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Congressman Exposes Secretive Obama Program to Strangle Politically Out-of-Favor Businesses

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Photo Credit: Bill Clark / Newscom

Photo Credit: Bill Clark / Newscom

Calling a secretive government operation to strangle politically out-of-favor businesses “more dangerous” than the IRS targeting scandal, a congressman with a background in banking is preparing to introduce legislation to kill the Obama administration initiative.

“I believe this activity is probably more dangerous and more disastrous than that of the IRS scandal because this is running people out of business for no reason and it’s harming livelihoods, incomes [and] families,” Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., said today in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Luetkemeyer, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, was comparing the Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point to the Internal Revenue Service’s much-reviled targeting of tea party and other conservative groups.

Operation Choke Point seeks to cut off the financial lifeblood of payday lenders and other industries the Obama administration doesn’t like by pressuring banks to close their accounts with such businesses.

The government contends that Operation Choke Point combats unlawful, mass-market consumer fraud. However, a congressional report revealed that the initiative’s targets include legal businesses such as short-term lenders, firearms and ammunition merchants, coin dealers, tobacco sellers and home-based charities.

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30,000 Emails that IRS's Lerner 'Lost Forever,' Now Recovered

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Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Photo Credit: AP / Susan Walsh

Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.

The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that were used to back up the IRS email system.

“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the Washington Examiner.

The IRS, in a statement provided to the Examiner, said the agency and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is fully cooperating with the investigation.

“As Commissioner Koskinen has stated, the IRS welcomes TIGTA’s independent review and expert forensic analysis.” The IRS statement said. “Commissioner Koskinen has said for some time he would be pleased if additional Lois Lerner emails from this time frame could be found.”

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Bombshell Memo: Dem Senator Jeanne Shaheen Conspired With Lois Lerner

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was principally involved in a plot with Lois Lerner and President Barack Obama’s political appointee at the IRS to lead a program of harassment against conservative nonprofit groups during the 2012 election, according to letters exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) did not want to publicly release 2012 correspondences exchanged between the IRS and Jeanne Shaheen at her personal Washington office: the agency delayed releasing the information to a major conservative super PAC multiple times, even threatening to see the super PAC in court, according to emails.

“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.

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IRS Admits it Has Not Looked for Lerner’s Missing Emails on IRS Computer Servers

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Photo Credit: AP / Carolyn Kaster

Photo Credit: AP / Carolyn Kaster

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) attorneys have admitted in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that the IRS failed to search any of its standard computer systems for Lois Lerner’s missing emails, according to the government watchdog group Judicial Watch.

Lerner was the director of the Exempt Organizations Unit at the IRS, responsible for reviewing the tax exemption applications of Tea Party and conservative groups. Many of those applications were delayed for years, allegedly in an effort to prevent those groups from participating fully in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Documents, including emails, have been sought by congressional investigators since May 2013.

In June 2014, the IRS disclosed to Congress that Lerner’s computer had apparently crashed and her emails from January 2009 to April 2011 were lost. Then in August, a Justice Department attorney admitted that the federal government maintains a back-up system for all computer records and the emails potentially could be recovered.

The latest revelations about the IRS not even looking for Lerner’s emails on IRS computer systems came about because of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit to force testimony and document production from the agency regarding the “lost and/or destroyed” records on the targeting of Tea Party groups.

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Churches Defy IRS, Endorse Candidates, Dare Agency to Sue…

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Photo Credit: APA record number of rogue Christian pastors are endorsing candidates from the pulpit this election cycle, using Sunday sermons to defiantly flout tax rules.

Their message to the IRS: Sue me.

But the tax agency is doing anything but. Although the IRS was sued itself for not enforcing the law and admitted about 100 churches may be breaking the rules, the pastors and their critics alike say the agency is looking the other way. The agency refuses to say if it is acting.

At the same time, the number of pastors endorsing candidates in what they call Pulpit Freedom Sunday jumped from 33 people in 2008 to more than 1,600 this year, according to organizers, Alliance Defending Freedom. And this year, they’ve stepped up their drive, telling pastors to back candidates any Sunday up until the election, not just one Sunday as in past years.

The church leaders are jumping in high-profile races that will help decide the Senate and tight governor races across the country, endorsing candidates from Thom Tillis (R) over Sen. Kay Hagan (D) in North Carolina to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) over Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) in Kentucky.

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Guilty Until Proven Innocent: Law Lets IRS Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required

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Photo Credit: Angela Jimenez for The New York TimesFor almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report.

“How can this happen?” Ms. Hinders said in a recent interview. “Who takes your money before they prove that you’ve done anything wrong with it?”

The federal government does.

Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up.

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Tea Party Loses Court Battle Over Targeting to IRS

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Photo Credit: Lauren Victoria Burke, APA federal court dismissed two lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, ruling that the tax agency is no longer targeting conservative tax-exempt groups for greater scrutiny.

“Unless an actual, ongoing controversy exists in this case, this court is without power to decide it,” U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton ruled, dismissing one lawsuit brought by True the Vote, a conservative vote-monitoring organization.

True the Vote, an offshoot of the Tea Party-affiliated King Street Patriots, had its application as a social welfare group help up because the IRS suspected it was engaging in direct political election campaigning, which is forbidden under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. IRS agents found that its web site contained “Democratic attacks and Republican/conservative response,” according to confidential IRS documents obtained by USA TODAY.

Walton said the IRS has assured the public that they’re no longer screening applications for tax exemptions based on its political leanings, a practice that led to the dismissal of several top IRS officials when it was disclosed by Treasury inspectors last year.

“Thus, the allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which had delayed the processing of the plaintiffs’ tax-exempt applications and spawned this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiffs,” Walton said in a second opinion dismissing a lawsuit brought by Linchpins of Liberty and 40 other groups in 22 states.

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WATCH: "[The IRS] Must be Abolished!" Creator of New Documentary Demands Change

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“Unfair: Exposing The IRS” is a new documentary that investigates corruption inside the IRS and the many Americans that fell victim. The 80-minute feature is an in-depth look into the people and organizations that want to abolish the IRS and see a new tax system implemented.

Read more from this story HERE.

Producer of Anti-Obamacare Movie ‘Sick and Sicker’ Hit with IRS Audit

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Photo Credit: YouTubeThe producer of a new movie that criticizes Obamacare has reportedly become the latest prominent conservative slapped with an IRS audit.

Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever.

“I had never been audited before I made this movie,” he says in a YouTube video. “There seems to be a pattern here.”

The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated.

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IRS Official Who Called Conseratives A**holes Says She "Isn't a Political Person," Plays Victim in New Interview

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Photo Credit: TownHall“Regardless of whatever else happens, I know I did the best I could under the circumstances and am not sorry for anything I did,” former IRS official Lois Lerner told POLITICO in an exclusive interview released today.

In the piece, Lerner portrays herself as being unfairly attacked by the very groups she spent years inappropriately targeting.

Lerner, for her part, assumes she is at the center of the storm because “I was the person who announced it. I assume the other part of it is because I declined to talk, and once I declined to talk, they could say anything they wanted, and they knew I couldn’t say anything back.”

Oh, and she wants everyone to know how apolitical she is too. This is the same woman who was in contact with the Department of Justice about putting tea party leaders behind bars for “lying” about political activity and the same woman who called conservatives crazies and a**holes in an email. Speaking of those crazy a**holes, according to Lerner and her husband, Mark Levin and his listeners were the source of that comment.

They’ve released partial emails, including one after President Barack Obama’s reelection in which she and Miles bemoan far-right conservative talk radio, calling them “crazies” and “a—holes.”

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