lerner, according to a bombshell new congressional report.

The Daily Caller has obtained an advance copy of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report set to be released Tuesday morning that definitively proves malicious intent by the IRS to improperly block conservative groups that an IRS adviser deemed “icky.” (That’s right. “Icky.”)

“The Committee has identified eight senior leaders who were in a position to prevent or to stop the IRS’s targeting of conservative applicants,” the Oversight report states. “Each of these leaders could have and should have done more to prevent the IRS’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants.”

Here are six major takeaways from the report:

  1. The IRS admitted that the front office was “spinning” about the targeting rumors as early as 2012, after IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman denied the tea party targeting to Congress. ...
  2. Then-IRS commissioner Steven T. Miller almost broke down and told the truth about the tea party targeting at a July 2012 hearing, but Lerner’s sidekick Nikole Flax told him not to. ...
  3. The IRS definitely treated tea party applications by a different standard than applications from other (c)(4) groups. ...
  4. Lois Lerner expressed her frustration about having to potentially approve a lot of groups, and her colleagues in the agency assured her that she wouldn’t have to. ...
  5. So the IRS reached out to outside advisers to help come up with ways to deny tax-exempt status to “icky” organizations. ...
  6. A May 2011 email from a lawyer in the IRS chief counsel’s office made clear that the agency sought to use a new “gift tax” to target donors to nonprofit political groups.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/the-irs-9.html

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Comments

Cleanest, quickest way to judge this "bombshell" report: it was released Dec 23. Congressmen don't release no bombshells two days before Christmas. They release them when somebody will pay attention.

Righties, please stop fooling yourselves.

Posted by: kyle | Dec 24, 2014 12:14:44 AM

"Gregory : 'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
"Holmes: 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.'" From the Silver Blaze, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The REAL bombshell in Rep. Issa’s report is what is missing–evidence that the WH orchestrated a plot–a connection Republicans originally sought to make but later abandoned as they failed to find a smoking gun. Or anything resembling a smoking gun. But that hasn’t stopped them from calling Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi–I mean scandal, scandal, scandal–and cutting the IRS budget in their continuing efforts to drown the GOTUS in the proverbial Norquist bathtub. If another country tried to do this to our government, the cruise missiles would be on their way.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Dec 23, 2014 6:30:28 AM