Thursday, February 06, 2014

Attorney Cleta Mitchell Tells Congress Exactly What's Going In With IRS Scandal



Cleta Mitchell is a tax attorney who represents several of the conservative groups that have been targeted by the IRS. Today, she testified before the House Government Reform and Oversight committee, and what she had to say should be the leading news story all across America.

Talking about President Obama’s claim on Sunday during his interview with Bill O'Reilly that there is no IRS scandal, and “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, she said in no uncertain terms that the scandal is real, that there is criminal behavior involved and that “The IRS scandal is not over. It is continuing to this day. And the Department of Justice investigation is a sham. It is a nonexistent investigation.”

The attorney testified that she was aware as far back as October of 2011 that the targeting was being coordinated outof Washington D.C., because when she contacted the Cincinnati IRS agent assigned to one of her clients and offered to try to help the application process along she was told, “Oh, there’s a task force in Washington; we can’t do anything until we hear back from Washington.”

Mitchell.who has years of experience dealing with the IRS in these matters said flatly that the Obama Administration took what had been for decades a process of reviewing applications for exempt status that used to take three to four weeks and “converted that process into one that took three to four years, and in some cases is still not over.” At least for conservative groups.

She bluntly went over several outright Federal crimes that have been committed in the course of this sorry episode and wondwered out loud where the FBI was.

Former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., also took weighed in on President Obama’s claim that there was no corruption in the IRS targeting conservative groups, especially in the tax-exempt division formerly headed by Lois Lerner.

“How can the president say there’s not a smidgen of criminality when Lois Lerner invoked the 5th Amendment, 41 witnesses haven’t been interviewed – including the two that are here right now? How can he possibly draw that conclusion?!” Gowdy asked.

The congressman also maintained the president’s claims tainted the Department of Justice investigation into the IRS and called for Obama to appoint a special counsel.

Right now, the person conducting the Justice Department investigation into the IRS scandal just happens to be one Barbara Bosserman, a political appointee who donated $6,750 to President Obama’s election campaigns and the Democratic National Committee since 2004, most of it during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

The Justice Department, of course, declined to allow her to appear before the Committee, citing it as 'standard practice' during an investigation. They stuck to that story even though they attempted to counter accusations concerning the appropriateness of her investigating a scandal that directly touched the White House by changing their story about her leading the investigation and downgrading her status to merely 'a member of the investigative team.'

Want to bet she finds that nothing illegal occurred? And of course, it will be after th e2014 elections.

This stinks to high heaven. And the Justice department's tactics, along with the e-mails revealing collusion between Lois Lerner and the Treasury Department make it a certainty that the White House was involved up to its collective neck.

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