Politics in the Zeros

IRS’ Lois Lerner re-subpoenaed after accidentally waiving her right to plead the Fifth

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Lois Lerner, IRS official in charge of targeting, will plead 5th amendment at IRS hearings.This is how Watergate began. Explanations begin to crack. Stories change. Those involved start stonewalling. It’s also important to remember that the IRS Inspector General’s report is what broke the story. The internal investigation by the IRS Treasury Inspector General for [...]

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As I expected, the Tea Party protests today at IRS offices nationwide were a dud. Calling demonstrations on short notice in numerous locations on a work day is a brain dead tactic. I helped organize multiple Iraq antiwar protests in LA and trust me, we spent months building them, doing outreach, and made sure impact [...]

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It is not credible that Obama didn’t know about the IRS targeting before May 10 considering that his chief counsel knew. President Obama claims not to have been made aware of the IRS indiscretions until May 10th it seems the White House’s chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the IRS likely would [...]

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The IRS is woefully underfunded. There is a hiring freeze and employees often buy their own office supplies. Seriously. The Cincinnati IRS office was filled with mainly low-level employees working under a crushing load. However, this does not mean that Cincinnati acted alone or as a rogue office. Quite the opposite. G7s aren’t going to [...]

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The IRS nonprofit division, over a period of years, became increasingly dysfunctional, isolated, and off on its own, oblivious to orders from DC. That’s the conclusion Propublica reaches in an excellent investigative report. But why was this division allowed to drift so badly and why was it so mismanaged that it disobeyed an order to [...]

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And Who Is The Poster Boy for Tax Exempt Political Hit Teams? Karl Rove is the real poster boy for the so-called IRS scandal of taking a closer look at applications by political organizations seeking a 501(c)(4) tax status that makes them not only tax exempt but protects their donors with anonymity. That 501(c )(4) is [...]

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WaPo implies the IRS Tea Party debacle was due to insubordination and thus not that big a deal. Excuse me? Why did a group of IRS officials deliberately and knowingly disobey orders from the director? That’s the question. Instead we get spin from the Washington Post, the Beltway attempts to protect its own. In the [...]

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Between the unprecedented seizure of AP phone records and TeaPartyGate, the Obama Administration will be preoccupied for months. Obama’s agenda is dead. For the foreseeable future instead it’ll be damage control and CYA. Of course, CYA is what brought down Nixon. IRS officials in DC and at least three other offices were involved in the [...]

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Teapartygate just keeps getting worse.  The Cincinnati office sent nonprofit applications from conservative groups that had not yet been approved to Propublica. Applications are not public until they are approved. Disclosing confidential docs is an immediate firing offense at the IRS and this is blatant breaking of the rules. The same IRS office that deliberately [...]

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