Wednesday, May 22, 2013

IRS-Gate Update- Stonewalling And Denials As The Fiction Falls Apart

Aside from Senior IRS official Lori Lerner taking the Fifth and refusing to answer any questions, there are a number of other disturbing developments taking place on IRS-Gate.

For starters, the IRS has defied congress's request for all communications between the agency and the White House about targeting conservative, evangelical and pro-Israel groups.

In a May 14 letter signed by Rep. Dave Camp and Sander Levin, Chairman and Ranking Member respectively of the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS was given a deadline of Tuesday, May 21 to comply with their committee’s demand for the information and records, including records of any communications between IRS and the Treasury on the matter.

The IRS missed the deadline and has apparently decided to stonewall...and we all know they didn't make that decision without guidance from the White House. No federal agency would.

It's also come out that the IRS' own internal investigation ended May 12th, 2012, six months before the election but was deliberately hidden from Congress.I wonder who gave that order:
Rep. Darrel Issa, the committee's chairman, said that the committee learned just yesterday that the IRS completed its own investigation a year before a Treasury Department Inspector General report was completed.

But despite the IRS recognizing in May 2012 that its employees were treating right-wing groups differently from other organizations, Issa said, IRS personnel withheld those conclusions from legislators.

'Just yesterday the committee interviewed Holly Paz, the director of exempt organizations, rulings and agreements, division of the IRS,' Issa said. 'While a tremendous amount of attention is centered about the Inspector General's report, or investigation, the committee has learned from Ms. Paz that she in fact participated in an IRS internal investigation that concluded in May of 2012 - May 3 of 2012 - and found essentially the same thing that Mr. George found more than a year later.'

'Think about it,' he continued: 'For more than a year, the IRS knew that it had inappropriately targeted groups of Americans based on their political beliefs, and without mentioning it, and in fact without honestly answering questions that were the result of this internal investigation.'

Moreover,the Administration's claim that the wrongdoing was limited to 'a few low level agents' is falling apart like a paper in the rain.

In fact, the IRS' own system makes a few low level IRS employees conducting as jihad on groups selected for their ideology impossible:
When an application for tax exempt status comes into the IRS, agents have 270 days to work through that application. If the application is not processed within those 270 days it automatically triggers flags in the system. When that happens, individual agents are required to input a status update on that individual case once a month, every month until the case is resolved.

Keep in mind, at least 300 groups were targeted out of Cincinnati alone. Those applications spent anywhere from 18 months to nearly 3 years in the system and some still don't have their non-profit status. 300 groups multiplied by at least 18 months for each group, means thousands of red flags would have been generated in the system.

So who in the chain of command would have received all these flags? The answer, according to the IRS directory, one woman in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, the Program Manager of the Tax Exempt Division. Because all six of our IRS workers have different individual and territory managers, Cindy Thomas is one manager they all have common.

It turns out Cindy Thomas' name is one we have heard before. The independent journalism group ProPublica says in November of 2012 they had requested information on conservatives groups that had received non-profit status.

Cindy Thomas, says Swann, is the highest-ranking employee in the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Department in Cincinnati.

Even the Washington Post is saying that a Special prosecutor is not a matter of if but when.

Personally, I think the president is just arrogant enough to try and brazen this out.

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