A Police State?

Matt Taibbi is a journalist who has been reporting on the Twitter files released by Elon Musk. Matt Taibbi is not a conservative and is considered an objective journalist. As anyone who has followed the story is aware, the Twitter files show a lot of illegal activity in the collaboration between Twitter and a number of government agencies. Obviously, the deep state is not happy about this information being revealed to the public. Telling the truth has consequences.

On Monday, The Gateway Pundit reported:

An IRS agent showed up at the home of ‘Twitter Files’ journalist Matt Taibbi on the same day he testified before Jim Jordan’s Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.

How convenient.

On March 9, Matt Taibbi dropped a Twitter Files ahead of his testimony to Congress: THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before Congress later that day.

The FTC had already been harassing Elon Musk and demanding he “identify all journalists” granted access to the Twitter files.

The article notes:

The IRS agent just showed up to the journalist’s home unannounced!

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Monday to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seeking an explanation for why journalist Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent. We’ve seen the letter, and both the circumstances and timing of the IRS focus on this journalist raise serious questions.

The article concludes:

Mr. Taibbi has provided the committee with documentation showing his 2018 return had been electronically accepted, and he says the IRS never notified him or his accountants of a problem after he filed that 2018 return more than four-and-a-half years ago.

He says the IRS initially rejected his 2021 return, which he later refiled, and it was rejected again—even though Mr. Taibbi says his accountants refiled it with an IRS-provided pin number. Mr. Taibbi notes that in neither case was the issue “monetary,” and that the IRS owes him a “considerable” sum.

There is a desperate need to clean house in Washington.

 

 

Targeting The People Who Can Least Afford It

On February 8, Hot Air posted an article about the Biden administration’s plan to crack down on unreported tips.

The article reports:

Remember when we were told that the army of new IRS agents Biden wants to hire was only going to go after billionaires? Good times. If that’s the case, somebody should check to see if Bill Gates and Elon Musk have taken some side gigs slinging hash at a diner somewhere. (Of course, in Musk’s case it may come to that if he can’t get 10 million more people to sign up for Twitter Blue.) As it turns out, the Tax Man is launching a new program to crack down on tips received by wait staff in the food and beverage industry. That’s right. The IRS thinks that waiters and waitresses are pocketing too much money in gratuities, and Uncle Sam plans on getting his piece of the action. (Fox News).

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed a revenue procedure this week cracking down on service industry’s reporting of tips.

The so-called Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program would be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and service industry companies cooperate, according to the announcement Monday. As part of the proposal, the IRS will give the public until early May to provide feedback on the program before implementing it.

“Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich…” Mike Palicz, the federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform, tweeted. “They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now.”

The article concludes:

The whole concept of an “income tax” is based on the compensation a person is paid by their employer. The wait staff’s tips shouldn’t be taxed at all because the patrons are not their employers and are under no obligation to tip them. It’s really more of a gift given in appreciation for good service.

But that probably won’t stop the IRS from doing this. And it’s policies like these that have made me develop a habit of always tipping in cash when we dine out, even if we pay for the meal with a debit card. I tend to be a bit of an exorbitant tipper (at least according to my wife) but regular customers who tip well generally wind up getting much better service in my experience. And I enjoy the looks on the faces of hard-working servers when they find some twenty-dollar bills that they can just stick in their pockets waiting for them. As far as I’m concerned, owners of bars and restaurants should tell the IRS to keep its nose out of their employees’ tips.

At some point, I wish the government would realize that what people earn is theirs and the government actually has no right to any of it. If the spending habits of our government were a bit more sane, some of us might not mind paying the ridiculous taxes that we pay. Right now–in
America–taxpayers pay more money to the government than the Midievil surfs did to the lords of the manor. That is not acceptable.

Following The Money

Money does not always determine the outcome of an election (see the presidential election of 2016), but in many cases, large amounts of money can make a difference. Name recognition is important in an election, and being able to purchase ads to answer false charges against an opponent is also important. The mid-term elections are crucial for the Democrats–if enough Republicans win who care about government integrity, the Democrats may not be able to survive the investigations that follow. So the Democrats need lots of money from various sources.

On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner posted the following headline, “Fake charities are spending millions to help Democrats win elections.”

The article reports:

In fact, what the IRS isn’t doing in the nonprofit (or “public charity”) sector will affect the midterm elections far more than any FBI raid ever could.

A big part of the IRS’s job is the oversight of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that are awarded tax-exempt status because of the beneficial work they do. There are many different rules that 501(c)(3) nonprofit groups must follow to maintain their favored status, but the most important is that 501(c)(3)s are forbidden to engage in partisan electioneering, or efforts to aid political candidates and affect the results of elections, in any way.

Advocacy and political bias are allowed, but elections are strictly off-limits.

Enter fake charities such as the Voter Participation Center, State Voices, and the Voter Registration Project that siphon tens of millions of dollars every year from billionaires and their charitable foundations to use in ways that the IRS strictly forbids. By abusing their knowledge of racial demographic voting trends and enormous microtargeted voter databases, these groups can ensure they only register people likely to vote for Democrats and function as tax-exempt Democratic PACs.

The partisanship of these “civic participation” nonprofit groups has been an open secret for decades.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is the best and earliest example — and the one most people know. During the 2008 election cycle, ACORN harvested voter registration forms from over 1.3 million people, and the organization crumbled after numerous ACORN activists were investigated and charged with forgery, fraud, and bribery related to voter registration work.

Later, in the 2012 book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, liberal journalist Sasha Isenberg wrote of the Voter Participation Center (which raised $88 million in 2020): “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats.”

Remember Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who was the central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting controversy. The IRS denied conservative groups tax-exempt status outright or delayed that status until they could no longer take effective part in the 2012 election.  The Democrats have always understood the value of politically-aligned groups. It’s time all of those groups were recognized for what they are so that the public can make informed decisions.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. What has happened to our elections in recent years may result in the end of our representative republic as we know it.

When You Don’t Deal With A Lawbreaker…

On Tuesday, Townhall reported that the Biden administration has chosen the person to lead the new, expanded Internal Revenue Service.

The article reports:

As the Biden administration continues its attempts to consolidate power within the federal government and among its leftist allies, there’s a familiar face being tapped to lead Biden’s effort to surge power, resources, and agents to the IRS — and she has quite the track record of working to target conservative groups and organizations. 

One of Lois Lerner’s lackeys from the Obama-era IRS scandal — one that saw the agency target conservative and tea party affiliated groups as a political arm of the Obama-Biden administration — will be leading the Biden administration’s expansion of the IRS and stated goal of hiring 87,000 new agents.

Nikole Flax, who most recently served as the deputy commissioner in charge of the IRS’ Large Business & International Division, has been with the IRS since 2008. According to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, Flax will be leading “the creation of a new, centralized office for implementation of all IRS-related provisions” outlined in the boondoggle falsely named the “Inflation Reduction Act.” There’s little Democrats love more than a chance to work on “centralized” anything within the federal government. 

I wonder if the IRS will be used to squelch conservative speech before the mid-terms and before the 2024 presidential election.

The article notes:

Once the IRS was caught in its scheme of treating conservatives disparately from liberal organizations, Flax was one of several senior IRS officials who had their emails conveniently get “lost,” along with Lerner’s, as Katie reported in 2014. “One of those officials is former chief of staff to former Acting Commissioner Steven Miller, Nikole Flax,” Katie also noted. “The ‘lost’ emails fall during the time period when ‘the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups,” according to the House Ways and Means Committee.”

Somehow in Washington, the excuse ‘the dog ate my emails’ is accepted.

The article concludes:

As a refresher, the emails that *were* recovered from Lerner and other high-ranking officials included explanations of their main goal in going after conservatives and tea party groups: “One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing stuff,” Lerner wrote.

Flax also, as Katie reported here, “visited the White House 35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.” What was Flax doing at the White House? Who did she talk to? Was she reporting progress or taking orders? All that’s known is that Flax will again now have a leading role within the IRS as the Biden administration steps up its attacks on conservatives by labeling vast swaths of Americans as fascists.

A Facebook friend who does excellent research points out:

Nikole Flax was the pointPERSON in the Obama program to target conservative businesses. When it was discovered that they broke the law in specifically targeting opposition, the inspector general sent Flax instructions to deliver her computer to his office for inspection.
She miraculously had a hard drive crash that very instant and, notwithstanding the incredible amount of computer geeks at the FBI, no one was ever able to recover a single bit of information from her hard drive. Imagine that.
She was never prosecuted for abuse of power, obstruction of justice, or destruction of evidence.
Instead, China Joe has appointed her to head the IRS Central Office controlling the audits for the 87,000 new agents as well as its existing auditors. The White House did not disclose whether she gets one of the new AR-15s and some high-capacity magazines the IRS recently purchased.
Do you really think they are going to enforce the law equally?
Not since Vladimir Putin has an evil person in government been given so much power.

Stay tuned (and make sure you are current on alternative news sources)!

What Was This About?

On Tuesday I posted an article that I had serious doubts about posting. I posted it anyway because it was true. I was hoping it wasn’t true, but history has a way of repeating itself. Please keep that article in mind while reading the following.

On Wednesday, Townhall posted the following:

IRS Job Page Removed After Alarming Description of the Special Agent Position Got Exposed

Numerous people on the internet took screenshots of the job page before it was removed.

Here is one of those screenshots:

The article at Townhall concludes:

Excuse me? The link got taken down, but given what has transpired at the IRS, the FBI, and the DOJ—it sure looks like the organs of the state are mustering for armed confrontation with the Left’s political enemies. Let’s not forget that the IRS got busted for targeting conservative non-profits in 2013. The recent spending bill passed by Senate Democrats aims to appropriate $80 billion to the IRS, which even former commissioners admit won’t be spent efficiently, but it will add another 87,000 employees to the agency to apparently go on search and destroy missions if we don’t pay our taxes.

We all remember Lois Lerner who targeted conservative groups and has now happily retired with her pension. This is one agency that does not need to add additional personal nor does it need to be armed.

Thank God for the alert Internet users who found the ad and shared it.

 

 

This Is Probably A Done Deal

Now that Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to vote for it, the Inflation Reduction Act will probably pass the Senate and become law. That is not good news for Americans.

The Conservative Treehouse points out some of the changes that were made to the law to get Senator Sinema to agree to vote for it:

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced her support for the senate climate change spending and tax proposal after some modifications to the new taxation.

To support the hedge fund donors, Senator Sinema insisted the carried interest loophole tax provision be removed and instead replaced with a corporate tax on stock buybacks.  Any time a corporation wants to buy back their own shares of stock, they will now pay the U.S. government a tax for doing so; at least that’s the ¹intent.

[¹Note: taxing shares of company stock will never work, because that’s exactly what shell companies were designed to avoid. Set up a child shell company to purchase the stock and the parent company doesn’t pay taxes on the child’s purchase. It’s a shell game]

Additionally, according to reports, there is some kind of agreement to modify the 15% corporate minimum tax. Details unknown. Bottom line, Senator Sinema now supports the $700 billion climate change spending and tax proposal.

The Tax Foundation has an analysis of exactly what the financial impact of the bill will be:

Last-week’s Democrat-sponsored Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), successor to the House-passed Build Back Better Act of late 2021, has been touted by President Biden to, among other things, help reduce the country’s crippling inflation. Using the Tax Foundation’s General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States. It would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run.

By reducing long-run economic growth, this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy.

Our analysis contains estimates of the budgetary, economic, and distributional impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act as specified in bill text provided on July 27.

Using the General Equilibrium Model, we estimate that the tax provisions, IRS enforcement, and drug pricing provisions in the bill would increase federal revenues by about $656 billion over the budget window, before accounting for $352 billion in expanded tax credits for individuals and businesses, resulting in a net revenue increase of about $304 billion from 2022 to 2031.

Excluding the anticipated revenue from increased tax compliance and the drug pricing provisions, the bill would lose about $126 billion in revenue over the budget window.

The article includes the following chart:

The bill also includes almost $80 billion in appropriations for the Internal Revenue Service to put toward taxpayer services and enforcement. I suspect those of us in the middle class will feel that change. Even if your taxes are done correctly to the penny, the IRS can make you very uncomfortable. My husband and I experienced that after we donated to the tea party. The next year we were audited. We sent them all the applicable information, and they delayed the case for a year. They couldn’t find anything wrong, but they took a long time admitting that. The IRS does not need more money–it needs to go away and have our tax code replaced by something that people can understand and can fit on one sheet of paper.

 

 

Interesting, But I Don’t Expect Much

On Sunday, Breitbart reported the following:

US Attorney Doc: IRS Issued Grand Jury Subpoena to JPMorgan for Hunter, James Biden Bank Records In Probe into Biden Family’s China Connections

The article notes that there is a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden going back as far as May 2019. I hope he can sell enough paintings to pay his legal fees.

The article reports:

The document, dated May 20, 2019, is a subpoena compelling JPMorgan Chase bank to appear in U.S. District Court in Delaware. “YOU ARE COMMANDED to appear in this United States district court at the time, date, and place to testify before the court’s grand jury,” the document — a subpoena to JPMorgan Chase Bank’s subpoena processing office based in Indianapolis — says. “When you arrive, you must remain at the court until a judge or a court officer allows you to leave.”

The document lists a courtroom in the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Delaware, as the location that JPMorgan Chase Bank officials were compelled to appear and commands a response by June 25, 2019.

The article concludes:

“This wide-ranging grand jury subpoena suggests that Joe’s son and brother received transfers from an account with the Bank of China. The question that remains is why Bill Barr directly intervened to ensure that the U.S. Attorney in Delaware’s investigation into Joe’s family was kept from the public for over 17 months until after the election, as previous reporting has confirmed. David Weiss and Bill Barr—or someone with a conscience inside the Justice Department—should answer that question for the American people,” Ziegler said in a statement to Breitbart News.

The aforementioned Politico story suggests Weiss took steps to keep his investigation from going public in 2019 because he did not want it coming out in the middle of an election, and a subsequent Wall Street Journal piece in December 2020 suggests that Barr did the same.

It is unclear if JPMorgan Chase Bank cooperated with this subpoena. It is worth noting that the bank’s outside counsel firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP announced it hired former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch shortly after receiving this subpoena. It is unclear if Lynch had any involvement on this specific matter, however, she has worked on similar matters involving JPMorgan Chase Bank compliance.

It is also unclear where this criminal investigation stands.

If we really had ‘equal justice under the law’, I suspect we would know whether of not the bank cooperated with the subpoena.  With the story out in the media (even though the mainstream media won’t cover it), the bank may be forced into compliance.

This Really Isn’t A Surprise

Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about President Biden’s spending plans.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden’s administration is facing a daunting reality check after claiming for months that their spending agenda will “cost zero dollars,” with the head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) saying the White House drastically overestimated the revenue the IRS could gain by cracking down on tax loopholes.

Biden and numerous other senior Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill have repeatedly insisted that their $1.85 trillion social spending package will add nothing to the national debt. They argued the package included enough pay-fors to offset the spending programs. CBO chief Phillip Swagel brought that claim down on Monday, however, saying that the tax loophole crackdown in the bill would only garner $120 billion, a far cry from the White House’s projected $400 billion, according to The New York Times.

Why didn’t these numbers come out before they voted on the Infrastructure Bill?

The article notes:

The CBO, which is a non-partisan organization, is set to release its official report Friday. The White House is shoring up support and urging lawmakers to disregard the report ahead of its release.

“In this one case, I think we’ve made a very strong empirical case for CBO not having an accurate score,” Ben Harris, assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, told the NYT. “The question is would they rather go with CBO knowing CBO is wrong, or would they want to target the best information they could possibly have?”

Why do we have the CBO if lawmakers are going to disregard their research? Again, why didn’t the lawmakers wait for the report before they voted on the spending?

Some Good News

NewsMax is reporting today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has reversed its position on granting tax-exempt status to a group called “Christians Engaged.”

The article reports:

The action came after numerous Republican lawmakers rebuked the agency for overt political bias last month after it had first denied the status to Christians Engaged.

“The IRS has granted tax exempt status to Christians Engaged, a nonprofit organization that educates and empowers Christians to pray for our nation and elected officials, vote, and be civically engaged,” the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute announced in a statement.

“The reversal comes after a national backlash against the IRS’s initial rejection of Christians Engaged’s nonprofit status because, the IRS claimed, “[B]ible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican] party and candidates.”

Lea Patterson, counsel for the First Liberty Institute, applauded the move.

“This is truly great news for our client, as well as religious organizations and churches across America. We are grateful the IRS changed course to bring its decision into line with the Constitution and its own regulations,” she said.

Christians Engaged had appealed the IRS’ initial ruling with help from the First Liberty Institute.

When the IRS denied the tax-exempt status, they claimed that because the group followed Biblical teachings, it was too closely aligned with the Republican party. It is not the fault of any religious group that the Democrat platform does not align with Biblical teachings! The Bible is apolitical–it is God’s guide to a better life. The fact that the principles in the Bible work and may align more closely with one particular political party is totally irrelevant!

Freedom Is Under Attack

The following is a Judicial Watch Press Release from January 29th:

Reminiscent of the Obama Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) witch hunt of conservative groups, a U.S. Senator who sits on the committee that oversees the tax agency is pushing it to revoke a student charity’s nonprofit status. The veteran lawmaker, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, says the conservative student organization, Turning Point USA, should lose its nonprofit rating because it held large events that could help spread COVID-19. In a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig the senator describes the gatherings as “superspreader” events. He specifically mentions a Palm Beach, Florida winter gala at the Mar-a-Lago Club famously owned by former President Donald Trump.

“According to press reports and social media posts, many participants gathered and mingled indoors without wearing masks, in violation of Palm Beach County’s COVID-19 regulations,” Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS chief. The powerful chamber has oversight over the IRS, among many other government agencies. “In holding these ‘superspreader’ events, Turning Point USA knowingly exposed hundreds of young people and staff working at the events to serious risk of infection,” the letter continues. The legislator asks the IRS to review whether the group, which has more than 250,000 student members, should continue to enjoy its tax-exempt nonprofit status. “Established law has long held that an organization is not eligible for tax exemption under section 501(c)(3) if a purpose of the organization is contrary to public policy or is illegal,” the letter states, reminding the IRS commissioner of a three-part test established to determine whether an organization’s activities are consistent with tax exemption under the code.

The analysis includes determining whether the purpose of the organization is charitable, if activities are not illegal and whether the activities are in furtherance to the group’s exempt purpose and are reasonably related to that purpose. “Turning Point USA’s reckless decision to host potential ‘superspreader’ events, in open violation of local COVID-19 regulations, put children and others at risk, and was clearly contrary to the public good,” the senator tells the IRS commissioner. “Tax-exempt status provides a substantial benefit to charitable organizations and reflects the federal government’s endorsement of an organization’s activities. Organizations that knowingly put in danger minors entrusted to their care should not enjoy the benefits of tax-exempt status. Accordingly, I urge the IRS to review whether it should revoke Turning Point USA’s tax-exempt status.”

Founded in 2012, Turning Point USA describes itself as a national student movement dedicated to identifying, organizing, and empowering young people to promote the principles of free markets and limited government. The group’s founder, 27-year-old Charlie Kirk, was the chairman of Students for Trump, which aimed to activate a million new college voters before the 2020 presidential election. In a press release announcing the letter to the IRS, Whitehouse refers to the group as a “right-wing nonprofit” that “promotes far-right ideas to young people around the country.” The document, posted on the senator’s official website, further states that Turning Point USA “has cultivated close ties to President Trump and the Trump family.”

The senator’s push to repeal the conservative charity’s nonprofit status brings back memories of the Obama IRS singling out groups with conservative-sounding terms such as “patriot” and “Tea Party” in their titles when applying for tax-exempt benefits. Judicial Watch launched an investigation and sued for records after an explosive Treasury Inspector General report revealed that in 2010 the IRS began using inappropriate criteria, such as lists of past and future donors, to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status. The illegal IRS reviews continued for more than 18 months, according to the report, and “delayed processing of targeted groups’ applications” preparing for the 2012 presidential election. The IRS director at the center of the scheme, Lois Lerner, not only broke agency rules—as well as the law—to target conservative organizations she also lied to Congress to cover up the wrongdoing.

Please understand that under the Biden administration there is a real possibility that the government will be used to limit the rights of conservatives. This was done under the Obama administration, and many of the people in that administration are pulling the strings in the Biden administration. We are truly in danger of losing our freedoms.

This Might Be A Really Good Year To Make Sure Your Taxes Are Filed Accurately

In November, Accounting Today posted an article reporting that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to ramp up audits of smaller businesses and their investors by about 50 percent next year, following years of persistently low examination rates, an agency official said Tuesday.

The article reports:

“The IRS is focusing our efforts to increase compliance activity in this area of not only partnerships, but also investor returns related to pass-throughs,” De Lon Harris, the IRS deputy commissioner of examination for small businesses, said at an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants event. For 2021 “we are planning for 50 percent more than we had in the previous year.”

Pass-through entities, which include partnerships, limited-liability companies and sole-proprietorships, are incredibly difficult for the IRS to audit because they frequently have complex structures that can involve dozens of inter-related entities. Pass-throughs don’t pay taxes themselves, but “pass” along the profits and tax liabilities to investors — who then pay the taxes on their individual returns.

The article concludes:

The IRS is hiring 50 more specialized auditors to work these cases, with the aim of having them in place by February, Harris said. The IRS can select returns to audit that are up to three years old. If the agency finds significant problems in a taxpayer’s filings, the auditors can examine returns that are even older.

New audit procedures that Congress approved in 2015 mean that the IRS can more easily collect any underpaid taxes it finds during the audit. Instead of having to track down each investor, the IRS can now collect the money from the partnership itself.

File your taxes carefully!

Guilty As Charged

On September 19th, I posted an article about Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, an airplane mechanic accused of sabotaging an airplane about to take off at Miami International Airport in July.

The Washington Times posted an article on Wednesday about Mr. Alani’s trial.

The article reports:

A longtime airline mechanic with some possible links to Muslim extremists pleaded guilty Wednesday to sabotaging a jetliner with 150 people aboard, causing the pilot to abort the flight just before takeoff at Miami International Airport.

Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani entered the plea in Miami federal court. He previously admitted to investigators that he committed the sabotage, insisting it was an attempt to gain overtime to fix the American Airlines jet – which he did.

“I do admit the guilt,” Alani, shackled and wearing tan jail clothing, said through an Arabic interpreter.

Alani, 60, is a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Iraq who had been an airline mechanic for 30 years. Prosecutors say he has a brother in Iraq who may be involved with the Islamic State extremist group and that he had made statements wishing Allah would use “divine powers” to harm non-Muslims.

Investigators said Alani also had Islamic State videos on his phone depicting mass murders and that he traveled to Iraq in March but did not disclose that to the FBI after his arrest.

Despite that evidence, Alani was never charged with any terrorism-related crime. He pleaded guilty to attempted destruction of an aircraft, which carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence. Alani will likely get less prison time when he is sentenced March 4.

Court documents show the sabotage involved gluing Styrofoam inside the nose of the Boeing 737 so that it disabled a component pilots use to monitor things such as airspeed, altitude and the pitch of the plane. Authorities say if the flight had taken off as planned July 17 for Nassau, Bahamas, the sabotage could have caused a crash.

Many of Alani’s actions that day were captured on surveillance video and he was identified by fellow workers.

I wonder why this man was not charged with terrorism. It may be that the government felt that their case was not strong enough. However, the government (and we the people) need to understand that terrorists are probing all the time to find weak spots in our defenses. It terrorists realize that they can commit terrorism and not have it recognized as such, they may become more bold. Thank God the plane did not go down. This could have been much worse. Mishandling of this case could easily result in terrorists feeling they have a green light to commit terrorism because the consequences, whether they succeed or fail, will be minimal.

Prepare The Popcorn, The Show Is About To Begin

Joe Biden has entered the Democratic presidential race. Prepare for amazing statements by someone who seems to have no relationship with reality.

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today about a recent statement by former Vice-President Biden.

The article reports:

“The thing I’m proudest of is we, coincidentally, we were each in a different part of the country and we were each talking to groups of people that were being televised. On the same day, purely coincidentally, we were asked what are you proudest of from your administration? You know what I said—he said the same thing, though probably a bit more clearly than I did: Not one single whisper of scandal,” Biden said on ABC’s The View. “That’s because of Barack Obama.”

This has been a common refrain among Democrats and people in the media. In 2018, Obama himself declared his presidency was free from scandal.

“I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama said.

Despite Obama’s claim of a scandal free presidency, his administration was plagued by numerous scandals. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, the administration’s response to the 2012 terror attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, a scandal involving the IRS targeting conservative organizations, Operation Fast and Furious, Department of Justice’s tracking of reporter James Rosen, the Solyndra scandal, and the failures of the Department of Veterans Affairs are a few of the scandals to have occurred throughout Obama’s time in office.

Wow. Maybe he just forgot.

 

I Guess We Haven’t Entirely Cleaned Up The Internal Revenue Service

Bay City News posted an article today with the following headline: “IRS analyst charged with leaking Michael Cohen bank records.” What was leaked was a bank report of suspicious activity. IRS investigative analyst John Fry, 54, was charged in federal court in San Francisco on Feb. 4 with leaking information about Michael Cohen’s (formerly President Trump’s personal attorney) bank records. Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for adult film actress Stormy Daniels, posted those records online. An employee of the IRS has stated that Fry talked with Avenatti the day before the records were posted online.

The crime that John Fry is charged with carries a jail sentence of five years if he is committed.

It is time that all of the people in government who are using their positions for political purposes or personal gain were removed. If the IRS cannot clean up its act, it needs to be put out of business.

The Wrong People Are Paying For This

On January 11th, The Daily Signal posted the following article, “Conservative Groups Targeted in Lois Lerner’s IRS Scandal Receive Settlement Checks.”

The article reports:

The federal government in recent days has been issuing settlement checks to 100 right-of-center groups wrongfully targeted for their political beliefs under the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service, according to an attorney for the firm that represented plaintiffs in NorCal v. United States.

Three of the claimants in the $3.5 million national class-action suit are based in the Badger State.

“This is really a groundbreaking case. Hopefully it sets a precedent and will serve as a warning to government officials who further feel tempted to discriminate against U.S. citizens based on their viewpoints,” Edward Greim, attorney for Kansas City, Missouri-based Graves Garrett LLC told MacIver News Service.

Most of the claimants will each receive a check for approximately $14,000, Greim said. Five conservative groups that were integrally involved in the lawsuit get a bonus payment of $10,000 each, the attorney said.

About $2 million of the settlement goes to cover the legal costs of five long years of litigation. IRS attorneys attempted delay after delay, objection after objection, trying to use the very taxpayer protection statutes the plaintiffs were suing under to suppress documents.

The agency has admitted no wrongdoing in what a federal report found to be incidents of intrusive inspections of organizations seeking nonprofit status. Greim has said the seven-figure settlement suggests otherwise.

Folks, these checks are coming out of our tax dollars. As taxpayers we are paying for the corruption in the IRS during the Obama administration.

The article continues:

Disgraced former bureaucrat Lois Lerner led the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt groups. A 2013 inspector general’s report found the IRS had singled out conservative and tea party organizations for intense scrutiny, oftentimes simply based on their conservative-sounding or tea party names. The IRS delayed for months, even years, the applications, and some groups were improperly questioned about their donors and their religious affiliations and practices.

Lerner claims she did nothing wrong. In clearing her of wrongdoing, an Obama administration Department of Justice review described Lerner as a hero. But she invoked her Fifth Amendment right in refusing to answer questions before a congressional committee. The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit took the first and only deposition of Lerner, a document that the former IRS official and her attorneys have fought to keep sealed.

“At one level, it’s hard to even assess a dollar amount to what they did, it’s so contrary to what we think our bureaucrats in Washington should be doing. It boggles the mind,” Greim said.

This was an egregious violation of free speech and disregard for the law, and no one actually was held accountable. That is sad.

Cleaning Up The Federal Taxes And The Federal Budget

Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about one aspect of the tax bill that will limit fraud and save the taxpayers billions of dollars.

The article reports:

The new GOP tax overhaul would strip illegal immigrants of the ability to claim several major tax credits, saving the government $23.1 billion over the next decade, according to the bill’s authors.

For years Republicans have complained that despite a general ban on taxpayer benefits flowing to illegal immigrants, the IRS has allowed them to collect the child tax credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

…But the new tax overhaul tries again, calling for taxpayers to have to submit work-eligible Social Security numbers in order to claim the credits.

Immigrant-rights advocates have complained about attempts to close the tax credits in the past.

In the case of the child tax credit, activists say that while the parents may be in the country illegally, their children are often U.S. citizens who deserve the credit.

…Many illegal immigrants pay taxes using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, which the IRS issues to those who aren’t authorized to work in the U.S., but whom the government still wants to pony up to Uncle Sam.

The IRS pays out billions of dollars a year in tax credits to people filing using ITINs each year, according to the agency’s inspector general.

The inspector general has repeatedly urged the IRS to stop making the payments, but the agency has refused, saying it interprets the law related to those tax credits to cover illegal immigrants as well as other taxpayers.

The obvious question is why is the government making payments to people who are not in America legally and have no right to work here.

Huh?

As a blogger, I follow the news closely. I see a lot of things I don’t understand, but sometimes I am just amazed at how the media spins the events around us.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are running for President., He is an extremely successful businessman, and she is a former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State. There is no doubt that she has had more political experience than he has, but much of that political experience has involved failure rather than success.There are scandals swirling around both candidates–hers relating to pay-for-play while Secretary of State, lying to Congress, lying to the American people, defending her husband when his actions were despicable, etc. His scandals involve locker-room talk, divorces, probably more illegally recorded remarks to come.

I went looking for the turnover rate in Trump businesses, thinking that might give me some insight as to how Donald Trump runs things. I did find information about Trump Towers in New York City. One of the anonymous reviews by employees listed the following as a negative, “Longevity – it is an issue for anyone looking to advance with the company since most dept heads have been there for many years and have no intention of leaving.” Evidently (at least at Trump Towers in New York) the turnover rate is low. I think that is something that needs to be mentioned while the Clinton campaign attempts to convince the American voters that Donald Trump is a horrible monster not fit to lead a Boy Scout Troop.

I am having a hard time understanding why a private conversation (horrible as it was and probably more to come) is given the same weight as failed foreign policy, corruption, stonewalling federal investigations, intimidating women her husband has sexually assaulted, etc. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If the conversations we heard are an illustration of character, how is that character any worse than the character of his opponent. In one case we have talk, in the other case we have actions. They are not equal.

In watching this unfold, we need to look underneath what is happening at the core of the matter. Donald Trump is a serious threat to the status quo. The cozy little Washington establishment currently composed of both Democrats and Republicans is becoming unglued at the idea of someone coming in and changing the rules. Currently we don’t have a working Constitution–we have whatever President Obama says. The Justice Department was corrupted from the beginning (illustrated by the New Black Panthers case). The undermining of the Police was there from the beginning (the comment ‘police acted stupidly’ paved the way for charges of racism in later years). There are currently some serious questions about the politicization of the FBI, and we all remember the politicization of the IRS. We the little people in America know that we need to go back to equal justice under the law. We also understand that under President Hillary Clinton that will never happen. At least under President Donald Trump it might.

Regardless of how abhorrent Donald Trump’s comments were, and how abhorrent any future illegally taped comments are, they are comments–not proven actions. Meanwhile, we have a list of deplorable actions taken over the years by Hillary Clinton, along with the failure of her policies as Secretary of State. Why are we talking about illegally taped comments?

Confirmation Of What We Already Knew

Kimberley Strassel has written a book entitled The Intimidation Game. The book details the attack on conservative speech by elected Democrats during the last two elections. She posted an article on NewsBusters today detailing some of what she discovered in writing the book. One of the more disturbing things detailed in the book is the attack on conservative (or Tea Party) groups through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The fact that no one was held accountable for this abuse of power is an indication that it is time to create a tax code that no longer requires the existence of the IRS. For whatever reason, we have reached the point where the IRS has become a political weapon. That is an indication that the IRS needs to go. In 1974, the Second Article of Impeachment of Richard Nixon read as follows:

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to … cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

How far we have fallen.

The article at NewsBusters reports:

So Lerner, the IRS, Obama—they were all correct that the targeting fiasco started with a “line agent” in Cincinnati. They just neglected to mention that within twenty-four hours of that agent’s alert—and every minute thereafter—it was political types in Washington running the show.

When Koester talked about “media interest,” he was undoubtedly referring to the wall-to-wall coverage that had just followed the Citizens United decision. He’d likely seen the White House’s furious reaction to the Court’s decision to free up speech rights, and Obama’s dressing-down of the Supremes. He’d likely seen the Democratic Party and its media allies bang on daily about the evils of conservative “nonprofits.” He’d likely taken in the nonstop stories about the Tea Party gearing up in opposition to Obama, and how they were rushing into the (c)(4) realm. And he likely knew those groups were having an effect. Only a month earlier, Scott Brown had won that Senate race, against all odds. Koester was a prime example of how an executive branch—and a political party—can drive a story and make the bureaucracy take notice.

We know that one person in particular took notice: an ambitious partisan by the name of Lois Lerner.

Lerner shocked Washington with her May 2013 admission that her agency had harassed Americans. The shocking thing was that anyone was shocked.

Lerner to this day won’t cooperate with any real investigation; the nation has been denied the opportunity to hear her story. But e-mail is a wondrous thing. Between her records and the recollections of her colleagues, we have a vivid portrait of the former head of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations unit. She was a brassy, self-assured bureaucrat with Democratic leanings and a near-messianic belief in the need for more speech regulations.

I plan on reading the entire book, but Ms. Strassel’s comments in the article confirm what most Americans already knew–the IRS has been used by the Obama Administration to limit free speech. During the Nixon Administration, using the IRS as a political tool was an impeachable offense. Why? Because the media kept up a constant drum beat about the offense. Unfortunately conservatives do not have that media back-up. It is up to us to fight for our First Amendment rights. Unless more Americans wake up to what is happening, that will be a very long and hard fight.

This Is Called Blackmail

Yesterday Fox News posted an article with the title, “IRS chief warns of refund delays over budget cuts.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what is going on here. If people experience delays in getting their tax refunds, they will complain. If they make enough noise, Congress will have to give the IRS more money to get the refunds out promptly. I hope Congress is smarter than that.

The IRS in recent years has abused its power and become a political tool. I think it is time to cut its funding (actually, I think it is time to make it go away and replace the income tax with a consumption tax of some kind).

The article reports:

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen gave details Thursday on ways the tax-collection agency might try to cut costs. He said everything from taxpayer services to enforcement efforts could be affected.

But, in a move that could impact millions, he said there could be a lag in refunds being processed.

“Everybody’s return will get processed,” Koskinen told reporters. “But people have gotten very used to being able to file their return and quickly getting a refund. This year we may not have the resources, the people to provide refunds as quickly as we have in the past.”

In recent years, the IRS says it was able to issue most tax refunds within 21 days, if the returns were filed electronically. Koskinen wouldn’t estimate how long they might be delayed in the upcoming filing season, which is just a few weeks away.

Congress cut the IRS budget by $346 million for the budget year that ends in September 2015. The $10.9 billion budget is $1.2 billion less than the agency received in 2010. The agency has come under heavy fire from congressional Republicans for its now-halted practice of applying extra scrutiny to conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

I totally support cutting the budget of the IRS. I would also support eliminating the agency.

 

Using The Internal Revenue Service To Target Conservative Speech

We still don’t know exactly what went on with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the targeting of conservatives and conservative groups. I can tell you that after making a small donation to the Tea Party a few years ago, my husband and I were audited for the first time in 45 years (nothing in our taxes had changed). Well, evidently the targeting of conservatives was aided and abetted by some members of Congress.

Yesterday The Daily Caller reported that they had obtained copies of correspondence between Senator Jeanne Shaheen and the IRS showing a plan to harass conservative groups during the 2012 election.

The article reports:

“The IRS is aware of the current public interest in this issue,” IRS chief counsel William J. Wilkins, a White House visitor described by insiders as “The President’s Man at the IRS,” personally wrote in a hand-stamped memo to “Senator Shaheen” on official Department of the Treasury letterhead on April 25, 2012.

The memo, obtained by TheDC, briefed the Democratic senator about a coordinated IRS-Treasury Department plot to target political activity by nonprofit 501(c)(4) groups. The plot was operating out of Lois Lerner’s Tax Exempt Government Entities Division. 

 …Shaheen got the inside info from the IRS, making it clear she was the point person in a group composed of six close Democratic colleagues including Chuck Schumer and Al Franken, who joined with Shaheen in quietly writing a letter to then-IRS commissioner Doug Shulman expressing their concern about new nonprofit groups engaging in political activity in 2012.

The Democratic senators’ publicly available March 9, 2012 letter asked the IRS to “immediately change the administrative framework for enforcement of the tax code as it applies to groups designated as ‘social welfare’ organizations” by introducing a new “bright line test” for how much a tax-exempt group can invest in political activity and by setting a new rule that at least 51 percent of a group’s activity must non-political. The senators called for more elaborate disclosures about finances and “undertakings” in groups’ form 990 submissions and sought new rules about how much donors could write off as business expenses.

The problem here is that the new rules would be specifically aimed at conservative groups. There was no effort made to be even-handed about putting restrictions on liberal PAC’s, unions, or other groups on the left side of the aisle.

Unfortunately many Democrats do not endorse the concept of free speech when it does not conform to their ideas. The Democrat party has also shown that it is not above using the full weight of the government to stifle conservative speech. Using the government as a political weapon is not an idea that belongs in a representative republic.

One Perspective On The Mid-term Election

Michael Goodwin at the New York Post posted an article with an interesting perspective on the mid-term elections. Mr. Goodwin noted that even as a daily misstep is coming from the Obama Administration, President Obama seems to be saying that he is blameless in whatever disaster is unfolding.

The article notes:

We are witnessing the total collapse of a bad idea. Obamaism, a quasi-socialist commitment to a more powerful government at home and an abdication of American leadership around the world, is being exposed as a historic calamity. It is fueling domestic fear and global disorder and may well lead to a world war.

If there is a smidgen of a silver lining, it is that the unraveling, complete with Obama’s shameless attempts to duck responsibility, is playing out on the eve of the midterm elections. Fortunately, voters seem ready to respond by giving Republicans control of both houses of congress.

…He was aided and abetted by every Democrat in Congress. They marched in lockstep with his cockamamie policies, from ObamaCare to open borders. They protected corrupt leaders in numerous federal agencies, from the IRS to the Genera Services Administration. They stymied efforts to find the truth about Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle.

They ceded their constitutional obligations and allowed Obama to crash the system of checks and balances. The vast majority stood silent while he gutted the military and abandoned our allies, including Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and courted Iran, the most menacing nation on earth.

With painfully few exceptions, Democrats put their loyalty to him above their duty to America.

And now they must be punished. All of them.

Mr. Goodwin notes that he is a registered Democrat. However, he suggests that what is happening in the country at this moment is a national emergency and the only solution is to vote Republican for every federal office. I understand where he is coming from–I used to be a Democrat.

President Nixon Would Be Green With Envy

On Friday the Associated Press posted an article stating that emails have been lost from five more Internal Revenue Service (IRS) workers who are being investigated in relation to the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.

Today, Townhall.com posted the reaction of the lawyer who is representing those conservative groups.

Townhall.com quotes Attorney Mitchell’s reaction:

Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who is representing many tea party and conservative groups targeted by the IRS, isn’t impressed and not surprised about the latest round of “lost” emails.

“I have gotten to the point where this is like one of those infomercials where they say ‘wait, wait, there’s more!’ I mean just when you think you’ve heard it all, you find out more things about the IRS and frankly I think what Congressman Camp said is absolutely right that there is no way we are getting anywhere close to the truth about what happened and the DOJ has become, in my opinion has become complicit in trying to cover-up what’s been going on. I think we have to have a special prosecutor if we are ever going to get to the bottom of it,” Mitchell said in an interview with Fox News

Attorney Mitchell was recently interviewed on Fox News. You can watch the interview at the Townhall.com link above.

 

Why Has It Taken So Long For The Public To Learn This?

Fox News is reporting today that the IRS emails that Lois Lerner claimed to have lost may exist on back-up computers. Politico posted a story at the end of July that summarizes the timeline on this whole scandal.

Politico reports:

Backgrounder recap: It all started in May 2013, when ex-IRS tax-exempt chief Lois Lerner acknowledged the agency inappropriately used loaded key words like “tea party” to scrutinize applicants seeking tax breaks. A critical inspector general report followed, Lerner and others stepped down, and here we are, dozens of congressional hearings later.

Although the Justice Department, FBI and Treasury inspector general for tax administration are all probing the matter, it could be awhile before they issue final reports on how and why the ex-IRS official at the heart of the scandal lost two years’ worth of emails, the latest wrinkle in the controversy.

When the Ways and Means Committee began investigating the IRS scandal, they requested Lois Lerner’s emails. In June the Committee was told the emails were missing and that the IRS had been aware of that fact since February.

I hate to be cynical (although sometimes it is necessary), but do you think that the IRS and the Justice Department have had enough time to sanitize those emails and delete anything that might be incriminating? I strongly suspect that when the emails are released, there will be nothing even remotely problematic for the IRS. The emails will be strangely innocent.

Were it not for the efforts of Judicial Watch using the Freedom of Information Act, the IRS and Justice Department would not even have to take the time to clean up the emails. At least Judicial Watch is forcing the IRS to spend some time covering their tracks.

Are They Following Any Rules?

Today’s Daily Caller is reporting that because they did not follow their own rules and policies, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has put American taxpayers at risk of fraud and identity theft.

The article reports:

If one needs further evidence that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has veered out of control, look no further than last week’s Treasury Inspector General’s report that found serial failures on the part of the agency to conduct basic background checks on contractors used to handle sensitive taxpayer information. In just one instance, a computer disk with 1.4 million American names, addresses and even Social Security numbers was handled by contractors without background checks, putting taxpayers at unnecessary risk for fraud and identity theft.

What makes this even more outlandish is that this is not just a breach of common sense; it is a violation of IRS policy.

It seems that the IRS is lax about following their own regulations in a number of areas.

The article further reports:

Furthermore, other investigations have brought to light accounts of money wasted by the IRS on lavish agency conferences while the rest of the country struggled in a deep financial recession. Spoof training videos were produced by the IRS while other government agencies were furloughing employees. And to top it off, from 2011-2012 alone, more than $1 million in bonuses were paid to IRS employees who were delinquent on their own federal taxes!

…The IRS is out of control, and if Commissioner Koskinen wants to return some faith to the agency he leads, he can start by holding his people responsible for the IRS’s outrageous behavior.

Will the Obama Administration hold the IRS accountable for its behavior? If not, it is time to consider an alternate tax policy that would abolish the IRS.