Investigative journalist, James O’Keefe has a new video out today featuring Richard Head, Associate Attorney General for the state of New Hampshire.
Head tried to indict O’Keefe, last year, for releasing a video that exposed voter fraud in the polling booths in his state. O’Keefe’s video contributed to a voter ID law passing in the state with a super-majority vote.State Democrats tried to repeal the law in March of this year, but failed.
“I was doing my duty as a journalistto educate the public on issues that matter, while he was trying to stifle free speech,” O’Keefe says in an email touting the new video.
“What was particularly unnerving is the New Hampshire state officials knew where to find me before I had even moved. Was another Department of Justice/AP spying scheme happening?? How did they know where I was? “
In May of 2012, a few months after sending state officials to search the home of a Project Veritas videographer, New Hampshire state authorities arrived at the home of Mike Rogers with a criminal grand jury subpoena for James O’Keefe. How state officials knew the address of where O’Keefe was staying before he even got there is a mystery. We filed a public records request to determine if these authorities were working with the Feds, but they never responded.
Associate Attorney General Richard Head was the man responsible for most of this activity, as well as efforts to indict our reporters after our video showing ballots offered out in the names of the dead at poll locations. Reality prompted the state legislature to pass a voter ID law, overturning Governor Lynch’s veto. Project Veritas also obtained a letter showing how Richard Head was asking for years of my emails from political opponents working with hacker types.
We also asked head to sign the Chapter in the new book Breakthrough documenting all these injustices, entitled, “Richard Head Rises”.
What’s next for our young hero?
O’Keefe left an intriguing hint ant the end of his email: “Coming up, we’ve got a new investigation coming your way that could rock government largesse…Hint: #BuyingVotes.”
I’ll tell you what. That Hillary Clinton sure ran a tight ship when she was in charge of the State Department. /sarc
Last week we found out about whistleblower, Aurelia Fedenisn, the former investigator at the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General who said she was threatened by Regime goons after turning over documents to Senator Ted Cruz alleging cover-ups of investigations involving State Dept. employees using drugs and prostitutes. Fedenisn claimed that senior State Department officials interfered with the investigations she was involved in, and then interfered with a report about the interference, causing it to be watered down. In other words, they tried to cover up wrongdoing - and then tried to cover up the cover up.
In the latest black eye for the scandal-ridden State Department, a whistleblower claims she was run out of the foreign service after complaining about a consul general’s alleged office trysts with subordinates and hookers.
Kerry Howard says she was bullied, harassed and forced to resign after she exposed US Consul General Donald Moore’s alleged security-threatening shenanigans in the Naples, Italy, office.
As the post’s community-liaison officer, Howard was charged with keeping workplace peace and advising higher-ups on the state of morale, but when she revealed allegations about her boss, State Department officials swept it under the rug, according to an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint she filed with the department’s Office of Civil Right
“It’s cover-up after cover-up. It’s absolutely hideous,” she told The Post. “When our diplomats disrespect the Italians by hiring and firing them because they have seen too much — or use them for ‘sex-ercise’ — we have to question why we have diplomats abroad at taxpayer expense.”
So, to make a long story short, in her capacity as community-liaison officer, Howard blew the whistle on Moore’s disgusting sexual escapades as the Naples Consul General which started immediately after he started serving in 2010. He impregnated a staffer who he then pressured to have an abortion and have her tubes tied. It got worse from there – and after Howard blew the whistle, she became a target of other State Dept employees who saw her as a “backstabber.”
Howard ended up resigning in May 2012.
“I was left with no choice,” she said in her affidavit. “I was forced to leave or suffer continued harassment and humiliation.”
She made a lousy $16,000 a year and had to put up with that?
Moore is still assigned to his post in Naples.
The low caliber of people Obama has appointed in posts throughout the world are an embarrassment. The fact that Hillary Clinton presided over such a culture of corruption and malfeasance and did nothing about it is a disgrace.
Only a shamelessly in the tank, corrupt, state-run media would allow Clinton’s ignominious tenure as Obama’s Sec of State be a plus for her in 2016.
RELATED:
Last Friday, Megyn Kelly interviewed Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon Inspector General and author of The Inspector General Handbook about the State Department Retaliation Against Aurelia Fedenisn.
The scenario had been carefully planned: A terrorist group prepared to hurt vast numbers of people around Boston would leave backpacks filled with explosives at Faneuil Hall, the Seaport District, and in other towns, spreading waves of panic and fear. Detectives would have to catch the culprits.
Months of painstaking planning had gone into the exercise, dubbed “Operation Urban Shield,” meant to train dozens of detectives in the Greater Boston area to work together to thwart a terrorist threat. The hypothetical terrorist group was even given a name: Free America Citizens, a home-grown cadre of militiamen whose logo would be a metal skull wearing an Uncle Sam hat and a furious expression, according to a copy of the plans obtained by the Boston Globe.
But two months before the training exercise was to take place, the city was hit with a real terrorist attack executed in a frighteningly similar fashion. The chaos of the Boston Marathon bombings disrupted plans for the exercise, initially scheduled for this weekend, forcing police to postpone. Now officials must retool aspects of the training.
“Frighteningly similar” in every way except that the culprits in the real bombing were the Islamic terrorists you would expect – not the sort you only find in feverish left-wing fantasies.
Yeah, we’re to believe that the IRS targeting of conservative sounding groups was a result of two rogue agents in Cincinnati – not part of a larger pattern of targeting coming from Washington DC.
The sad irony here is, if NSA, FBI and DHS spent half as much time focusing on our real threats rather than Obama’s political enemies, the real Boston bombing could have been averted.
I do not know the reason for the Secret Service interrogation. I know the Twitterer himself, Tom Francois, says this of it:
On April 11, 2013, he heard relentless pounding on his door shouts of “Police!” The officers introduced themselves as members of The Secret Service and asked if they could “take a look around.”Since Tom had nothing to hide (and he didn’t want any return visits) – he complied fully with their request. He even signed a consent to search his premises AND an “Authorization To Review Medical and Mental Health Records!”
They asked Tom if he ever left his state or traveled to Washington, D.C.
One Agent asked Tom if he has any intentions of “whacking” the President.” To which Tom replied- “Of course not. I wish him no harm. I disagree with his policies and actions and I make no bones about it. It’s my First Amendment Right and I intend to exercise it.”
I need to do some research and find out if this is part of a larger pattern of SS targeting of online conservatives. I remember a story from a couple years ago in which a female conservative blogger (I forget her name) was visited by the SS for no good reason, and there was a conservative YouTuber about a year ago who was, too. Are there more stories like this out there?
So Biden came down pretty hard on the president regarding the NSA spy program:
“I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to – I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question, here is – what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda?”
Psych.
Yeah, that was 2006 – he was talking about President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
I certainly trusted the last administration a lot more than I trust this current hive of villainous scum. After 9/11 the Bush administration had a pretty good track record of keeping Americans safe from Islamic terror.
The current Regime has declared the War on Terror over, and has instead waged a low intensity war on its domestic enemies – i.e. people who identify as Christians, patriots, veterans, and believe in the Constitution, and limited government, etc. That’s why we’ve seen an uptick of terrorist attacks on American soil throughout the Obama years, and conservatives groups have been targeted for harassment by the government.
It’s a sickening situation made even more nauseating by the abject hypocrisy on display by so many Democrats – the President and Vice President first and foremost among them.
In other news, the ACLU is suing the Obama administration for illegally collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, to which I say – congrats to them – even a broken clock is right twice a day?
A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive coverup — including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes.A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
…
A DS agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
…
Via Hot Air,the Post ID’s him as a big Obama bundler:
A DS agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo.
“The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team . . . were well aware of the behavior.”
***
Gutman was a big bundler for Obama in 2008, raising over $500,000 for his campaign and cutting checks for the inaugural.
Today, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder testified before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Justice Department’s FY2014 budget. He was asked about the seizure of Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeting conservative groups for investigation.
Senator Kirk (R-IL) asked Holder if the DOJ monitored phones for members of Congress, and shockingly, he refused to answer.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett said there’s no chance Attorney General Eric Holderwill resign in light of revelations that his Justice Department has spied on journalists.
“You can take it from me,” she said. “He will be in his position for quite a while.”
Three weeks ago, Breitbart News published an article listing 10 questions the Obama Administration must answer about the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative groups for scrutiny and harassment throughout the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.
Yet after weeks of House and Senate hearings, and much grandstanding by Obama Administration officials, not a single question posed has been answered.
Here, then, are just a few of the questions lawmakers must obtain answers to beyond the classic question, “What did the Administration know and when did it know it?”
Would you believe this blockbuster story was broken in a British newspaper, The Guardian? Of course you would because the US media is too lame to break stories like this.
Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice cast a wide net in his search of AP phone logs, was the picture of intrusiveness in the James Rosen case, and now NSA is targeting millions of Americans for daily data collection?
Glenn Greenwald reports on secret court order, issued in April, which compelled one of the nation’s largest telecom providers to hand over daily call logs to the federal government. The information did not include actual content of conversations, but it included everything but:
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
We will probably soon be finding out that such “daily data collections” are not limited to just Verison.
I can’t wait to see the responses of Obama and Holder, tomorrow after they read all about this bombshell in the newspaper.
The video report below about the massive NSA spy center in Utah, is from a year ago and there were already concerns that colossal facility would be used to spy on Americans. Security expert Mark Baker seemed pretty sure that the facility wouldn’t be used to target ordinary Americans. But, as we know from recent events, this particular government will do whatever it darn well feels like doing.
Fox did another report recently about the completed center, but I couldn’t find that on Youtube.
UPDATE:
Holder is springing into action – will “very likely” be investigating who leaked the information to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian.
On Thursday’s “Morning Joe,” New York City Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson asked if Greenwald would be investigated and suggested the White House would face many questions about the Guardian story.
“They may not be prepared to answer that question,” Wolfson said. “But given what happened with Fox, given what happened with AP, that will be a very hot topic today.”
“I was told last night: definitely there will be a leak investigation,” he said.
However, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post Thursday morning that it’s premature to suggest an investigation is certain to take place.
“There’s been no referral yet from the intelligence community,” the official said.
Meanwhile, at NRO,Andrew McCarthy is saying that this story is being overblown, but the concerns people have about this particular administration are certainly valid (elections have consequences):
Here is what they don’t tell you. Telephone record information (e.g., the numbers dialed and duration of calls) is not and has never been protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court held as much in its 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision. Understand: the phone record information at issue here is very different from the content of telephone conversations. Because the latter involve higher privacy expectations, they are heavily regulated under not only the Fourth Amendment but both Title III of the federal penal code and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under these laws, the government is not permitted to access communications content absent court authorization based on probable cause either that a crime has been committed or that the surveillance target is an agent of a foreign power (such as a terrorist organization or a hostile government).
(Because the Post’s report relates to information the government is gathering pursuant to court order, I am not going to rehash the vigorous debate we had circa 2004-2006 over the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping and the president’s authority to seize information without judicial authorization. There is no reason to believe that is going on.)
Unlike the content of your communications, you have no expectation of privacy in your telephone activity records. If you think about it for a second, you know you don’t. If there were a mistake on your phone bill – for example, if you were charged for a long-distance call you didn’t make — you would expect to be able to call your phone company and have the problem addressed. That is because you understand that, when you make a call, this information is not secret: your phone company keeps records of whom you called and how long the call lasted. A phone record is, by nature, a record of information shared with third-parties. It is not like personal papers and other personal items you keep in your home – items the government may not search without a judicial warrant (except in certain circumstances not relevant to this discussion).
By gathering massive amounts of telephone traffic information, the government is able to establish phone call patterns, which is vital for mapping terrorist organizations. Without this, you cannot have preventive, intelligence-based counterterrorism – i.e., counterterrorism whose goals are to identify terror cells before they strike and to stop atrocities from happening. To be sure, Congress could deny the government this kind of information by statute. If lawmakers did that, however, we would be in a September 10 counterterrorism paradigm – i.e., rather than prioritize prevention, we would be contenting ourselves to investigate and prosecute only after attacks have occurred and Americans have been killed.
Can the kind of information gathering the government is doing – and has been doing in this fashion since 2006 – be abused? Could the Obama administration use its national-security authorities as a pretext for spying on Americans? Of course it could. All information collecting can be abused. It may sound trite to point out that elections have consequences, but it really matters who we elect to run the executive branch.
All of the witnesses who testified at the House Ways and Means Committee hearing, this morning, were impressive and compelling, but perhaps the most impressive, passionate and articulate was the National Organization For Marriage’s John Eastman who is a professor of law.
In his response to Congressman Price’s query about the publishing of names of his organization’s donors, he took the opportunity to lash out at a couple of the Democrat hacks on the Committee – publicly humiliating them to great applause.
Eastman testified Tuesday alongside several Tea Party activists who all claim they were targeted by the IRS. The Tea Party groups offered a first-hand account of how the IRS singled them out when they applied for tax-exempt status, asking them onerous questions and dragging out their application process.
But Eastman shed light on another potential controversy involving the IRS — the unauthorized disclosure of tax document information. He recalled how information on their donors was leaked last year and published on the website of the Human Rights Campaign, which Eastman described as their “principal political opponent” on the marriage issue. The documents showed Mitt Romney’s political committee as a donor.
Asked by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., if he had “proof” that the IRS leaked that material, Eastman said that he did.
Eastman explained that while some information was redacted in the posted version, his group’s “forensic” specialists were able to strip layers from the document and found “the original document that was posted there had originated from within the IRS.”
He said the version had “internal IRS stamps,” which “only exist within the IRS.”
Eastman added: “You can imagine our shock and disgust over this. … We jealously guard our donors.”
He later alleged the information was “deliberately” provided to their opponents.
“If that’s inadvertent, the word no longer means anything,” he said, claiming his group has been “stonewalled” in its request for an investigation.
MORE:
Professor John Eastman Talks to Dennis Prager About the Felonious Actions Taken by the IRS:
Eastman’s interview starts at 6:50.
A couple of bombshells, here…..
Eastman said while it was possible that the HRC got their hands on the donor list and tax info through less nefarious means, the most likely scenario is that someone within the IRS who is against the cause of traditional marriage leaked the info to their political opponent so that they could in punish, harass and intimidate those people in order to silence their opposition.
“A couple of other pieces to this that I think is extremely important. The Human Rights Campaign has been trying for a long time to get our donor list so they could do just that to our donors. And the president of the HRC, Joe Solmonese had just recently become a National Co-Chair of the Obama Re-election Campaign.”
That story was broken a couple of weeks ago by Matthew Boyle at Big Government.
Both the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and HRC described the leak as coming from a “whistleblower.” The Huffington Post used the document to write a story questioning former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s support for traditional marriage. The document showed Romney donated $10,000 to NOM. HRC went a step further than the Huffington Post in its criticism of Romney and accused him of using “racially divisive tactics” in a press release.
Solmonese, then still the HRC’s president, said in the release he felt Romney’s “funding of a hate-filled campaign designed to drive a wedge between Americans is beyond despicable.”
“Not only has Romney signed NOM’s radical marriage pledge, now we know he’s one of the donors that NOM has been so desperate to keep secret all these years,” Solmonese added.
Solmonese resigned his position at HRC the next day and took up a position as an Obama campaign co-chair. He had announced the then-pending resignation from HRC the previous autumn.
NOM announced Tuesday that it will sue the IRS for this alleged leak. Under immense political pressure, Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation into the IRS’s actions. Congress will conduct ts own investigation.
In early April 2012, NOM published documents which it said showed this leaked confidential information did not come from a “whistleblower” but “came directly from the Internal Revenue Service and was provided to NOM’s political opponents, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).”
Eastman said in the interview with Prager that NOM had asked for an investigation from the Treasury Dept and the DOJ and the initial investigation actually focused on NOM itself to see if someone internally had leaked the donor list to HRC, (the so-called whistle-blower theory) and when that was not fruitful, it was the last they heard about it for a year. They’ve filed a series of FOIA requests to find out what was going on with the investigation, and they were stonewalled. In the he latest stonewall, the IRS said that “the very statutes that prohibits IRS officials from disclosing your tax returns prohibits us from telling you whether we’ve identified the culprit because that’s a taxpayer, too so we can’t identify him.”
Unbelievable.
NOM president Brian Brown argued in that April 2012 release that the leak was made to benefit President Obama’s re-election campaign against Romney, his GOP challenger. “The American people are entitled to know how a confidential tax return containing private donor information filed exclusively with the Internal Revenue Service has been given to our political opponents whose leader also happens to be co-chairing President Obama’s reelection committee,” Brown said.
“It is shocking that a political ally of President Obama’s would come to possess and then publicly release a confidential tax return that came directly from the Internal Revenue Service,” he declared. “We demand to know who is responsible for this criminal act and what the Administration is going to do to get to the bottom of it.”
Democrat Congressman Jim McDermott took the floor at today’s Ways and Means hearing and blamed the conservative groups that were improperly targeted by the IRS. According to McDermott, if they didn’t apply for tax-exempt status, they would have never been scrutinized.
After the horror stories that have come out, Congress’s biggest hack. Jim McDermott suggests that the conservative groups brought their problems with the IRS on themselves.
At The Conversation, Joel Pollak commented, “if the IRS scandal lacked a bully figure, it has one now.”
McDermott repeated the same attacks on 501(c)4 organizations that other Democrats have recycled in their talking points since the scandal began. But he made the mistake of attacking the witnesses–and misrepresenting the testimony of at least one in particular. All of them, he said, were before Congress because they had been seeking tax subsidies; but as Dr. John Eastman of the National Organization for Marriage–already a tax-exempt organization–had just testified, his specific complaint was about the apparently criminal leak of their donors’ names to a liberal organization.
Paul Ryan inspired applause from spectators in the hearing room when deviated from his original question to respond to McDermott’s absurdities.
Rep. Aaron Schock piled on, bringing up Obama’s Organizing for Action group.
Ace: ”Paul Ryan administered the Donkey Punch to McDermott, and then Aaron Shock applied the Dirty Sanchez.”
Whether they acted on bad advice or out of frustration, Democrats missed badly with their attacks on the witnesses. They came across as bullies–with the exception, perhaps, of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who once falsely accused the Tea Party of racism but undoubtedly knows about the importance of 501(c)4 status in the history of the civil rights struggle. Worse, Democrats saw their cherished Citizens United defense crushed.
***
The coup de grâce came during questioning by Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL), who pointed out the elephant in the room: President Barack Obama’s own Organizing for Action, a 501(c)4 group specifically devoted to the defense of the president’s policies. Rep. McDermott interrupted to state that Organizing for Action should also disclose its donors as well. Yet clearly that is not on the agenda for Democrats or the White House.
“There have been a lot of stupid conspiracies in American and world history,” said Charles Krauthammer on Special Report Monday evening. “The idea of arguing that [the White House ordering the IRS targeting] is dumb because it would have been stupid is nonsensical. It shows you how afraid they are.”
He said the only question at this point was how far up the scandal goes, and advocated giving “people like Lois Lerner immunity” so we can find out.
Extra scrutiny for conservative groups isn’t something that began organically among 88 different employees. We already know from a New York Times story a few weeks ago that some “manager” up the chain told them to get cracking on this. Oddly, though, the Times couldn’t nail down which manager it was. Steve Miller, in his testimony before Issa’s committee, claimed that he’d been told once before who was responsible but … had since forgot. And now we find that Treasury’s own inspector general, whose report noted that the targeting began when a specialist in the Determinations Unit “was asked” to take a closer look at conservative groups, couldn’t figure out who did the asking. Which raises two possibilities. One: Collective amnesia. Two: A whole lot of employees are intimidated by the thought of getting on the wrong side of whoever it is who ordered this, a realization that’s doubly interesting given the transcript Issa released suggesting interest among IRS officials in Washington in some of these cases at the time.
The answer, in a general sense (and, perhaps, a specific one, too), is President Barack Obama, who created a culture of intimidation around conservative donors and non-profits, going back to the 2008 campaign. That effort sharpened in early 2010 when President Obama did the unthinkable: humiliating the Supreme Court on national television during his State of the Union Address over their recent Citizens United ruling.
Dick Morris made the same point a few days ago when it was revealed that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House approximately 157 times. However Morris goes a bit further, saying it’s “obvious” that Obama was personally involved:
The obvious reason is that Obama was following the IRS audits with an obsessive, personal involvement. Apparently, the Citizens United scandal so galvanized him into action and tapped so deeply into his psyche that he was determined personally to supervise the castration of the wealthy people and groups whose access to the political system was opened wide by the Court.
To see a man who held a subordinate, non-policy making position 157 times, you have to be a president on a mission.
Meanwhile, according to Drudge editor and Washington Times columnist, Joseph Curl, the scandal is about to explode because the so-called “rogue employees” in Cincinnati are sick of being scapegoated.
One source says there’s a paper trail to DC, and some who were worried from the get-go kept a paper trail. Wouldn’t say WH, but said ‘high.’
Carney told reporters at a recent press briefing that the White House tries to give out the best information they have, as quickly as possible during rapidly moving stories, and when new information comes in, he updates reporters with the new information. So see – if the story changes – that’s why.
But of course he has it completely backwards. His job as the White House Spokesliar is to present a narrative to the media that pleasing to the Regime. That requires that he stonewall questions, and conceal the truth for as long as possible, (with direct lies if necessary) and when the truth can no longer be concealed, the narrative is updated. I chronicled the evolving White House line on Benghazi, here.They didn’t provide the media with the facts as soon as they knew them. They provided them with malarky that was “convenient at the time.”
But that’s just me – a conservative blogger in flyover country talking.
Here’s Darrell Issa the Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, today on CNN with Candy Crowley, calling Carney a “paid liar”:
“Their paid liar, their paid spokesperson, the picture behind, he’s still making up things about what happened and calling this a local rogue,” Issa told Candy Crowley of CNN on Sunday. “This is a problem that was in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters,” he said. “We’re getting to proving it.”
Issa blasted away at Carney, stating, “The president’s spokesman – spokesperson – is saying whatever’s convenient at the time. The story changes.”
Harsh but very true, and a reason I think, so many reporters are refusing to go along with the WH spin any longer. The constant, ridiculous lies can no longer be defended.
A committee spokesman sent MailOnline partial transcripts of two interviews with unnamed IRS workers about the agency’s actions in early 2010, on whose testimony Issa based his bombshell statement.
One of those interviewees said it was ‘impossible’ for a few IRS agents to have orchestrated such widespread partisan targeting on their own.
‘Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search [for tea party groups], any more context?’ one IRS witness was asked in a closed-door interview.
‘He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases,’ came the reply.
The employee, who said he or she was evaluating 40 such applications for tax-exempt status from conservative organizations at the time, said ‘some went to Washington. D.C. … I sent seven.’
The interviews, which are still ongoing, are being conducted by oversight committee staff in conjunction with House Ways and Means committee staff, and include both Republicans and Democrats.
The employee told those congressional investigators that IRS headquarters had also requested two specific cases for review.
I think most of us who have been paying attention kinda figured out already that this wasn’t orchestrated by two rogue agents in Cincinnati, but now that Issa has publicized what they’ve discovered from their investigation, thus far, look to hear Jay Carney alter his story, this week, as “new information” has come in.
Salvi said the FEC controversy filed in 1996 lingered through his 1998 challenge of Secretary of State Jesse White. The Democrats used the questions raised in campaign ads that implied he had been involved in criminal activity.
“I remember getting a pizza with my kids, and looking up to see the TV showing the [Democrat] ad, and I didn’t want to upset my kids, so I distracted them away,” he said. “I’ll never forget the concern that went on for months, affecting my law firm and my business.”
And Salvi said when he thinks of that, he recalls the shock on Lerner’s face when the judge dismissed his case. “We never lose!” Lerner said, and then, he said she distinctly threatened, “We’ll get you!“
Salvi said he told his wife right away to get ready for an IRS audit – that it would be coming. He instructed his firm’s accountants to err on the conservative side when filing tax returns, just in case.
But after the May 2000 dismissal, there was no contact from the FEC or from the IRS. However, there was from the FBI. In the fall of 2000, FBI agents knocked on the door of the Salvis’ home and said they wanted to ask him about his mother’s $2000 donation to his 1996 U.S. Senate campaign.
“That visit from the FBI was significant,” Salvi said. “That meant a criminal investigation, not a civil disagreement with the elections commission. And, if a person lies to the FBI, they can go to jail.”
Salvi said he reviewed the situation with the agents, and told them they were being used for political purposes. The two agents visited with his elderly mother and soon after, notified Salvi they were terminating the investigation.
“It was a nightmare,” Salvi said. “People ask me today why I’ve never run for office again after being a state representative for two terms, winning a GOP primary against the sitting lieutenant governor to run for U.S. Senate, and then finally losing an intense campaign against Durbin. All the time this long FEC ordeal continued while I ran for Secretary of State in 1998 and beyond. Why would anyone run for office again after all that? I’m very happy now,
WASHINGTON – House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) revealed new testimony from IRS employees in Cincinnati involved with the IRS’s political targeting today on CNN’s State of the Union.
The Committee released excerpts from bipartisan transcribed interviews between Committee Investigators and Cincinnati IRS employees. In these interviews Cincinnati IRS employees reject the White House’s claim that the targeting was merely work of “rogue” agents and say targeting of conservative political groups came from Washington, D.C.
“As late as last week, the administration was still trying to say the [IRS targeting scandal] was from a few rogue agents in Cincinnati, when in fact the indication is that they were directly being ordered from Washington,” Issa told CNN.
Below is an excerpt from the transcribed interviews between Committee Investigators and Cincinnati IRS employees:
One Cincinnati IRS employee interviewed by the Oversight Committee rejects the White House assertion and points to Washington as being responsible for targeting effort:
Breaking:4Liberty at Free Republic reported – I live in Los Angeles. Our San Fernando Tea Party coordinator will be testifying BEFORE CONGRESS along with 5 or 6 others at 10 AM Eastern to 1 PM Eastern. CSPAN DOES NOT HAVE ANY SCHEDULE SHOWING THEY WILL BROADCAST.
UPDATE: I plan on attending the hearing this week.
On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” former George W. Bush Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and former senior adviser to President Barack Obama David Plouffe faced off over whether the Internal Revenue Service’s abuse of its powers to target conservative political groups was a political matter.
According to Plouffe, there were no indications those abuses were politically motivated.
“There’s been no suggestion — the independent, the prosecutor looked at this, excuse me, the inspector general said there was no politics involved in this,” Plouffe said. “No one has indicated at all that the White House is involved. The IRS director was appointed under President [George W.] Bush, served under both presidents, attested…. So this was not a political pursuit.”
But Plouffe’s remarks drew a sharp response from Rove: “Baloney.” This led to a heated exchange between the two.
I see the strategy has shifted from feigned shock and outrage (It’s outrageous!) at the IRS, to assertions that the targeting was “not politically motivated.”
Rep Bob Goodlatte (VA – R), theHouse Judiciary Chair has Called for AG Eric Holder to Step Down, which he actually did for the first time during the Fast and Furious controversy.
Congressman Randy Forbes joined Martha Maccallum on America’s Newsroom, today, to discuss Goodlatte’s letter to Holder, which states that “media reports and statements issued by the Department regarding the search warrants for Mr. Rosen’s emails appear to be at odds with your sworn testimony before the Committee.”
“I think when all this clears out…we’re going to find out that he didn’t tell the truth to the Judiciary Committee,” Forbes told Maccallum.
Wow, this Lois Lerner is a piece of work, isn’t she?
We’d already heard about some of her anticswhile she was head of the Enforcement Division of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), under Clinton.
In the late 1990’s, the FEC initiated a burdensome investigation of the Christian Coalition, an endeavor that ended up costing the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars and many hours of time.
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One of the most shocking and startling examples of this irrelevant and intrusive questioning by FEC attorneys into private political associations of citizens occurred during the administrative depositions of three pastors from South Carolina. Each pastor, only one of whom had only the slightest connection with the Coalition, was asked not only about their federal, state and local political activities, including party affiliations, but about political activities that, as one FEC attorney described as “personal,” and outside of the jurisdiction of the FECA [Federal Election Campaign Act]. They were also continually asked about the associations and activities of the members of their congregations, and even other pastors.
Now, via Illinois Review we find out how in 1996, Lerner went after Republican State Rep. Al Salvi who was running for US Senate in Illinois.
According to Salvi, Lerner was without question, politically motivated, and went so far as to make him an offer: ”Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.”
Salvi, who had nothing to hide, declined her offer and the case against him was eventually dismissed.
Reported bank loans to Mr. Salvi as personal loans from the candidate, never identifying the source of the funds;
Failed to report debts to the candidate;
Failed to file 48-hour notices for personal advances from the candidate; and
Failed to disclose campaign-related payments by the candidate to vendors and a bank.
A federal district court dismissed the case against Salvi in 1999, and the FEC appealed it to the 7th U.S. District Court of Appeals.
The FBI was called in at one point to gather evidence on the case. According to Salvi, two FBI agents unexpectedly visited the Salvis’ home, and interrogated his elderly mother about her $2,000 check to her son’s campaign and where she got “that kind of money.”
Salvi says he saw the visits as nothing but intimidation, making it clear the FEC intended to use his case as a example to others.
At the same time, Salvi said, other conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition were besieged by the FEC demands. One time, representatives from several investigated conservative groups even convened on a conference call to compare notes on how the Clinton Administration was scouring their organizations’ financial and activity records.
In fact, Salvi’s case (and name) was highlighted as an example several times in the FEC’s monthly publication until the case was finally dismissed in 2000.
It was while dealing with the FEC complaint that Salvi says he first met Lois Lerner, then the head of the FEC Enforcement Division.
No wonder the Obama administration liked this modern day Madame Defarge.. She was the perfect totalitarian to enforce the means to Obama’s ends.
At today’s WH press briefing, CBS’s Major Garrett and Fox News’ Ed Henry tag teamed Jay on the question of whether the Attorney General lied under oath to congress when he told the House Judiciary Committee he’s never been involved with the “potential prosecution” of the press for security leaks:
“In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material — this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy,” Holder said during the hearing.
However, NBC News reported last week that Holder personally approved a search warrant that labeled Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen a co-conspirator in a national security leaks case.
The panel is investigating whether NBC’s report contradicts Holder’s claim that he had not looked into or been involved with a possible prosecution of the press in a leaks case.
The White House apparently hasn’t made room under the bus for Holder, yet. Carney insisted he sees no conflict, there.
Yesterday, the Daily Beast embarrassed itself with a Holder profile so glowing and so obviously aimed at tamping down the media’s frustration with him, that even BuzzFeed’s left-wing Ben Smith raised his eyebrows over it on “Morning Joe” Wednesday.
We also learned Wednesday that Holder has already set up meetings with various representatives from a number of print and television organizations to discuss how the DOJ will handle leak investigations in the future.
During his Congressional testimony two weeks ago, Holder didn’t seem at all contrite during questioning about his department’s role in the seizure of phone records from the Associated Press. In fact, the Attorney General came off as cocky, bored, and peevish.
What has come out since, though, has obviously knocked the smug out of him. The House Judiciary Committee is now investigating Holder’s statements during his recent testimony. It seems that Holder’s statement about never hearing or having anything to do with attempting to prosecute a journalist or reporter doesn’t quite reconcile with an application that accused Rosen of espionage. A perjury charge could be forthcoming.
What has to worry Holder the most, though, is that the revelations surrounding the Justice Department’s hysterical actions toward Fox News have not elicited the kind of reaction from the mainstream media that Holder likely expected. The media hates Fox News almost as much as the Obama administration does, but only almost.
