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Wonder if we'll ever see another one like him again?
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Saturday, September 6, 2014
From the ridiculous to the sublime
IRS says it has lost emails from 5 other employees related to probes
Next time Smidgen is called back to testify:
No "thinking" person could swallow this absurd chain of deceit. One lie to cover another.
"There's not a smidgen of corruption". Will go down in the annals of time right along with "You can keep your insurance period."
This is clearly the most far reaching breach in government corruption since the Nixon administration. How much longer can the MSM afford to look the other way?
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The IRS said Friday that it has lost emails from five other employees involved in congressional probes into the agency's targeting of conservative groups, leading one top Republican to declare "this pattern must stop."
The announcement comes after the agency said in June that it could not locate an untold number of emails to and from Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The revelation set off a new round of investigations and congressional hearings.
On Friday, the IRS issued a report to Congress saying the agency also lost emails from five other employees related to the probe, including two agents who worked in a Cincinnati office processing applications for tax-exempt status.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, whose committee has been investigating the scandal, said the disclosure is yet another example of the Obama administration changing its story on the scandal.
"The IRS’s ever-changing story is practically impossible to follow at this point, as they modify it each time to accommodate new facts," Issa, R-Calif., said. "This pattern must stop."
The disclosure came on the same day the Senate's subcommittee on investigations released competing reports on how the IRS handled applications from political groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
The Democratic report, released by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said both liberal and conservative groups were mistreated, revealing no political bias by the IRS. The Republican report, issued by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said conservative groups were clearly treated worse.
The IRS inspector general set off a firestorm last year with an audit that said IRS agents singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for inappropriate scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
Lerner's lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, the Justice Department, the inspector general and at least two federal judges.
The IRS blamed computer crashes for all the lost emails. In a statement, the IRS said all the crashes happened well before Congress launched the investigations.
"Throughout this review, the IRS has found no evidence that any IRS personnel deliberately destroyed any evidence," said the IRS statement. "To the contrary, the computer issues identified appear to be the same sorts of issues routinely experienced by employees within the IRS, in other government agencies and in the private sector."
When Congress started investigating the IRS last year, the agency identified 82 employees who might have documents related to the inquiries. The IRS said 18 of those people had computer problems between September 2009 and February 2014. Of those employees, five probably lost emails -- in addition to Lerner -- the agency said Friday.
Lerner, who was placed on leave and has since retired, has emerged as a central figure in congressional investigations. The other five employees appear to be more junior than she.
In addition to the Cincinnati workers, they include a technical adviser to Lerner, a tax law specialist and a group manager in the tax-exempt division.
In general, the IRS said the workers archived emails on their computer hard drives when their email accounts became too full. When those computers crashed, the emails were lost.
"By all accounts, in each instance the user contacted IT staff and attempted to recover his or her data," said the IRS statement.
The IRS has said it stored emails on backup tapes but those tapes were re-used every six months. The inspector general's office is reviewing those tapes to see if any old emails can be retrieved.
Friday's reports by the Senate subcommittee on investigations mark the conclusion of just one investigation. The Justice Department and three other congressional committees are continuing their probes.
Levin is chairman of the investigations subcommittee and McCain is the ranking Republican. Their staffs routinely work together on investigations, and while they don't always agree on the results, it is highly unusual for them to issue such diverging reports.
"The investigation found that the IRS used inappropriate selection criteria, burdensome questions and lengthy delays in processing applications for 501(c)(4) tax exempt status from both conservative and liberal groups," Levin said in a statement.
The Democratic report slams last year's audit by the IRS inspector general. It says the IG report was incomplete because it focused only on the treatment of conservative groups. The IG's report "produced distorted audit results that continue to be misinterpreted," the Democratic report said.
The inspector general's office declined to comment Friday. A spokeswoman said they were reviewing the report.
The Republican report says far more conservative groups were singled out for extra scrutiny. They were also asked more questions and were more likely to have their applications rejected or withdrawn.
"The IRS selected conservative groups out of normal processing, placed them on a separate list, stopped work on their applications completely, forced them to answer intrusive questions about their behavior and demeanor at meetings and delayed their applications for multiple years," the Republican report said. "Our investigation has uncovered no evidence that liberal groups received the same expansive inappropriate treatment that conservative groups received."
The Democratic report said investigators reviewed 800,000 pages of documents and conducted 22 interviews with current and former workers at the IRS and the inspector general's office. The investigators, however, were not allowed to see confidential taxpayer information, so many of the documents were blacked out.
Only two committees in Congress have the authority to see confidential taxpayer information: the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. Those two committees are continuing their probes.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Stedman Expands Ferguson Witch-Hunt
See if I got this straight. Stedman... head of the DOJ a known liar and held in Contempt of Congress responsible for the death of two border patrol agents and countless Mexicans in an attempt to exploit gun dealers with a botched plan called Fast and Furious which ultimately blew up in his face is going to conduct the investigation?
Really...
If anyone deserves to be behind bars it's him.
His boss Barry has always been queasy on the war on terror. But never fails to come up with a "strategy" when it comes to:
(MSM depiction)
A killer who took 26 minutes to die in a botched execution.
The white guy who took 2 hours.
"The gentile giant"
Barry's great at soaring rhetoric. But when it comes to real leadership (ISIS) we have a used car salesman for a president. Another Sharpton race hustler. Totally out of his league. I know it. He knows it. And now the whole world knows it.
Lets see...if Tahmooressi was DeMarcus Jones...
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Despite the continuing absence of any evidence whatsoever that race was a factor in the police shooting of Michael Brown, the Department of Justice will be conducting a race-baiting witch-hunt aimed at the entire police force in Ferguson, Mo., Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday.
The new investigation is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded Democratic Party voter registration drive disguised as a civil rights investigation. Such hoaxes are the stock in trade of the radical community organizers who run the Obama White House. Statistics, by the way, suggest Ferguson is far from the hotbed of crime the media has portrayed it as. Ferguson reportedly has an average level of crime.
“When I visited Ferguson two weeks ago, I promised that the U.S. Department of Justice would continue to stand with the people there long after the national headlines had faded,” Holder said, according to the text of prepared remarks. Egged on by violent left-wing mobs and racial tension profiteers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr., federal officials were already conducting what will almost certainly prove to be a fruitless civil rights-centered investigation of Brown’s death.
“Today, with our investigation into the Ferguson Police Department and our reform efforts in St. Louis County, we’re taking significant steps to keep that promise,” Holder said. “As these efforts unfold, my colleagues and I will keep working with the people in Ferguson to ensure that a fair, thorough investigation occurs; to see that dialogue can be translated into concrete action; and to facilitate lasting, positive change – that brings together police officials, civil rights leaders, and members of the public – to bridge gaps and build understanding.”
Except perhaps for what some critics said was an initially heavy-handed and overly militaristic approach to crowd control used by Ferguson police, there is no evidence much, if any, change is actually needed in the St. Louis-area township.
To repeat, this expanded federal investigation of a local incident has absolutely nothing to do with justice and everything to do with electoral politics. Although at least 40 federal agents have reportedly been on the ground in the St. Louis area desperately searching for proof of racial animus on the part of Darren Wilson, a decorated Ferguson police officer who shot Brown Aug. 9 after the 18-year-old suspected gang member beat him and tried to take his handgun, such evidence remains elusive.
That figure of 40 agents is apparently more than the Obama administration has assigned to all the other major scandals embroiling the administration combined. Those other scandals include Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi bungling, IRS persecution of conservative groups, New Black Panther Party voter intimidation charges, the Fast and Furious gun-running episode, and the NSA’s domestic spying.
All the racial grievance-community organizing complex currently has to go on is the fact that the decedent was black and the policeman was white.
It is, of course, no coincidence that the investigation was announced as President Obama’s approval rating with the public dipped to record lows. At an anemic 38 percent according to Gallup’s three-day rolling average, it is now descending into President Nixon territory. Obama is anxious to change the conversation to issues that don’t matter like raising the minimum wage and income inequality.
The announcement of an expanded federal investigation in Ferguson comes three weeks after the race-baiting members of the far-left Congressional Black Caucus demanded a federal lynch mob be assembled to put the mostly white Ferguson police department in its place.
In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who heads the CBC, Reps. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), and John Conyers (D-Mich.) demanded the political persecution of Ferguson cops because in their view Brown’s killing “may be part of a continuing pattern of the use of deadly force by police against unarmed African-Americans.”
Brown’s shooting raises “potentially serious concerns” about law enforcement in St. Louis, the lawmakers wrote. Holder’s Department of Justice should take over the probe because, they claim, the St. Louis County Police Department “may not be the most objective or credible body to investigate civil rights matters involving law enforcement given evidence of racial profiling by that department in the recent past.”
“Only the federal government has the resources, the experience, and the full independence to give this case the close scrutiny that the citizens of Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area deserve,” the letter said.
While Brown’s body was still warm, Democrats set up a voter registration booth where Brown died, as if the suspected gang member were some kind of martyr. They are now trying to leverage his death nationally for partisan purposes.
“This is going to go past Ferguson,” said John Gaskin III, a spokesman for the St. Louis County, Mo., NAACP and a member of the group’s national board of directors.
“What I’ve told people is I want them to be aware that there’s a Ferguson near you, near every city,” he said. “I don’t think people will run out of steam on this one.”
Holder’s announcement also comes days after Brown was laid to rest following a grotesque political rally led by the abominable racial arsonist Al Sharpton.
The politically correct lie that a helpless 6’4″ 292-lbs. Brown was shot in cold blood, arms raised while attempting to surrender to white police officer Wilson, instead of the less convenient truth that Brown was beating the cop while reaching for his gun, refuses to die.
In the minutes before he attacked Wilson, Brown was captured on video bullying a much smaller East Indian shopkeeper during a robbery, an act that some might consider a hate crime.
The image of a huge robber manhandling a much smaller victim won’t run out of steam anytime soon, either.
Thursday, September 4, 2014
The New Mentality
The MO. First the MSM runs cover for Barry. It's been months now and we still haven't gotten the straight story on Bergdhal. Since we haven't, the indication is he's a deserter. A stretch to far you say? Has anyone heard he's been exonerated? Realistically, haven't they had sufficient time to resolve this case? He's either a deserter or not. This we do know. Six guys died trying to rescue him. To add insult to injury he was given $200,000 in back pay and an additional $150,000 for deserting... or as they like to say...held prisoner.
Compare this to Sgt Tahmooressi a decorated veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan, made a wrong turn, and wound up in a Mexican jail. So far he has spent over $100,000 of his and his family's money in legal fees to get out. With this administration he would have an easier time getting back into the country if he was illegal!
My only defense for this administration is they know something about Tahmooressi we don't. Barring this the treatment of the decorated vet is appalling. Seems Barry only has a "strategy" when it comes to the Martin's and Brown's of the world.
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