Sounds speculative, but Lois Lerner was targeting the Tea Party specifically to have this effect.

So, the burden should be on the side that disagrees with this thesis to prove their claim.

Did the IRS Tea Party allegations help Obama’s presidency?

Note, meanwhile, that Al Sharpton faces no similar “mistakes.”

IRS says that it mistakenly penalized GOP candidate Christine O'Donnell a second time.

The IRS says it was only an accident that for a second time it penalized Delaware Republican Christine O’Donnell by putting an “erroneous levy on her bank accounts.”

O’Donnell discovered the IRS’s action when she tried to use her bank accounts during this past Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Looks like more IRS harassment…

“The day before I was heading out of town for the Thanksgiving weekend, my bank told me the IRS had frozen my accounts. They didn’t give me a reason why, just a phone number to call,” Ms. O’Donnell said in an interview this week.

She said she called the Internal Revenue Service and was told the agency had concluded she owed $30,000 in taxes from a 2008 house transaction, which was long ago accounted for on her federal returns. She said she implored the agency to check her tax records and eventually was told the levy was generated in error and her accounts would be freed up.

Although IRS officials removed the levy, they first withdrew all the funds from her account. They said that, too, was in error and the funds would be returned to her. The funds have not been replaced, Ms. O’Donnell said.

Ms. O’Donnell, who writes a column for the online Washington Times Communities, says her only current matter pending with the IRS is that she filed for an extension to pay her 2013 taxes but that the levy had nothing to do with that filing.

O’Donnell has been the victim of a LOT of IRS harassment since she ran for Senate in Delaware… during the Obama presidency, of course.

Weird how it always seems to work that way.

Most transparent administration ever!

The torture report has to be released; it only emboldens America's enemies and shows injustice to murderers.

But the IRS investigation of conservatives is completely different; it would embolden Republicans and shows injustice to Americans.

//Sadly, the 18 month investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups isn’t over, and it may be worse than anyone thought. A federal judge has broken loose more emails that the DOJ had surely hoped would never surface. The picture it reveals isn’t pretty. The documents prove that Lois Lerner met with DOJ’s Election Crimes Division a month before the 2010 elections.

It has to be embarrassing to the DOJ, which may not be the most impartial one to be investigating the IRS. In fact, the DOJ withheld over 800 pages of Lerner documents citing “taxpayer privacy” and “deliberative privilege.” Yet these internal DOJ documents show Ms. Lerner was talking to DOJ officials about prosecuting tax-exempt entities (yes, criminally!) two years before the IRS conceded there was inappropriate targeting.

Ms. Lerner met with top officials from the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch in October of 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DOJ (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice, No. 14-cv-01239),the DOJ coughed up dirt only on court order. Even then, DOJ  handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails.//

A Democrat Senator using the IRS to undermine conservatives?

Welcome to the era of Hope and Change - Banana Republic-style.

Scandal Time.

IRS loses more employees' emails.

Good news

It seems that the IRS and the FFRF were entering into a collusive settlement.  It sounds like it was supposed to involve a consent decree signed by a judge so that the IRS could claim that it was forced to violate the Constitution.

The Becket Fund stepped in and blocked the settlement and threatened to actually litigate the case, which both the IRS and FFRF knew they couldn't win.  Consequently, FFRF dismissed the case RATHER than have judicial precedent AGAINST it.

//FFRF filed the lawsuit in an attempt to force the IRS to enforce the ban, something the IRS has for decades been reluctant to do. The Becket Fund successfully intervened in the suit on behalf of Milwaukee-based Holy Cross Anglican Church and its vicar, Father Patrick Malone, a Benedictine abbot. The church argued that FFRF's suit must fail because enforcing the Johnson Amendment against its internal religious speech would violate federal constitutional and statutory law.

"The IRS has long threatened churches with speech restrictions but hasn't been willing to do much more for fear of losing in court. But FFRF's suit, which tried to force the IRS to make good on its threats, gave houses of worship a chance to fight back. Once FFRF realized its error, it packed up shop quickly," Blomberg said.

"It's remarkable to see the collusive way that FFRF and the IRS orchestrated getting out of this suit as fast as they could. From hiding documents to falsely promising to provide information, they did whatever they could to run away quickly," he added.//

Perhaps we can get some common sense back into government.

Trey Gowdy toasts a professor trying to run cover for not having an independent counsel.

For left wing Democrats...

...conservative Americans are the real enemy.

Banana Republic

WSJ:

//One of the big questions out of the IRS targeting scandal is this: How can an agency that engaged in such political misconduct be trusted to implement ObamaCare? This week’s Halbig v. Burwell ruling reminded us of the answer. It can’t.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Halbig that the administration had illegally provided ObamaCare subsidies in 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Yet it wasn’t the “administration” as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS.

And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election.

The White House viewed it as imperative, therefore, that IRS bureaucrats ignore the law’s text and come up with a politically helpful rule. The evidence shows that career officials at the IRS did indeed do as Treasury Department and Health and Human Services Department officials told them. This, despite the fact that the IRS is supposed to be insulated from political meddling.

We know this thanks to a largely overlooked joint investigation and February report by the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees into the history of the IRS subsidy rule. We know that in the late summer of 2010, after ObamaCare was signed into law, the IRS assembled a working group—made up of career IRS and Treasury employees—to develop regulations around ObamaCare subsidies. And we know that this working group initially decided to follow the text of the law. An early draft of its rule about subsidies explained that they were for “Exchanges established by the State.”

Yet in March 2011, Emily McMahon, the acting assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department (a political hire), saw a news article that noted a growing legal focus on the meaning of that text. She forwarded it to the working group, which in turn decided to elevate the issue—according to Congress’s report—to “senior IRS and Treasury officials.” The office of the IRS chief counsel—one of two positions appointed by the president—drafted a memo telling the group that it should read the text to mean that everyone, in every exchange, got subsidies. At some point between March 10 and March 15, 2011, the reference to “Exchanges established by the State” disappeared from the draft rule.

Emails viewed by congressional investigators nonetheless showed that Treasury and the IRS remained worried they were breaking the law. An email exchange between Treasury employees in the spring of 2011 expressed concern that they had no statutory authority to deem a federally run exchange the equivalent of a state-run exchange.

Yet rather than engage in a basic legal analysis—a core duty of an agency charged with tax laws—the IRS instead set about obtaining cover for its predetermined political goal.//

IRS Scandal.

IRS has been lying about Lois Lerner's hard drive.

On July 11, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton, at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by the targeted conservative group True the Vote, told Obama administration lawyers he wanted to see an affidavit explaining what happened with Lerner's hard drive.

He wanted something on the record and under oath that went beyond the tap dancing of recent congressional testimony. Walton also wanted to know the serial number of the hard drive and, if that number was known, "why the computer hard drive cannot be identified and preserved."

In response, the IRS said under oath that the hard drive from Lerner's computer was destroyed and recycled, echoing earlier testimony from Commissioner John Koskinen.

The reason given for Lerner's hard drive — possibly containing incriminating emails from and to the former head of the IRS Tax Exempt division — being destroyed and recycled, according to the IRS in the affidavit, was that a team of its technical experts had determined the drive was irreparably damaged and had to be recycled.

Except that was not true.

On Tuesday, House Ways and Means Committee investigators said that they had a chance to talk to the technical experts inside the IRS who actually examined Lerner's computer, and that the experts said the hard drive in question was merely "scratched" and most of the data on it was indeed recoverable.

According to a committee release, "in-house professionals at the IRS recommended the agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data."

Yet no attempt to get outside help was made.

Have we reached the point where our government has such contempt for us that it is no longer even trying to make up plausible lies?

IRS lawyer: By the way, the hard drives of some other employees who dealt with Lois Lerner also crashed

Discovery Abuse.

Obama's nightmare may be starting.

Judge tells IRS to explain why it failed to maintain emails.

The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.

But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.

“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.

“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.

"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other PDAs.”

IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA request for the Lerner emails.

The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True the Vote for exempt status.

“If the IRS’s public statements about ‘recycling’ Ms. Lerner’s hard drive are true, that alone establishes spoliation of evidence that violates federal statutes and regulations, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and professional ethics and responsibility.

“These statements, coupled with the refusal of Defendants’ counsel, to provide any assurances about what has been and will be done to preserve evidence underscore the need for the relief that True the Vote seeks."

If it is Friday, it must be time for an Obama administration "Friday Info Dump."

Today the dump is that the IRS lied to a court about discovery.

Internal Revenue Service officials will have to explain to a federal judge July 10 why the tax agency didn't inform the court that Lois Lerner's emails had been lost.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Emmett G. Sullivan quickly granted a motion filed earlier today by attorneys for Judicial Watch seeking a courtroom status conference “as soon as possible to discuss the IRS's failure to fulfill its duties to this court under the law, as well as other ramifications of this lawsuit.”

In its motion, the non-profit watchdog noted that the IRS publicly acknowledged loss of Lerner emails to and from individuals outside of the agency early in February 2014.

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Then on Feb. 26, the tax agency provided its first production of documents in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in October 2013.

No mention was made in that production of the lost Lerner emails, even though the original Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit filed in May 2013 specifically sought them.

Judicial Watch further noted that "although IRS had knowledge of the missing Lois Lerner emails and of the other IRS officials, it materially omitted any mention of the missing records" in an April 30 status update on its document production.

An IRS spokesman declined to comment on Sullivan's ruling or the Judicial Watch motion without first reviewing the filings.

The IRS is already under severe fire from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Committee on Ways and Means for failing to disclose the lost emails in a timely fashion.

The July 10 conference could add a similar failure to inform a federal judge and the plaintiff in an FOIA lawsuit to the legal and public relations troubles facing the IRS.

The tax agency could also face court sanctions or even criminal proceedings if Sullivan is not satisfied with the government's explanation.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said “the IRS is clearly in full cover-up mode. It is well past time for the Obama administration to answer to a federal court about its cover-up and destruction of records.”

What if the IRS was the enemy?

Let's assume that Obama had nothing to do with it, that means that the IRS is setting its own agenda.

Isn't that actually worse than if Obama is controlling the IRS?

Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.

The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival.

“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”

The Daily Signal is seeking comment on the settlement  from the IRS and Justice Department.

Update: At 5:28 p.m, IRS spokesman Bruce I. Friedland emailed: “Privacy law, specifically Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, prohibits us from commenting.”

In his order entered this morning, District Court Judge James C. Cacheris granted the settlement of NOM’s suit against the IRS, which was represented by the Department of Justice.

In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.//

Paranoid or not paranoid enough?

Once again the question is corruption or gross incompetence?

//The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

IRS Scandal Update

Wall Street Journal reports:

//Some highlights since the email story broke last Friday: 

* According to Strassel’s column today, the contents of Lois Lerner’s hard drive were wiped out by forces unknown “about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived,” that is to say, a letter from House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp inquiring into targeting of conservative groups. (Lerner then replied to Camp denying targeting and subsequently pleaded the Fifth before Congress.) 

* A WSJ editorial this morning points out the remarkable timing of the IRS’s begrudging disclosure last Friday that evidence central to the case has been destroyed: more than a year after the investigation began and only when a deadline was impending in which the IRS commissioner would have to certify personally that the agency had produced to Congress all relevant communications. Were responsible agency officials determined to treat this as a high-priority investigation, to be carried on in good faith and with all deliberate speed? (There was no doubt about the seriousness of the scandal, as President Obama himself admitted—or seemed to be admitting—at the time.) Or did they instead stall and deflect until the very last moment? So un-forthcoming was the agency that, according to today’s Journal editorial, IRS staffers met with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) Monday and did not tell him that the external emails of six other IRS employees had gone missing too—he found that out only later in the week when he read a press release from the House side.  

* While some IRS critics focus almost to the exclusion of all else on the possible role of the Obama White House in directing the IRS, Strassel and the WSJ correctly will not let us forget that much of the pressure on the agency was coming from Congress itself. In particular, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), along with Reps. Chris Van Hollen and Elijah Cummings (both D-Md.), were among many Democrats seeking to enlist the IRS in a crackdown on politically antagonistic nonprofits.

Thank heavens for Kim Strassel and her colleagues at the WSJ, because otherwise it would seem as if few in the press were willing to focus serious investigative attention on this extraordinary scandal. //