BETWEEN THE LINES
OBAMA'S POLITICAL IRS -- A CORRUPT LEGACY
Exclusive: Joseph Farah is encouraged by recent court action in favor of tea party groups
It’s been five years since Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service was caught red-handed targeting tea party groups and other political “enemies” of his administration.
Since then, the IRS reluctantly “apologized.” Its own inspector general found the tax agency guilty. And the IRS has continued to stonewall the release of documents that would subject it to civil penalties. Of course, the U.S. Justice Department, rather than prosecute individuals responsible for the crimes, has aided and abetted the IRS in the cover-up.
That’s not my opinion. That’s what a federal appeals court unanimously found Tuesday, scolding the Justice Department for compounding the original crime with its delays and frivolous motions.
The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Department lawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith and compounding its violation of the law in the first place.
“Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views,” wrote Judge Raymond M. Kethledge in a unanimous decision.
“No citizen – Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian – should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here.
The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own inspector general for tax administration. Those findings include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the inspector general called ‘unnecessary information.'”
The case stems from the IRS’ decision in 2010 to begin subjecting tea party and conservative groups to intrusive scrutiny when they applied for nonprofit status.
The IRS has issued an apology, blaming mistakes by low-level employees. Yet it fought for more than five years demands for full disclosure and documents sought by tea party groups.
Kethledge wrote in his opinion that the IRS’ conduct since the original offense has “only compounded the conduct” that gave rise to complaint in the first place.
“The lawsuit has progressed as slowly as the underlying applications themselves: at every turn the IRS has resisted the plaintiffs’ requests for information regarding the IRS’ treatment of the plaintiff class, eventually to the open frustration of the district court,” wrote Kethledge. “At issue here are IRS ‘Be On the Lookout’ lists of organizations allegedly targeted for unfavorable treatment because of their political beliefs. Those organizations in turn make up the plaintiff class. The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has not complied with the court’s orders. Instead the IRS now seeks from this court a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district court. We deny the petition.”
The court wrote in some detail about IRS selective and intrusive demands for information from the aggrieved groups.
“In 2010, the IRS began to pay unusual attention to 501(c) applications from groups with certain political affiliations,” Kethledge wrote. “As found by the inspector general, the IRS ‘developed and used inappropriate criteria to identify applications from organizations with “Tea Party” in their names. … As to the policy positions, the IRS gave heightened scrutiny to organizations concerned with ‘government spending, government debt or taxes,’ lobbying to ‘make America a better place to live’ or ‘criticiz[ing] how the country is being run.'”
The court found the IRS kept this inappropriate criteria in place for more than 18 months and that when applications were wrongly flagged they were passed on to a team of specialists where applicants “experienced significant delays and requests for unnecessary information,” according to the IRS’ own inspector general.
Is justice in sight?
Will this legacy haunt Obama when he leaves office?
What will Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2016, whose husband’s administration was also notorious for targeting political adversaries with IRS audits, have to say about this?
Will anyone even ask the question?
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/03/obamas-political-irs-a-corrupt-legacy/#S6Bg508fZd1q3cyY.99My comments: Obama could care less. He accomplished his Goal, in getting re-elected.
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