IRS targeted conservative groups

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will.15's Avatar
Semper Fooey
This is sheer invention. When I posted the link I described it as "IRS agents have already told Congress." All this stuff about "treating it as fact" or "smoking gun stuff" is a total straw man.

Today at least at the moment the forum isn't quite as slow as it has been the past week and i am landing on pages with print on them instead of white blanks. This must have something to do with your server because i tried Google Chrome and had the same problem and i am not having this problem anywhere else.

Well, you were reprting from incomplete, select transcripts that were misleading. One of the two IRS sources actual quote shows a more evasive answer than you claim.

There is at this point zero evidence the targeting was directed from Washington. You have presented no evidence there was, but thave tried to argue based on straw that there was. Your proof? One IRS official who thinks the targeting came from Washington and another who said she was taking orders from a Washington lawyer, but whose testimony has been contradicted by others.

...which doesn't remotely explain why you thought your source contradicted it. Everything I'd reproduced from it and said about it was in your source, too. So please, explain to me how the WSJ pay wall caused you to misread a completely different article.

Well, I missed there was a second page, which I said. i made a mistake there. and you mKE MISTAKES ALSO, LIKE INSISTING AN ARTICLE YOU CITED PROVED IN ANOTHER THREAD showed language was in law when in fact it wasn't there. So explain to me why it is only a big deal when i screw up when you do it also? The fact remains the actual testimony does not show as you claim the targeting was being directed in Washington. And yet your commentary assue mes facts not actually in evidence.

So? This doesn't contradict anything I said. Hofacre claims direct knowledge, and Mufert does too, in the sense of having heard it directly from his superior (and not merely inferred it circumstantially). So your claim that the source didn't say what I said it did was and is wrong.

Mufert does not claim direct knowledge. That is false. The actual testimony shows that to be inaccurate. Issa admtted that in an interview. I don't know what Hoface is claiming when you actual read her in context. Was Hull just asking for information or actually directing the way the applications were being processed?


Except I wasn't wrong, I didn't make false accusations, and I'm not ignorant of the topic. But other than that, yeah, ya' totally got me.

You are making false accusations. Inferring Washington directed the targeting because of the number of times IRS officials visited the White House. Saying flatly Washington directed the targeting based on selected excerpts by two IRS officials, one of whom said nothing that could be admissable in court. Ignorant of the topic? Well, I would say commenting on things that are not actually evident by a fair reading of what has been actually discovered makes you ignorant of the topic.

Are you capable of responding to this stuff without changing the subject? Doesn't seem like it. It seems like every time you get called on this stuff you try to draw some hacky equivalence to take the focus off of your own mistakes. As if you think your behavior and mistakes are somehow excused if you can try to accuse someone else. But they aren't.
Well, Unlike you I already said way, way back i didn't see there was a page 2 to click on. When are you going to acknowledge that even Republicans have criticized Darrel issa for his extremely partisan handling of these hearings, accusing Obama of misconduct when he has nothing yet to back that up, saying he will prove it, which sounds like he is on a witchhunt instead of trying to uncover what actually happened?
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Mistyping a number or misreading a source is a mistake. Instantly denying something, then saying the source is making it up, then saying your source says something else, then admitting it doesn't, and after all that still misquoting someone? That requires an element of will. Pun intended.

At a certain point these mistakes become so frequent and resistant to correction that they cease being honest mistakes. They come from a posture of kneejerk denial and a serious lack of attention to detail. Neither of which I feel obligated to indulge to this degree.

Based on the response in this thread it seems pretty clear that nobody shares your view of myself or the issue at hand. So I'm going to keep posting these updates, and if you want to keep trying to convince them about how awful and ignorant I apparently am, you're free to try. Good luck with that.



Interesting...

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/24/bu...irs-chief.html

Margaret M. Richardson, a partner in the Washington law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan, was nominated by President Clinton yesterday to be the new Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...-latest-cover/

Conducted by independent counsel David Barrett, the probe took 11 years to complete and mention’s that then-Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Peggy Richardson, a close friend of Hillary’s, was involved in efforts to quash the probe.
http://watchdog.org/91068/former-irs...a-coincidence/

While it may be difficult for people in Fauquier County familiar with the Boneta case to believe the IRS audit is a mere coincidence, this is very likely the case, Richardson said.

“Coincidences do happen.”



Heh. How about the "coincidence" with Frank VanderSloot? VanderSloot was a big Romney donor and who the President attacked by name on his campaign site, and who was subsequently audited three times: once as an individual, once for his business, and once by the Department of Labor. The odds of which, if we use the typical rates of auditing conducted at commensurate income levels (since people who make more are more likely to be audited), it works out to 0.002%.




Heh. How about the "coincidence" with Frank VanderSloot? VanderSloot was a big Romney donor and who the President attacked by name on his campaign site, and who was subsequently audited three times: once as an individual, once for his business, and once by the Department of Labor. The odds of which, if we use the typical rates of auditing conducted at commensurate income levels (since people who make more are more likely to be audited), it works out to 0.002%.

That's interesting too.



will.15's Avatar
Semper Fooey
Yes, it is real interesting your selected reporting. No mention by you of revelations the IRS was actually doing the same computer searches to identify liberal groups. And it is interesting that it has been two weeks and Issa has not selectively leaked yet the testimony of the link to Washington and the supposed director of the targeting, Carter Hull.

It is also interesting that during the entire Bush Presidency you never saw fit to start a thread titled Bush's Failures, although he had his share including non existent chemical weapons in Iraq as the pretext for war, the Katrina disaster, the mission accomplished declaration that wasn't, disinterest in finding Bin Laden, a botched Afghanistan policy,the Valerie Plame scandal, the Justice Department firings, and a housing meltdown during his watch that led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Where are your threads highlighting that with slanted commentary that assumes facts not yet proven?



Yes, it is real interesting your selected reporting. No mention by you of revelations the IRS was actually doing the same computer searches to identify liberal groups. And it is interesting that it has been two weeks and Issa has not selectively leaked yet the testimony of the link to Washington and the supposed director of the targeting, Carter Hull.

It is also interesting that during the entire Bush Presidency you never saw fit to start a thread titled Bush's Failures, although he had his share including non existent chemical weapons in Iraq as the pretext for war, the Katrina disaster, the mission accomplished declaration that wasn't, disinterest in finding Bin Laden, a botched Afghanistan policy,the Valerie Plame scandal, the Justice Department firings, and a housing meltdown during his watch that led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Where are your threads highlighting that with slanted commentary that assumes facts not yet proven?
I find this thread very informative and entertaining, even though it shouldn't be. Seriously though why is Bush even mentioned in this thread, never mind the majority of your response dedicated to him.

If his supporters, i apologize if you didn't vote for him Will. If you did though you should be either defending Obama's presidency or denouncing it. Bush has no impact on Obamas policies, if you're pissed with Bush, fair enough, but the way you describe Obama.....

I apologize for missing the point of the thread entirely, i'll go back to avoiding political threads.



Actually, I was going to post something about that today, because it makes things worse. The key word is "identify"--identify liberal groups, but not target them. They actually followed up with just 30% of those groups. You know how many of the 292 conservative groups that came up they investigated?

292. Every. Single. One.

The fact that they had the term "progressive" on one of the BOLOS is worse, not better, because it means they actively ignored that instruction, while rigidly enforcing the other.

And guess what? The IRS Inspector General--who's independent--confirmed this:


The IRS inspector general said this week that while some liberal groups were given extra scrutiny by the tax agency, they were not subjected to the same invasive queries as tea party groups — a finding that seems to confirm a political bias was at play.

...

“TIGTA concluded that inappropriate criteria were used to identify potential political cases for extra scrutiny — specifically, the criteria listed in our audit report. From our audit work, we did not find evidence that the criteria you identified, labeled “Progressives,” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 time frame we audited,” Mr. George said.
Time to bust one of these out again:




More: it appears the IRS leaked tax documents from a conservative advocacy group...directly to an opposition liberal group. During the campaign.

This is really getting messed up.
The article doesn't show that at all. It has an allegation and the so-called proof without corroboration by another source is thin gruel, like the experts declaring Obama's birth certificate was a fake. It may be so, that another expert who was not hired by the head of a tea party group would make the same conclusion, that the information came directly from an IRS document. But what you have here is at this point far from being messed up, except for your extraordinary sloppiness in drawing conclusions from it.
Guess what? It was true (emphasis added):

A House committee investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of right-leaning groups has identified the IRS agent who leaked the confidential donor list of the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization that opposes gay marriage. NOM’s donor list, contained in a Form 990 Schedule B, which it is required by law to file with the IRS, was obtained in March 2012 by its chief political opponent, the Human Rights Campaign, and subsequently became the subject of several national news stories that centered on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s donation to the group.
Pretty clear that most of the stuff trying to masquerade as honest skepticism was really just kneejerk denial.



And it just keeps coming. Conservative Groups Would Take Hit From New IRS Rules:

The new U.S. Treasury/Internal Revenue Service rules aimed at clarifying what constitutes political activity for tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations are likely to give more heartburn to conservative groups than their liberal counterparts.
So, target conservative groups overwhelmingly with existing laws, and then when that's exposed, just change the law in a way that disproportionately affects them anyway. Everyone got that? If you get caught gaming the system illegally, just make something similar legal.



Issa: FBI impeding inquiry into IRS targeting of conservative groups:

Six months after it began, the FBI’s investigation has resulted in no release of information. The congressmen said the FBI even rescinded an offer for an in-person briefing with the assistant director in charge of the investigation. The reversal, after the FBI consulted with the Justice Department, suggests political meddling, the two investigators said.



http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/02/07...scandal-emails

IRS caught red handed according to the legal team, I'm still passed THAT Lois Lerner has even seen a penny of tax payer money, let alone how much she's earning off her payed leave what a scumbag
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