Rep. Van Hollen to Join in Suit to Halt IRS Aid to Political Dark Money Groups

From Salon, June 2013:

"Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., says that he and two campaign finance watchdog groups will file a lawsuit against the IRS over the agency’s policy of granting tax-exempt status to “social welfare” groups, because, he says, the IRS rules conflict with the law.

From the Huffington Post:

Van Hollen said he and watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 would sue to clarify an IRS regulation that he said was at odds with the law, which requires certain groups to “exclusively” engage in social welfare to earn nonprofit status. The IRS regulation permitting groups “primarily” engaged in social welfare allows the organizations to participate in an undefined amount of political activity, said the congressman, a leading advocate of campaign finance reform and ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

“We have now exhausted the administrative remedies and we do now plan to move forward,” Van Hollen said at a recent event on campaign finance hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice. “I plan to move forward with these groups to file a lawsuit against the IRS to enforce the plain meaning of the law, and frankly get the IRS out of the business of trying to draw these fine distinctions between whether something is 49 percent or 48 percent, or whatever it may be, political activity.”

Jillian Rayfield is an Assistant News Editor for Salon, focusing on politics. Follow her on Twitter at @jillrayfield or email her at jrayfield@salon.com. "

 

From Propublica.org comes this disclosure of the TRUTH!

This is a great article to read if you want to go beyond the media storm to real facts.

"Sound, Fury and the IRS Mess

by Richard Tofel
ProPublica, May 21, 2013, 9 a.m.

ProPublica’s job is to report the news rather than to make news ourselves, but sometimes we find an article of ours to be itself a subject of public debate. Last week was such a time, when two articles we had published back in December and January became the subject of significant attention in light of the uproar over IRS oversight of the process for granting tax exemption to so-called “social welfare” groups under section 501(c)(4). We triggered that attention, with a third article we published on May 13, setting out everything we knew about the circumstances of our previous stories.

Largely ignored in a public outcry last week—radio rants, Twitter storms, congressional, presidential and prosecutorial posturing-- were the following:

Our pieces in December and January raised very serious questions about whether six different “dark money” political groups seeking tax exemption had made false statements on their applications. Those applications are signed under penalty of perjury . If any false statements were made knowingly, the groups— including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS —may have committed a crime. There is no indication, however, that either the IRS or the Department of Justice has done anything since January to investigate whether such crimes were indeed committed. The groups in question happen all to be conservative. Not one congressional Republican has, to my knowledge, expressed any concern about this possible criminality.

Even more remarkably, leading public figures have asserted as fact that they know how we came to receive nine documents in the mail—statements that appear to have little basis (and in some cases, no basis at all).

The former acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue said on May 17 that the agency’s inspector general had found that the disclosure to us was “inadvertent”—we had requested the applications, but they should not have been sent to us before they were approved. The IRS followed later the same day with a statement to the same effect—but then refused to answer questions about who had made the mistake, and why they should be believed when they denied having acted intentionally (and thus likely denied committing a crime).

What really seems to have happened at the IRS in Cincinnati, across the last three presidencies (a Democrat, then a Republican, then a Democrat), and across two turns of the partisan screw in the House of Representatives, from Republicans to Democrats to Republicans again, is that the agency has been starved of resources, and badly mismanaged.

But while it took the IRS four long days to tell people about their conclusion of “inadvertence” and the same four days for ProPublica to report out the dysfunction , people like Rush Limbaugh, and their followers and fellow travelers on Twitter and in the fringe press, rushed headlong to judgment. Here’s what Limbaugh said about the mid-level federal employees at the IRS in Cincinnati on Tuesday: “The people at these government agencies have been stocked with leftists for decades now, and they’re all activists.” What evidence did he offer for this? None. How could he know that someone in a large bureaucracy, shuffling thousands of pieces of paper, didn’t make a mistake? He couldn’t, and he didn’t.

Well, you might say, that’s Limbaugh. But it wasn’t just Limbaugh. Stephen Moore writes for the Wall Street Journal (where I worked for 15 years, and where Mr. Rove also writes). Yet, he called the documents we were sent “ illegally leaked .” He knew nothing more than Limbaugh. “What is the motivation,” Moore asked, “for leaking these documents? The answer is that the left is trying to dry up the money of tea party and conservative groups by intimidating donors.” He noted that another group, in another case, had its donor list released. But in our case, there were no donor lists, and we had redacted the limited financial information on the forms we published. Moreover, these applications are completed with the expectation that they’ll eventually be made public—because they are when they are approved. Never mind all that; presumably no need to mention it.

And what of the investigators? Congressional committees leapt into action. The inspector general for the IRS had apparently already investigated. The President demanded another investigation; the Department of Justice said it had commenced a criminal inquiry.

Knowing that such is the way in Washington, we waited at ProPublica for someone to send us a subpoena, show up on our doorstep, or maybe just call. Nothing. Nothing since December 13, when we told the IRS we had these documents they weren’t supposed to have sent us—or since the next day, when we published that fact. Nothing before the inspector general reached his conclusion, nothing before the congressional hearings started televising their demands for answers and their righteous indignation, nothing since.

In point of fact, the investigators would have found out that we have nothing of value to them. But the fact that they didn’t even ask tells you a lot. And it reinforces the point that much of the heat generated last week on this subject is just the latest expression of Washington cynicism and its consequences—that the talk show hosts and their fellow travelers, and the representatives and senators and officials in the executive branch, aren’t really looking for answers here. They’re just putting on a show."

 

pie,

You need to keep up. We have already learned that the General Counsel of the IRS, an Obama appointee, was directly involved. He met with Obama right before the harrassment started.

The ProPublica propaganda you cite is also inaccurate. Rush never directly accused the Cincinnatti IRS employees of being leftists. He said that Obama didn't have to order this kind of thing directly because there were people in the IRS and other agencies who knew what to do and knew there would be no consequences. Now we know those people included not only Lois Lerner, who hid behind the Fifth Amendment, and this General Counsel.

 

Shocking, the obama admin investigating themselves came to the conclusion they did nothing wrong, hopefully they didnt try too hard, meanwhile they can actually keep a straight face when they say both sides got equal scrutiny when one side mysteriously ended up with 95% of the added scrutiny.
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OK pie...

lets say on the day of election...
the police only stopped the people who were speeding who were members to the tea party.
and later admitted they were targeting the tea party.

Would you be calling for full enforcement of speeding laws or would you admit that was crooked and criminal selective enforcement of the speeding laws.

 

ExactlyPad! And thak you for posting that. What reasonable people have been saying all along. The folks in Sin-Sin-natty got inundated with these requests from what were blatantly political groups for 501c(4) status, they handled the onslaught ridiculously wrong and stupidly, but eventually realized they were in, or had created, a mess, and sought advice from the Counsel General's Office. They finally did something right, which was to get legal advice. That's why they were asked to send the applications up to the Counsel General's Office. There are 1600 people in that office!

Now what needs to happen is all of these applications get turned down, and hence forth you must be a social welfare organization to qualify for 501c(4).

I am confident the pending suits will take care of this matter, and that hence forth all of these political organizations will have to file under 527, and disclose their donors names!

If you believe in democracy, then you can't possibly be in favor of dark money in politics!

 

That's not what happened Jem. The IRS treated applications in each period of time the same regardless, but there were huge numbers from right wing groups compared to a handful from progressive groups. No doubt they were handled more or less in the order received. All the applications should have been turned down. They screwed up by letting some go through in the past and trying to evaluate the extent of political activity of these groups with inadequate information. All they had to work with were guesses submitted by the applicants.

The statute goes back many years. Go to Propublica.org if you want to learn the truth.

Are you perhaps a creature of television and the Bible, two of the least reliable sources of truth imaginable. If you want to know the truth about any contentious issue, you have to seek it out, it won't come to you. What comes easily will be sensationalized of course, because the media you have ready access to is driven by advertising, and advertising is driven by audience share, and audience share is driven by entertainment and scandal, not reality and boring facts.

 

It really amazes me that so many on the left care so little about a search algo called google that they would rather go with an ad hom attack and an outright crazy lie.

how many times do you have be told this piezoe?


http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...185644-bbdf-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

"Lois G. Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, told reporters Friday that the “absolutely inappropriate” actions were undertaken by “front-line people” working in Cincinnati to target groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names."

 

No, the flagging was absolutely appropriate. Blatantly political groups were seeking tax exempt status. She's merely trying to save her job.

 

Really... why don't you show us how the left got caught up in the net on a proportional basis.

This was already dismissed as well...

http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/27/inspector-general-no-really-the-irs-targ


Today, though, a letter from a Treasury Department inspector general makes it clear that the IRS truly and sincerely was focusing on tea party groups. The Hill reports:

Liberal groups seeking tax-exempt status faced less IRS scrutiny than Tea Party groups, according to the Treasury inspector general.

Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, told Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) in a letter dated Wednesday that the IRS did not use inappropriate criteria to scrutinize groups with “progressives” in their name seeking tax-exempt status.

“Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.

The inspector general stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention, while only 30 percent of the groups with “progress” or “progressive” were highlighted as potentially political. George’s letter does not say why the progressive groups were given extra scrutiny.