1) It is illegal for a civil servant to leak classified information. This is not controversial.

GMTom wrote:

1) It is illegal for a civil servant to leak classified information. This is not controversial.

...really?
National security leaks can be considered treasonous and could be punishable by death (this was a CIA leak remember), not illegal? not controversial?

rickyp wrote:The whole issue regarding investigating the press is interesting when one considers that

1) It is illegal for a civil servant to leak classified information. This is not controversial.

2) Congress regularly complains when leaks are allowed to occur, and seeks to stop leaks,

3) It would be illegal for any person (excepting a journalist) to encourage a civil servant to release classified information.
4) The actual protections for journalist aren't particularly clear. I remember the case of Judith Miller protecting her White House sources by going to jail for disobeying a court order to reveal her sources.

5) There doesn't seem to be strong bilateral support for a shield law that would clearly protect journalists .... perhaps because the idea that setting journalists up as a specially protected class is considered dangerous...

6) The Patriot Act seems to have diminished everyone's protections under the Constitution when matters of "national security" are involved.

Representatives of these organizations have cried foul in recent weeks about their treatment by the I.R.S., saying they were among dozens of conservative groups unfairly targeted by the agency, harassed with inappropriate questionnaires and put off for months or years as the agency delayed decisions on their applications.

But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.

“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”

I.R.S. agents are obligated to determine whether a 501(c)(4) group is primarily promoting “social welfare.” While such groups are permitted some election involvement, it cannot be an organization’s primary activity. That judgment does not hinge strictly on the proportion of funds a group spends on campaign ads, but on an amorphous mix of facts and circumstances
Emerge America, which trained women to run for office, was granted 501(c)(4) recognition in 2006, but its status was revoked in 2012. Training people how to run for office is not in itself partisan activity, but the I.R.S. determined that the group trained only Democratic women and was operated to benefit one party.

rickyp wrote:So what if it turns out that most of the Tea Party groups targeted were actually breaing the law, like Emerge America?

From the New Yorkl Time today. (may 27)

Representatives of these organizations have cried foul in recent weeks about their treatment by the I.R.S., saying they were among dozens of conservative groups unfairly targeted by the agency, harassed with inappropriate questionnaires and put off for months or years as the agency delayed decisions on their applications.

But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.

“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”

I.R.S. agents are obligated to determine whether a 501(c)(4) group is primarily promoting “social welfare.” While such groups are permitted some election involvement, it cannot be an organization’s primary activity. That judgment does not hinge strictly on the proportion of funds a group spends on campaign ads, but on an amorphous mix of facts and circumstances
Emerge America, which trained women to run for office, was granted 501(c)(4) recognition in 2006, but its status was revoked in 2012. Training people how to run for office is not in itself partisan activity, but the I.R.S. determined that the group trained only Democratic women and was operated to benefit one party.

With Washington gripped by a trio of exploding scandals this week – from Benghazi to government spying on news outlets to thug tactics by the Internal Revenue Service – Senate Democrats seem to be hoping that if they just yell loud enough then voters will overlook a key role they played in at least one of them.

They quickly sensed the political toxicity associated with Friday's admission by the IRS that they selectively targeted conservative organizations for special government scrutiny, and so Democrats didn't waste any time springing into action. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, for example, vowed congressional hearings and called the IRS actions "an outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public's trust."

He was joined by a chorus of other Democrats including Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire who called it "completely unacceptable," Kay Hagan of North Carolina who called it "disturbing and troubling," and Mark Pryor of Arkansas who tweeted that he's "working to get to bottom of this so we can fire those responsible & ensure this never happens again."

Fortunately, voters won't need to look very far.The willful ignorance and revisionist history demonstrated by Senate Democrats on this issue has been breathtaking, even by Washington standards.

Over the last three years, Democratic senators repeatedly and publicly pressured the IRS to engage in the very activities that they are only now condemning today. At the same time, Republicans repeatedly and publicly warned against this abuse of government power and pointed to a series of red flags that strongly suggested conservative political organizations were being targeted by the IRS. Those warnings were deliberately ignored by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress.

As the New York Times reported back in 2010 :

With growing scrutiny of the role of tax-exempt groups in political campaigns, Congressional Republicans are pushing back against Democrats by warning about the possible misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to audit conservative groups….And the Republicans are also upset about an I.R.S. review requested by Senator Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who leads the Finance Committee, into the political activities of tax-exempt groups. Such a review threatens to "chill the legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights," wrote two Republican senators, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona, in a letter sent to the I.R.S. on Wednesday. ... Democrats dismissed the Republicans' complaints as groundless.

You read that correctly.

The same Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee who this week is calling for hearings into IRS activities, specifically called on the IRS to engage in that very conduct back in 2010. And he wasn't the only one. Just last year, a group of seven Senate Democrats sent another letter to the IRS urging them to similarly investigate these outside political organizations.

As the New York Times also reported just one week before they sent this letter:

The Internal Revenue Service is caught in an election-year struggle between Democratic lawmakers pressing for a crackdown on nonprofit political groups and conservative organizations accusing the tax agency of conducting a politically charged witch hunt.

Voters in New Hampshire may be interested to learn that Jeanne Shaheen was among the signatories of that letter urging action by the IRS.

So lost amid the hubbub surrounding the news that the IRS engaged in McCarthyite tactics to target specific political groups, and their subsequent apology for those tactics, has been the fact that the lobbying campaign from Senate Democrats actually worked.

From Max Baucus to Chuck Schumer to Jeanne Shaheen, key Senate Democrats publicly pressured the IRS to target groups that held differing political views and who, in their view, had the temerity to engage in the political process. The IRS listened to them and acted. And other Democrat senators like Kay Hagan and Mark Pryor said and did nothing about it.

Perhaps their strategy of distraction may work in the short-term with a Washington press corps pulled in a multitude of different directions, but Senate Democrats have a serious political problem that will haunt them as they head into an already-difficult election cycle. When these Senate Finance Committee hearings come to pass it would be a remarkable act of bravery and candor for one of these IRS bureaucrats to appropriately ask Max Baucus and others why they're not sitting at the witness tables next to them, instead of continuing in their charade of faux outrage http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/bri ... icizing-it.

GMTom wrote:Even Democrats admit abuse of power, but Ricky continues to push that this is anything but. He points to how many were illegally filing for the wrong filing status but was the IRS looking at all who applied for that particular status or only those conservative groups doing so, that is the key difference! Targeting that specific filing status is fair game even knowing the vast majority may well be conservative groups. But to target the GROUPS themselves, that Ricky is the problem in all of this, one even Democrats are distancing themselves from. They are doing so for a reason, even the IRS themselves admitted to wrong doing (http://www.care2.com/news/member/775377582/3586239) trying to explain it away just isn't going to work for them, it isn't going to work for you!

Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. Acting Director Steven Miller, who took over at the IRS in November, also made numerous visits to the White House, though variations in the spelling of his name in White House visitor logs makes it difficult to determine exactly how many times.

The frequent trips to the White House under Obama far outnumbered the times other administrations felt the need to meet with the IRS, according to Mark Everson, who led the IRS under former President George W. Bush. Everson said he remembers making only one trip to the White House between 2003 and 2007 and said he felt like he'd "moved to Siberia" because of the isolation.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... z2UbeH97Y2

So it's ok top target specific groups as long as some of them are in error?

An important part of this is that the IRS was specifically targeting likely anti-tax groups, which is part of the tea party platform. It's extremely dangerous for the nation's tax collector to have its own political agenda and enforce it again groups that generally don't support our tax policies.

Ricky:

Ray

An important part of this is that the IRS was specifically targeting likely anti-tax groups, which is part of the tea party platform. It's extremely dangerous for the nation's tax collector to have its own political agenda and enforce it again groups that generally don't support our tax policies.

The IRS has a mandate to enforce the laws and regulations regarding taxation. If they know that a certain class of organization is prone to tax avoidance or misuse of taxation laws, they have a duty to focus their efforts there in order to ensure the groups do not act with impunity.
If, as the NY Times says, there was this propensity - those in Congress complaining are complaining about effective enforcement of laws that they swore to uphold.