geojanes wrote:Well, this is interesting. I guess everything has context:

So the scandal—the real scandal—is that 501(c)(4) groups have been engaged in political activity in such a sustained and open way. As Fred Wertheimer, the President of Democracy 21, a government-ethics watchdog group, put it, “it is clear that a number of groups have improperly claimed tax-exempt status as section 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ organizations in order to hide the donors who financed their campaign activities in the 2010 and 2012 federal elections.”

Some people in the I.R.S. field office in Cincinnati took the names of certain groups—names that included the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot,” among others, which tend to signal conservatism—as signals that they might not be engaged in “social welfare” operations. Rather, the I.R.S. employees thought that these groups might be doing explicit politics—which would disqualify them for 501(c)(4) status, and set them aside for closer examination. This appears to have been a pretty reasonable assumption on the part of the I.R.S. employees: having “Tea Party” in your name is at least a slight clue about partisanship.

So it looks less like abusing the authority of the position, and more like doing their job. Oooops. Sorry, IRS, for jumping down your throats like that, but everybody hates you already so, you understand, it was really easy to do.

More here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/irs-scandal-tea-party-oversight.html

GMTom wrote:so, the IRS can look for conservative "cheats" but not into Liberal "cheats"? It's ok to ignore the democrats and liberals? It would seem so based on this "explanation". You want to target tea party groups, that's fine as long as you also target liberal groups yet that was not the case so the "explanation" falls flat on it's face yet you want to believe a half truth?

But in Monday’s briefing, he revealed that after White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was informed that the probe was coming to its conclusion, she told White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior White House staff. Carney also said that Ruemmler was made aware of the report’s key finding: that IRS personnel had improperly targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny. And he added that the White House then held meetings with the Treasury Department to discuss strategy for responding to the report.

“There were conversations with White House chief of staff and with Treasury about the anticipated timing of the release of the report and the potential findings,” Carney said.

Carney didn’t tell reporters last week about any of that information.

The evolving story doesn’t offer evidence that the White House was aware of the targeting at any point before last month. But it does raise questions about whether it’s being fully forthcoming in its public statements on the issue.

geojanes wrote:

GMTom wrote:so, the IRS can look for conservative "cheats" but not into Liberal "cheats"? It's ok to ignore the democrats and liberals? It would seem so based on this "explanation". You want to target tea party groups, that's fine as long as you also target liberal groups yet that was not the case so the "explanation" falls flat on it's face yet you want to believe a half truth?

Why do you think they didn't? I don't have a link, but I heard a radio story saying that while most of those asked for additional information were conservative, there were also similar liberal groups questioned as well. Not as many, but there were some.

This story is still unfolding of course, but it may be that there was nothing sinister about the intent.

The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.

Details of the now-infamous planted question emerged Friday after acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted the gambit under questioning from members of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.

The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.”

“We are referring to OPR our finding that Burke violated Department policy in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to a member of the media for a determination of whether Burke’s conduct violated the Rules of Professional Conduct for the state bars in which Burke is a member,” the IG wrote.

Burke resigned from his post as U.S. Attorney over the incident in August 2011, the first major Department of Justice official to leave his or her post in the Fast and Furious scandal. He said after the fact, in interviews with congressional investigators, that he now views leaking the document as a “mistake.”

In addition to Burke’s involvement in leaking the document, emails the IG uncovered show senior officials at the Department of Justice discussed smearing Dodson.

One of those was Tracy Schmaler, the Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs, who resigned her position at the DOJ after emails uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showed that she worked with leftwing advocacy group Media Matters for America to smear whistleblowers and members of Congress and the media who sought to investigate DOJ scandals under Attorney General Eric Holder.

geojanes wrote:I think intent is going to be really important for the IRS case. If there was a political intent to slow the development of right wing groups over left wing groups because of ideology, then this is a scandal of the highest order.

if there was not a political intent, rather it involved staff looking for political organizations trying to pass themselves off as something they weren't, and then used political filters to narrow their search, and ended up focusing on right wing organizations because of flawed filtering methods, that is a problem which needs to be addressed, but that's not a scandal. There are people involved here, people to be interviewed, and I expect the truth will come out.

Appoint a special prosecutor on the IRS. The last thing the country needs is another subpoena-powered fishing expedition like the Whitewater inquiries. But we might need a special prosecutor with a narrowly defined mission to investigate the actions and motives of IRS agents and their superiors. Is there a better way to restore the agency’s integrity? The administration investigating itself will not lift the cloud from Obama’s White House.

Doctor Fate wrote:How many shoes have to drop before you think this is serious?

geojanes wrote:

Doctor Fate wrote:How many shoes have to drop before you think this is serious?

I do think it's serious, and have written as much, but I also read today that there was a possible explanation that showed, at worst, incompetence. There clearly needs to be an investigation and the truth needs to be determined. As I said, it could be a scandal of the highest order, or it could be run of the mill incompetence that produced some fairly serious results.

The president said press freedoms must be balanced against the protection of U.S. personnel overseas. According to the office of Ronald Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District, its prosecutors followed federal regulations by first seeking the information through other means before subpoenaing media phone records. Machen’s office is investigating both the Kim and AP cases. The Justice Department said in a statement that in both cases it had abided by “all applicable laws, regulations, and longstanding Department of Justice policies intended to safeguard the First Amendment interests of the press in reporting the news and the public in receiving it.”

The Obama administration has pursued more such cases than all previous administrations combined, including one against a former CIA official charged with leaking U.S. intelligence on Iran and another against a former FBI contract linguist who pleaded guilty to leaking to a blogger.

The Kim case began in June 2009, when Rosen reported that U.S. intelligence officials were warning that North Korea was likely to respond to United Nations sanctions with more nuclear tests. The CIA had learned the information, Rosen wrote, from sources inside North Korea.

The story was published online the same day that a top-secret report was made available to a small circle within the intelligence community — including Kim, who at the time was a State Department arms expert with security clearance.

FBI investigators used the security-badge data, phone records and e-mail exchanges to build a case that Kim shared the report with Rosen soon after receiving it, court records show.

In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters at 2201 C St. NW a few hours before the story was published on June 11, 2009.

“Mr. Kim departed DoS at or around 12:02 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:03 p.m.,” Reyes wrote. Next, the agent said, “Mr. Kim returned to DoS at or around 12:26 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:30 p.m.”

The activity, Reyes wrote in an affidavit, suggested a “face-to-face” meeting between the two men. “Within a few hours after those nearly simultaneous exits and entries at DoS, the June 2009 article was published on the Internet,” he wrote.

The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation. Rosen and a spokeswoman for Fox News did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target.

Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a “covert communications plan” and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information.

In the exchange, Rosen used the alias “Leo” to address Kim and called himself “Alex,” an apparent reference to Alexander Butterfield, the man best known for running the secret recording system in the Nixon White House, according to the affidavit.

Rosen instructed Kim to send him coded signals on his Google account, according to a quote from his e-mail in the affidavit: “One asterisk means to contact them, or that previously suggested plans for communication are to proceed as agreed; two asterisks means the opposite.”

He also wrote, according to the affidavit: “What I am interested in, as you might expect, is breaking news ahead of my competitors” including “what intelligence is picking up.” And: “I’d love to see some internal State Department analyses.”

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill is going further. A former state auditor, she has had years of experience with dissembling bureaucrats and errant officials. Last Friday, she issued a video statement calling for a full house-cleaning of everyone involved in the scandal: “We should not only fire the head of the IRS, which has occurred, but we’ve got to go down the line and find every single person who had anything to do with this and make sure that they are removed from the IRS and the word goes out that this unacceptable.”

Doctor Fate wrote:Haha, I notice no liberals are interested in this any longer. Can't defend the IRS? Suppression of the press? Sebelius raising money as "a private citizen" from medical companies she will regulate?