Tag Archives: Lois Lerner

“Americans are beginning to understand that the politics of ‘hope and change’ has an enforcement arm that operates like an organized crime syndicate”

Posted on by
Reply

Those Lois Lerner emails that happened to have been accidentally deleted and could not be retrieved turn out to still exist and are being brought to light. So this is where matters now stand: IRS Being Investigated For Criminal Misconduct Surrounding Lois Lerner’s ‘Missing’ Emails

“The IRS was apparently given instruction to do whatever necessary to silence those who spoke out against the Obama Administration. It became a West Wing weapon of choice. As the nation’s only pro-liberty election integrity organization, True the Vote was marked for takedown by the IRS early in 2010, along with hundreds of other organizations that spoke openly about government corruption. It took a long time, too long, for the pieces to be put together, but Americans are beginning to understand that the politics of ‘hope and change’ has an enforcement arm that operates like an organized crime syndicate. The time for choosing is now,” True the Vote Founder Catherine Engelbrecht, who was targeted by the IRS and other government agencies, said in a statement about the new revelations. “Our elected officials need to stop playing politics and use the powers we’ve entrusted to them to restore the rule of law in Washington. Stop handing out bonuses and start sending law-breaking bureaucrats to jail. If Congress doesn’t have conviction enough to get the job done, then just turn out the lights, get off the payroll, go home, and get out of the way. Enough is enough. The American people will not be silenced.”

No doubt the media blackout on these developments continues.

Stealing the election

Posted on by
Reply

It has seemed pretty straightforward that Obama stole the election in 2012, with the IRS suppression of opposition funding at the very core. The various precincts in Pennsylvania that went something like 52000 to zero – Obama v Romney – is an impossibility. In this post April Sands, a woman working for the Federal Electoral Commission, who as it happens was also a former co-worker of Lois Lerner’s, was running partisan, pro-Obama, messages from her office during the election. But the truly grotesque aspect is what happened when they came to investigate:

The FEC has a far-reaching mandate into the operations of elections, which means that partisanship in that agency is particularly corrosive. The Hatch Act requires strict neutrality of all federal employees while on duty, and one would expect that to be particularly observed in the FEC. Instead, Sands tweeted partisan messages from her office in 2012; sent out fundraising pleas for Obama’s re-election campaign, called Republicans her “enemy,” and said they should shut up and “stand down.”

When the Inspector General came knocking, however, the evidence had vanished. The FEC “recycled” her hard drive, which meant that criminal charges could not be pursued. How exactly could this have happened? Sands was under suspicion of a crime under a statute which would be updated later that year, in a bill signed by Barack Obama himself. Shouldn’t the FEC have taken steps to secure evidence rather than destroy it?

There is not, of course, any doubt at all that the hard drive would reveal massive illegality, just as would the also now lost hard drives of Lois Lerner.

And then there’s this from the UK, which means that they do the same in the US, which discusses a toolkit of software programs used to manipulate online traffic, infiltrate users’ computers and spread select messages across social media sites including Facebook and YouTube:

A number of interesting tools and their short descriptions are below:

ASTRAL PROJECTION: Remote GSM secure covert Internet proxy using TOR hidden service
POISON ARROW: Safe malware download capability
AIRWOLF: YouTube profile, comment and video collection
BIRDSTRIKE: Twitter monitoring and profile collection
GLASSBACK: Technique of getting a target’s IP address by pretending to be a spammer and ringing them. Target does not need to answer.
MINIATURE HERO: Active skype capability. Provision of realtime call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.
PHOTON TORPEDO: A technique to actively grab the IP address of MSN messenger user
SPRING-BISHOP: Finding private photos of targets on Facebook
BOMB BAY: The capacity to increase website hits, rankings
BURLESQUE: The capacity to send spoofed SMS messages
GESTATOR: Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (YouTube)
SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE: Perfect spoofing of emails from Blackberry targets
SUNBLOCK: Ability to deny functionality to send/receive email or view material online
SWAMP DONKEY: A tool that will silently locate all predefined types of file and encrypt them on a targets machine
UNDERPASS: Change outcome of online polls (previously known as NUBILO).
WARPATH: Mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign.
HUSK: Secure one-on-one web based dead-drop messaging platform.

The US is near enough a one-party state in which it is almost impossible to imagine how, short of a catastrophe of some kind, a Republican president could again be elected any time soon.

The media sickness at the centre of the American political system

Posted on by
Reply

Lois Lerner’s emails with the White House have been deleted and cannot be retrieved. That’s what they say and what are you going to do about it? They spit in your eye because with a dead media who will not report on any misdeeds by a Democrat, there is no balance in the system. Led by a disastrous far-left President, every principle the United States has ever stood for is being betrayed in front of our eyes but nothing happens because the actual means to cause some reaction is not there. No outrage, no fury, no deep public anger. Just quiet, with a sense of resignation that nothing can be done.

And nothing will be done until a major American politician on the right decides to take this on. This was the reaction of the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. See if you can see anything in these words that reminds you of someone truly worked up about the brazen lying that has just taken place on his watch:

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” he said in a statement. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.”

What are they afraid of at this stage? Why is there no reaction with any sense of disgust, with a demand that the IRS be ransacked and the police sent into recover those emails which are without any doubt in the world sitting there in plain sight. The US is lost and gone. It is a backwater in the making.

Scandal, what scandal?

Posted on by
Reply

Paul Caron, who has been following the dead cat IRS scandal, has an article in USA Today on The media ignore IRS scandal. He therefore writes:

Today’s news media are largely ignoring the IRS scandal, and it is impossible to have confidence in the current investigations by the FBI, Justice Department, and House committee. I am not suggesting that the current scandal in the end will rise to the level of Watergate. But the allegations are serious, and fair-minded Americans of both parties should agree that a thorough investigation needs to be undertaken to either debunk them or confirm them.

Step one should be to give Lois Lerner full immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony. And then let the chips fall where they may.

Rise to the level of Watergate! This is so far beyond Watergate that even to suggest a comparison is to downgrade the significance of what went on. Whatever else Nixon did or did not do, at no stage was it ever suggested that he had even been aware of what was being done never mind having been involved.

With Lerner and the IRS it is completely different. The probability is not small that this is an Obama operation and originated in the White House. Lerner knows the truth but will never speak, and even if she did the media would never report what she said. Caron’s work is for the historians, not for political comment by anyone with a sentimental attachment to the left. The fact that it even showed up in USA Today is all the evidence you need that no one on the left thinks it will ever come to anything at all.

The IRS Scandal, Day 365

Posted on by
Reply

Instapundit has had a running theme for exactly a year today. Paul Caron, a law professor in the US, began assembling each day the latest news on the use of the IRS to harass any organisation on the right-side of the political divide. From the first moment I could not see how Obama could avoid being impeached even with the media virtually all in one corner. But on this, alas, I could not have been more wrong. So a full year has gone by, and this is where we are now on Day 365:

  • American Thinker: IRS Audits 10% of Tea Party Donors
  • The Blaze: IRS Agrees to Turn Over All Lois Lerner Emails
  • Bloomberg: House Holds Lois Lerner in Contempt for IRS Probe Silence
  • Catholic Online: Former IRS Official Lois Lerner Held in Contempt
  • Christian Science Monitor: House Holds Lois Lerner in Contempt in IRS Scandal: What Does That Mean?
  • Daily Caller: IRS Agrees To Give House Committee All Lois Lerner Emails
  • Daily Mail: IRS Finally Agrees to Turn Over ALL Lois Lerner Emails to House Republicans – A Day After She’s Found in Criminal Contempt
  • The Foundry: Why 26 Democrats Think IRS Scandal ‘Doesn’t Smell Right’
  • The Guardian: IRS Official Held in Contempt of Congress Over Tea Party Targeting
  • Human Events: Lois Lerner Held in Contempt by the House
  • Legal Insurrection: IRS to Turn Over All Lois Lerner Emails to House Committee
  • National Review: IRS to Turn Over All Lerner E-Mails
  • NBC News: GOP Focus on Benghazi and IRS Could Be Risky Business
  • News Busters: NY Times Reporter Suggests ‘Defensive’ GOP Playing Politics on Lois Lerner
  • News Max: Critic Slams Networks for Ignoring Contempt Vote on IRS’ Lerner
  • News Max: Rep. Cummings: Lerner Contempt Vote Recalls McCarthy Era
  • Newsweek: House Votes to Hold IRS’s Lois Lerner in Contempt Over Conservative Targeting
  • Roll Call: In Showdown With Lerner, House Imprisonment Not Out of the Question
  • Slate: Lois Lerner Is Held in Contempt of Congress, in Massive Consolation Prize
  • Town Hall: Guess Who Bailed on Lerner’s Contempt Vote?
  • Town Hall: Priorities: Pelosi Skips Lerner Vote, Attends Fundraiser in CA
  • USA Today: Congress Could Put Lois Lerner in Jail All by Itself — But Probably Won’t
  • Wall Street Journal: Four Ways the House Can Go After Lois Lerner
  • Wall Street Journal: Lois Lerner’s Contempt for Congress
  • Wall Street Journal: Some Democrats Target the IRS: The White House Can’t Call It a Partisan “Phony Scandal.”
  • Wall Street Journal: What’s Next for Lerner and the IRS Scandal
  • Washington Examiner: IRS’ Lois Lerner Held in Contempt by U.S. House
  • Washington Free Beacon: Meet the Democrats Who Want to Investigate the IRS
  • Washington Post: The Five Stages of GOP Scandal-Mongering: A Reader’s Guide
  • Washington Post: House Votes to Hold Lois Lerner in Contempt of Congress
  • Washington Post: Lois Lerner Is About to Join the Contempt Club. Who Else Has Been There?
  • The Weekly Standard: Six Dems Join House Republicans on Lerner Contempt Vote

Aside from media bias, the terrorist abilities of the IRS is keeping protest to an invisible low. You don’t need the army in the streets, just the Tax Department. Quite instructive but depressing.The United States is no longer a free country nor will it be a prosperous country for very long either. Its infrastructure is falling to bits which I was reminded of on another Instapundit post today which began:

Last night, I got back to California after my behind the scenes work on the Duranty Awards in New York, after a delayed flight from JFK to San Francisco that began with an hour and a half on the tarmac, proceeded by six hours in flight, inside an aging Boeing 767 with one bathroom out of service, no Wi-Fi, and plenty of turbulence.

Falling to bits in so many ways but the only issue that seems to engage their media and political class are racist comments made in private by the owner of a basketball team.

When is a scandal not a scandal?

Posted on by
Reply

When it involves Democrats stealing an election in plain view of everyone.

I’ve just stumbled across this by accident since it does not seem to have been given much play anywhere. That no one even breathes the virtual certainty that the 2012 presidential election was stolen seems to be part of the silence that has descended on the process by which the election was conducted. Dollars means votes, especially in the US system. By denying tax-free status for Republicans of the Tea Party variety when Democrat organisations just sail through the process, the IRS prevented an immense amount of money from flowing into the Republican campaign. We now have documents showing that Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS, not only wanted to stop these groups from forming, she wanted them prosecuted by the Justice Department:

Judicial Watch has been chipping away at the IRS stonewall with Freedom of Information Act requests, and just released some new emails that show Tax Exempt Organizations director Lois Lerner was talking to the Justice Department about criminal prosecutions for the groups targeted by her organization. She was also trying to get the Federal Elections Commission – where she used to work, under similar suspicions of politicized abuse of her authority – involved in the witch hunt. Judicial Watch previously discovered that the IRS handed tax returns for conservative groups over to the FEC, an action of both questionable utility and dubious legality.

These are the reactions from House Oversight chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulator Affairs chair Jim Jordan (R-OH). I wish I could sense the outrage but perhaps they are just weary of battling the sea of indifference and media hostility. But this is what they said:

“The release of new documents underscores the political nature of IRS Tea Party targeting and the extent to which supposed apolitical officials took direction from elected Democrats,” said Chairman Issa. “These e-mails are part of an overwhelming body of evidence that political pressure from prominent Democrats led to the targeting of Americans for their political beliefs.”

“Now I see why the IRS is scared to give up the rest of Lois Lerner’s emails,” said Chairman Jordan. “Not only do these e-mails further prove the coordination among the IRS, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Justice Department and committee Democrats to target conservatives, they also show that had our committee not requested the Inspector General’s investigation when we did, Eric Holder’s politicized Justice Department would likely have been leveling trumped up criminal charges against Tea Party groups to intimidate them from exercising their Constitutional rights.”

The US is heading to the slagheap and this is a large part of the reason why.