Tag Archives: Internal Revenue Service

Professor William Black ~ IRS-Incredible Abuses of Democracy [Video]

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USAWatchdog May 22 2013

Professor William Black is an expert in white collar crime.  When it comes to the IRS scandal, Dr. Black says, “This is everybody’s fear.  This is a real fear and not made up.  You can produce incredible abuses of democracy if you use the IRS as a weapon.”  Dr. Black contends, “It was precisely First Amendment activities that the IRS targeted under the Obama Administration.  At best, they were completely asleep at the wheel.”

Dr. Black isn’t sure higher-ups are going to jail but says, “The clear unbelievable thing is they gave an absolute gift, Christmas came early, for not only the Republicans, but for all Tea Party groups.”  Black goes on to say,“This administration, very early on, became an enemy of disclosure.  It hates whistleblowers with a passion.”  Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Professor William Black from the University of Missouri Kansas City.

Madison Ruppert ~ In America, Taxes Are Voluntary But If You Choose To Not Pay, You’ll Be Forced To ‘Voluntarily’ Comply

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Activist Post May 20 2013

Dees Illustration

Hidden amongst the reams of reports about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal is one little gem: the outgoing IRS Commissioner Steve Miller said that America’s tax system is “voluntary” in his testimony.

Now, whatever you do, don’t take that to mean that it is actually voluntary in the way that the word voluntary is normally used.

While you might think that voluntary means something which is “done without compulsion or obligation” or “done, made, brought about, undertaken, etc., of one’s own accord or by free choice,” when it comes to America’s “voluntary” tax system, it’s quite the opposite.

If you freely choose not to voluntarily participate in the tax system, you will enjoy being raided by armed agents, prosecuted and sent to federal prison. Quite the voluntary system indeed.

Furthermore, there are some practices that are clearly in no way voluntary. When income taxes are withheld from paychecks, for example, there is nothing voluntary about it.

When Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) said during the recent House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS scandal that the U.S. tax system is “a voluntary system,” Stephen Miller said, “Agreed.”

In fact, Becerra said it is “a voluntary system” twice. Becerra said those exact words at one hour, twenty nine minutes and eight seconds and again at one hour, thirty minutes and thirty five seconds, according to the C-SPAN transcript.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the same thing in an interview with Jan Helfeld in 2008.

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Jon Rappoport ~ Top IRS Official Takes The Fifth: What It Means

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www.nomorefakenews.com May 21 2013

Now it’s getting interesting.

Lois Lerner

Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt filings, will take the Fifth in front of Congress tomorrow.

She won’t answer questions. She won’t say, for example, why she never informed Congress that she knew there was criminal fiddling going on at the IRS, where employees “gave extra scrutiny” to tea party, conservative, patriot, and other groups during the application process.

Instead, as the DOJ launches a criminal investigation, Lerner will tell the House Oversight Committee, “I decline to answer. I invoke my Fifth Amendment right.” Multiple times she will say this.

Meaning: “If I answer, I could incriminate myself.”

Her lawyer, William Taylor, has asked the Committee to excuse Lerner from testifying tomorrow, Wednesday, since she won’t be answering questions. Taylor wrote to the House Committee, “[Forcing her to testify would] have no other purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.”

Tsk, tsk. Mustn’t embarrass a person who has committed crimes. Be nice. Be kind. Yes, Lois Lerner failed to tell the Committee anything about IRS crimes, when she testified four times last year, but so what? Give her a break. Goodness gracious, don’t put her through an ordeal.

Somehow, Lerner’s lawyer’s logic doesn’t stand up. But he’s a lawyer, so that’s no surprise.

Then there was this: a presidential election last year. 2012? Obama? Remember?

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Ron Paul ~ The IRS’s Job Is To Violate Our Liberties

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Infowars.com May 20 2013

Ron Paul

“What do you expect when you target the President?” This is what an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agent allegedly said to the head of a conservative organization that was being audited after calling for the impeachment of then-President Clinton. Recent revelations that IRS agents gave “special scrutiny” to organizations opposed to the current administration’s policies suggest that many in the IRS still believe harassing the President’s opponents is part of their job.

As troubling as these recent reports are, it would be a grave mistake to think that IRS harassment of opponents of the incumbent President is a modern, or a partisan, phenomenon. As scholar Burton Folsom pointed out in his book New Deal or Raw Deal, IRS agents in the 1930s where essentially “hit squads” against opponents of the New Deal. It is well-known that the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson used the IRS to silence their critics. One of the articles of impeachment drawn up against Richard Nixon dealt with his use of the IRS to harass his political enemies. Allegations of IRS abuses were common during the Clinton administration, and just this week some of the current administration’s defenders recalled that antiwar and progressive groups alleged harassment by the IRS during the Bush presidency.

The bipartisan tradition of using the IRS as a tool to harass political opponents suggests that the problem is deeper than just a few “rogue” IRS agents—or even corruption within one, two, three or many administrations. Instead, the problem lays in the extraordinary power the tax system grants the IRS.

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Ben Fulford (May 20 2013) ~ Signs Of End Game In Washington D.C. Proliferate, End Of Cold War In North East Asia Also Coming

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Benjamin Fulford

North Korean countryside

One of the most frustrating but necessary things for journalists is to hold information on embargo until a go ahead is given for publishing. This is one of those frustrating times. Embargoes are needed to ensure plans are not sabotaged and lives are not endangered.

However, there are enough hints available in the public domain for us to put some dots together. What is clear is that there is a lot of hysteria in Washington D.C. (IRS, Benghazi etc.) and London, England (pedophilia, gold market). It is also clear that for at least six months public statements by the US State Department repeated in the Zionist media have been regularly contradicted by the Pentagon. There are also proliferating signs of a breakdown in the financial system. All of this points to some sort of dramatic black swan incident soon. We will talk more about this below.

In Asia as well, secret negotiations with North Korea and among Asian powers are clearly preparations for a change in the post-war global power structure. The visit to North Korea last week by Isao Iijima, special envoy of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, was a case in point. We got four different versions of what was talked about, two Japanese, one North Korean and one Chinese. Like the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant (an elephant is big and flat, it is like a hose, it is like a tree trunk etc.) you need to piece the different versions together to figure out what is really going on. What the stories all agree upon though is that the visit was a best a fishing expedition, at worst a failure.

A source in the Japanese imperial family had the most interesting take on what Iijima had to say to the North Koreans. According to this source, Iijima asked the North Koreans if they would be willing to host 1 million Sabbatean refugees expected to want to leave Europe and the United States soon and was told no. This story about 1 million refugees looking for a place to go after leaving the United States has propped up repeatedly and from enough different sources that it seems to stem from a genuine belief that 1 million people will be asked to leave the US once the truth about what has been done by them to the American people is made public. My sources say they will not be allowed to leave but will have to face the music (i.e. be sent to the FEMA camps they prepared for others).

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Andy Hoffman ~ Total Cartel Control Over Media & Markets

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SGTbull07 May 19 2013

Benghazi, Department of “Justice” Fast & Furious gun running, Justice Department tapping AP Journalist’s phones, IRS targeting Patriot groups and Constitutionalists – the crimes of our literally CRIMINAL government are now obvious to all. So now’s the time the collective outrage of the American people will finally allow us to do something about it, and take our country back, right? No so fast, says Andy Hoffman. The criminal cartel remains in control of the media and the markets – and if the past 40 years are any example, the American people are likely to do more of the same, Nothing.

Jon Rappoport ~ When Will Obama Say, “I Am Not A Crook”?

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www.nomorefakenews.com May 19 2013

The upward pressure of ongoing scandals is moving into the White House. Benghazi, AP, IRS.

The president’s surrogates are trying out their lying skills.

Jay Carney: The situation at the IRS isn’t really a scandal, depending on what the definition of “is” is. And if one uses the passive voice, that’s acceptable, as in “mistakes were made.”

Hillary Clinton: It doesn’t matter how and why Americans were killed in Benghazi. They died. We’re alive. We move on.

Steven Miller, retiring/ousted head of the IRS: We gave bad customer service. Who at the IRS is guilty? I asked someone and they told me, but I don’t remember what they said.

Eric Holder: If something bad happened at my agency in relation to spying on AP reporters, I don’t know what it is, because I’ve recused myself. Other people under me are investigating the whole thing. I don’t know who these investigators are. I have to remain ignorant, in order to be objective.

Inside the White House, key players are saying: “Okay, we’ve deleted four thousand emails. That doesn’t sound like enough. Keep looking. Keep deleting. Destroy the computers. And paper. There’s still paper. Order new shredding machines. Check everybody’s schedules and logs of meetings. Make sure they don’t overlap in suspect ways…”

Remember the old phrase “plausible deniability?” The people around the president commit crimes and make sure the president doesn’t know about them. Or if he does know, or if he ordered the crimes to be committed, his people erase the links that would lead to his exposure.

It’s a game. Can the president be protected? Can he deny knowledge and make it stick? Can anyone prove he’s guilty? Can he fire a few underlings and make the whole thing go away?

Of course, the president chose those people around him. He chose criminals who will protect him. That’s true, but it’s not part of the plausible-deniability board game. It doesn’t count.

Magically, the president is pure. He just happened to err in judgment and choose a bevy of criminals to work close to him. What was he thinking?

The president is innocent. Everybody else is guilty. Amazing.

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Obama’s Biggest Fans Abandoning Ship?

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WND May 18 2013

Barack Obama once enjoyed a Teflon reputation in the mainstream media, where his allies were quick to deflect criticism of his presidency and bad news never seemed to stick.

But as scandal upon scandal have washed over his administration in recent weeks – first a floundering response to attacks in Benghazi that led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, then reports the IRS targeted his political opponents, then news the Justice Department seized phone records of Associated Press reporters – even some of Obama’s most ardent supporters in the media are turning critical.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example – he of the infamous “thrill up my leg” comment during Obama’s 2008 campaign – offered unusually harsh words earlier this week, complaining the president “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch.”

Politico – certainly not a conservative-leaning news source – described Matthews’ remarks as “a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.”

On another occasion this week, Matthews blasted testimony from former IRS chief Steve Miller, who suggested the agency’s behavior was inappropriate but denied any political targeting.

“That Mr. Miller guy,” Matthews said, “It’s like he didn’t see what he knew people certainly right, left and center could see, that when you target particular groups, you’re targeting particular groups. I mean, if this were on the other foot, and this was a George W. administration, they were targeting groups that were calling themselves progressives, I would say it’s prima facie evidence of targeting. I don’t think it’s complicated.”

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Jordan Bloom ~ IRS Scandal: Bureaucratic Failure Or Political Corruption?

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The American Conservative May 17 2013

Just got finished chatting about the IRS and AP scandals on the Marc Steiner show with Ari Berman of The Nation, the ACLU’s Gabe Rottman, and for the second half, FDL’s Kevin Gosztola. Podcast forthcoming here.

We disagreed, obviously, about how the IRS’s discrimination bears on campaign finance reform. I don’t see how the IRS scandal argues for putting even more power in their hands.

But I’d like to return to a finer point about which we disagreed but didn’t really get into. Berman seemed convinced that the discrimination was the result of front-line IRS employees deluged with a glut of new, post-Citizens United filings, that needed to come up with some criteria for sorting through it. This is more or less the argument the IRS itself has made (and somewhat similar to the one officials are making about Benghazi). For his part, Rottman contended that the politics didn’t matter so much as the discriminatory questioning itself. Here are four reasons why it’s hard to believe the IRS wasn’t just coping with an overflow of applications.

  • The questions themselves — If the IRS employees did not know that 501c4s are not required to disclose their donors when they asked for lists, then they are shockingly incompetent. So why did they want them? Either they intended to embarrass the donors by leaking them, or somewhat more benignly, it was just another question in a litany of unreasonable requests designed to hold up the approval process. Continue reading →

Greg Hunter ~ Weekly News Wrap Up May 17 2013 [Video]

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USA Watchdog

This Week’s Wrap-Up series of stories I call “Scandal-topia.”  Benghazi, IRS targeting conservative groups, Department of Justice seizing phone records of the Associated Press (AP) and yet another sex abuse scandal in the U.S. military.  While all of these stories are important, they are taking our eyes off other stories of great importance.   Let’s run down the list:

Benghazi, the White House is releasing some emails, but Republicans want many more released.  The left wants to paint this as a “witch hunt,” but lots of questions go unanswered.  Mark Thompson, one of the Benghazi whistle-blowers, was in charge of the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST.)  This team is comprised of people like Special Ops, FBI and security experts that can go in for a rescue.  Thompson’s testimony in front of Congress said FEST was “taken out of the menu of options.”  There was never any intention to mount a rescue, and this was a policy decision that came very early on 9/11/12.  The Accountability Review Board says you can’t blame former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the murder and non-rescue of four Americans.  Really?  The person in charge isn’t to blame?

Next up, the scandal involving the IRS targeting of hundreds of conservative groups.  If this isn’t against the Constitution and the law, I don’t know what is.  This was nothing short of an attempt to stop opposition to the Obama administration and its policies.  End of story.  I think Speaker of the House John Boehner got it stop on when he said, “Who’s going to jail for this?”  Well, don’t hold your breath because it was just announced that the person in charge of tax-exempt organizations (Sarah Hall Ingram) just got a promotion and is going to be in charge of the IRS part of Obama Care.  I cannot make this stuff up.  The President said he knew nothing about this scandal until he saw news reports.

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James Hall ~ IRS As A Political Hit Squad

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BATR May 15 2013

When the Internal Revenue Service admits to violations of law by targeting limited government advocate organizations, you know that the non-divulged crimes are much worse. The discloser in the mainstream media is a pleasant astonishment. The usual pattern of protecting “Big Government” is still intact, while the noise and agency diversion on the abuses of the IRS avoid the fundamental problem with federal taxation, based upon a system of deductions, exemptions, incentives and grants. The extortion and intimidation in the enforcement of the tax code is the entrusted role assigned to the IRS by the political hacks that administer the social engineering experiment that is fundamentally changing America.

The politicalization of the system is premeditated. The revelation that Obama governance resulted in IRS scrutiny that went beyond Tea Party, targeting of conservative groups broader than thought, should not be shocking. The sycophants in federal employment have a deranged hostility towards any voice that defends and promotes constitutional federalism. Foxnews reports:

“The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and “patriot” groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to “make America a better place to live.” It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of “how the country is being run.”

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in “limiting/expanding government,” education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform.”

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Michael Snyder ~ An Even Bigger Scandal: Why Are IRS Audits Being Used To Punish Obama’s Political Enemies?

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Economic Collapse blog May 15 2013

Is it right for Barack Obama to use IRS audits to punish his political enemies? As crazy as that sounds, there is a mounting body of evidence that indicates that this is actually happening. And if this can be proven, it is a much, much larger scandal than the IRS giving “extra scrutiny” to the applications of conservative non-profit groups. Let me be clear – if Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to punish his political enemies, that is an impeachable offense. Of all of the other scandals that are out there right now, this is the one that could actually bring down the presidency of Barack Obama. That is how serious this is. As you will read about below, there is a huge amount of circumstantial evidence that political enemies of Barack Obama have been singled out for IRS audits. We need to find out who initiated these audits. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent, this kind of abuse of government power should sicken and horrify you. If it can be proven that Barack Obama has been using IRS audits to attack his enemies, every single U.S. citizen should be calling for him to resign. This is something that is beyond politics – this is a direct threat to the very integrity of our system.

The recent revelation that the IRS has been specifically targeting patriot groups and Tea Party organizations for “extra scrutiny” has opened up the floodgates. In recent days, a large number of highly respected people have come forward claiming that they were the subject of IRS audits that were politically motivated.

For example, Larry Conners, a respected local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, Missouri says that he was hit with an IRS audit almost immediately after he conducted an interview with Barack Obama in April 2012…

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