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IRS Lawyer Carter Hull Confirms Tea Party Targeting Ordered By Washington - Investors.com - 0 views

  • Hull has confirmed the premeditated targeting of Tea Party groups went even higher than him or Lerner.
  • Apparently not only Tea Party groups were targeted but actual candidates as well. On March 9, 2010, the day Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell revealed her plan to run for Vice President Joe Biden's former Delaware Senate seat , an IRS tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers, an action that was quickly publicized by those who did not wish her well.
  • Earlier this year, Dennis Martel, special agent with the Department of Treasury in Baltimore, left a message on O'Donnell's cell phone telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day. The problem was that the house was not hers in the first place and the IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.
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  • To us it is inconceivable that one of only two political appointees was directly involved in targeting of Tea Party groups without White House knowledge and consent. It is said the fish rots from the head, and this one is really beginning to stink.
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    This has gone way too far.  The 2012 elections must be nullified and rescheduled.  Tens of millions of American citizens have been systematically targeted, their civil and Constitutional rights destroyed, and their voices and votes politically eliminated by a massive government conspiracy.  The 2012 election is a fraud.  And nothing short of complete nullification and recall, and the termination of the IRS will do the great Republic justice. excerpt: Scandal: A retiring IRS lawyer implicates the IRS chief counsel's office, headed by an Obama appointee, as well as the head of the IRS' exempt organizations office. The targeting included a Tea Party Senate candidate. In Thursday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, 72-year-old retiring IRS lawyer Carter Hull implicated the IRS chief counsel's office headed by William J. Wilkins, who attended at least nine White House meetings, and Lois Lerner, head of the exempt-organizations office, in the IRS scandal. In so doing, he made clear the targeting of Tea Party groups started in Washington and was directed from Washington. A tax-law specialist with 48 years of IRS experience, Hull testified that Lerner, the former head of the exempt organizations division, demanded that he send some of the reviews of Tea Party groups to the IRS chief counsel's office in Washington. The chief counsel is one of two political appointees in the IRS. According to Hull's testimony, Lerner, who famously pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights before the same committee, gave an atypical instruction that the Tea Party applications undergo special scrutiny that included an uncommon multilayer review that involved a top adviser to Lerner as well as the chief counsel's office. Hull's name came up earlier in the testimony of Holly Paz, a D.C.-based supervisor in the IRS's tax-exempt status division, who reported to Lerner. It was on May 22, the day after Paz was interviewed by investigators, that Lerner refused to answer questions from
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Nate Jackson: Does Seeking to Jail Political Opponents Count as a 'Smidgen of Corruptio... - 0 views

  • And they wonder why people don’t trust the NSA’s mass metadata collection. The conversations that began at least in 2010 continued for three years. In fact, two days before Lerner “apologized” and outed the whole conspiracy, she wrote an email to the acting IRS commissioner’s chief of staff detailing ongoing discussions with DOJ officials. “These new documents show that the Obama IRS scandal is also an Obama DOJ and FBI scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The FBI and Justice Department worked with Lois Lerner and the IRS to concoct some reason to put President Obama’s opponents in jail before his reelection. And this abuse resulted in the FBI’s illegally obtaining confidential taxpayer information. How can the Justice Department and FBI investigate the very scandal in which they are implicated?”
  • The answer to that last, albeit rhetorical, question is that they can’t and they aren’t. Any “investigation” by the DOJ or FBI will no doubt exonerate anyone of importance in the Obama administration. If any guilt is unavoidable, it will be hung around the necks of those rascals in Cincinnati or some other unfortunate scapegoat. All while Lerner continues to enjoy her comfortable retirement, and Obama himself remains untouched. On top of the serious breach of law and abuse of power in targeting Obama’s political opponents, the agencies' carefully crafted stonewall blocked the timely release of information. As with Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Benghazi cover-up, the slow bleed of information leaves the public tired of hearing “old news” and makes it all the more certain the perpetrators won’t face real accountability, much less justice.
  • Finally, we’re reminded of a commencement speech Obama delivered in 2009 at Arizona State University, after university officials declined to give Obama an honorary doctorate. Obama “joked” that “[university president Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.” Clearly, that wasn’t much of a joke.
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    "There was "not even a smidgen of corruption" at the IRS, Barack Obama told us in February 2014, though he conceded "there were some bone-headed decisions." That was a bald-faced lie at the time, and new information only reinforces that conclusion. While the mainstream media turns a blind eye and deaf ear, Judicial Watch has continued digging for information regarding IRS targeting of Tea Party and Patriot groups leading up to (and almost surely aiding in) Obama's re-election in 2012. And they discovered some serious collusion that sounds more like something out of Soviet Russia or Red China than here in the U.S. "Judicial Watch … released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official 'DOJ Recap' report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity." In other words, imprisoning political opponents. Remember when the IRS initially blamed the whole fiasco on a couple of low-level employees in Cincinnati? Good times. The documents reveal numerous conversations between the three agencies, including Lois Lerner, about creative ways to charge and jail conservatives for the "crime" of political activity opposing Obama. To do so, the DOJ and FBI needed to illegally obtain taxpayer information from the IRS. So the IRS sent the FBI more than one million pages of taxpayer information on 113,000 non-profit groups."
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House Holds Lois Lerner in Contempt in IRS Scandal - 0 views

  • The House voted Wednesday to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress and to instruct the Justice Department to probe her for criminal charges. The actions mark the culmination of two simultaneous committee investigations into allegations that Lerner knowingly presided over the improper targeting of conservative outside groups seeking tax-exempt status with the agency, including stalling the application process and giving special scrutiny to organizations that appeared to be affiliated with the tea party movement.
  • One resolution (H Res 574), agreed to on a 231-187 vote, will make Lerner the sixth public official since 1982 to be held in contempt for her refusal to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Lerner cited her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in an appearance last year. The other resolution (H Res 565), referred by the Ways and Means Committee and supported Wednesday by a 250-168 vote, would call upon Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special prosecutor to evaluate whether Lerner should face criminal charges on specific counts of misconduct related to the scandal. Neither resolution is likely to yield results: The Justice Department is actually under no obligation to appoint a special counsel, and the criminal contempt statute says the U.S. attorney has a “duty” to convene a grand jury in an event of a contempt citation, but it doesn’t appear to be mandatory.
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House Panel Said to Accuse Lerner of Disclosing IRS Data - Businessweek - 0 views

  • The House Ways and Means Committee plans to send a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder saying former IRS executive Lois Lerner should be prosecuted for violating taxpayers’ rights, misleading investigators and disclosing taxpayers’ private information, a House aide said. The aide, who has knowledge of the letter, spoke on condition of anonymity before the panel’s scheduled vote tomorrow. Lerner, who retired from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as director of exempt organizations, said at a congressional hearing last year that she has done nothing wrong and committed no crime. Her office gave extra scrutiny to small-government groups seeking tax-exempt status.
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Articles of Impeachment Against Obama - 0 views

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    Sarasota, FL ( August 12, 2013) - The National Black Republican Association (NBRA) based in Sarasota, FL, headed by Chairman Frances Rice, filed Articles of Impeachment against President Barack Obama with the following language.   We, black American citizens, in order to free ourselves and our fellow citizens from governmental tyranny, do herewith submit these Articles of Impeachment to Congress for the removal of President Barack H. Obama, aka, Barry Soetoro, from office for his attack on liberty and commission of egregious acts of despotism that constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.   On July 4, 1776, the founders of our nation declared their independence from governmental tyranny and reaffirmed their faith in independence with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.   Asserting their right to break free from the tyranny of a nation that denied them the civil liberties that are our birthright, the founders declared:   "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."  -  Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.   THE IMPEACHMENT POWER   Article II, Section IV of the United States Constitution provides: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."   THE ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT   In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Barack H. Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, personally and through his subordinates and agents, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:   ARTICL
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Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

  • Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016
  • The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
  • Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.
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  • Many on the Federal CIO Council could use some motivation, including the beleaguered State Department CIO, Steven Taylor. In office since April 3, 2013, Mr. Taylor is in charge of the Department's information resources and IT initiatives and services. He "is directly responsible for the Information Resource Management (IRM) Bureau's budget of $750 million, and oversees State's total IT/ knowledge management budget of approximately one billion dollars." Prior to his current position, Taylor served as Acting CIO from August 1, 2012, as the Department's Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) and Chief Technology Officer of Operations from June 2011, and was the Program Director for the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Toolset (SMART). While Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that because she sent her official e-mail to "government officials on their State or other .gov accounts ... the emails were immediately captured and preserved," a recent State Department Office of Inspector General report contradicts claims that DOS' e-mail archiving system, ironically named SMART, did so.
  • The report found that State Department "employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'" In 2011, while Taylor was State's Chief Technology Officer of Operations, State Department employees only created 61,156 record e-mails out of more than a billion e-mails sent. In other words, roughly .006% of DOS e-mails were captured electronically. And in 2013, while Taylor was State's CIO, a paltry seven e-mails were preserved from the Office of the Secretary, compared to the 4,922 preserved by the Lagos Consulate in Nigeria. Even though the report notes that its assessments "do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the State Department has not provided any estimation of the number of Clinton's e-mails that were preserved by recipients through the Department's anachronistic "print and file" system, or any other procedure.
  • The unfortunate silver lining of Hillary Clinton inappropriately appropriating public records as her own is that she likely preserved her records much more comprehensively than her State Department colleagues, most of whose e-mails have probably been lost under Taylor's IT leadership. 2008 reports by CREW, right, and the GAO, left, highlighted problems preserving e-mails. Click to enlarge. The bigger issue is that Federal IT gurus have known about this problem for years, and the State Department is not alone in not having done anything to fix it. A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard "print and file" approach by pointing out:
  • 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).
  • Troublingly, current Office of Management and Budget guidance does not require federal agencies to manage "all email records in an electronic format" until December 31, 2016. The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of "best practice" is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President's own Blackberry messages. The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the "ARMS" system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing its systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or misfiled.
  • s a result of two decades of the Archive's White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House. Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include: 2013 - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (for his "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?") 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failing to update FOIA regulations to comply with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics)
  • Rogue Band of Federal E-mail Users and Abusers Compounds Systemic Problems Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other federal officials who skirt or even violate federal laws designed to preserve electronic federal records compound e-mail management problems. Top government officials who use personal e-mail for official business include: Clinton; former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration; chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Rafael Moure-Eraso; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told ABC's This Week "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files." Others who did not properly save electronic federal records include Environmental Protection Agency former administrator Lisa Jackson who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; current EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama's political opponents "went missing or became destroyed."
  • "agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy;" yet GAO concluded even the "print and file" system was failing to capture historic records "for about half of the senior officials."
  • The destruction of other federal records was even more blatant. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency's defunct torture program ordered the destruction of key videos documenting it in 2005, claiming that "the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain;" Admiral William McRaven, ordered the immediate destruction of any emails about Operation Neptune Spear, including any photos of the death of Osama bin Laden ("destroy them immediately"), telling subordinates that any photos should have already been turned over to the CIA — presumably so they could be placed in operational files out of reach of the FOIA. These rogues make it harder — if not impossible — for agencies to streamline their records management, and for FOIA requesters and others to obtain official records, especially those not exchanged with other government employees. The US National Archives currently trusts agencies to determine and preserve e-mails which agencies have "deemed appropriate for preservation" on their own, often by employing a "print and file" physical archiving process for digital records. Any future reforms to e-mail management must address the problems of outdated preservation technology, Federal Records Act violators, and the scary fact that only one per cent of government e-mail addresses are saved digitally by the National Archive's recently-initiated "Capstone" program.
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    Complete with photos, names, titles, of the 41 federal department and independent agency CIOs. The March 2015 Insopector General report linked from the article belies Hillary Clinton's claim that all emails she sent to State Department staff had been preserved by the Department.   
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