White-tea-water-party-gate
Umm, there is no ‘there’ there. Someone needs to intervene with the IRS Inspector General who is definitely living in an alternate reality.
You can read the actual report [PDF] and wonder at the mind that came up with it. The basic complaint of the IG is that you shouldn’t use the name of an organization as an indicator of the purpose of the organization. Apparently if you called your group “Politics-R-Us” that shouldn’t be used as an indicator of what you are doing. It may come as a shock to the IG, but people tend to choose names that do indicate what they are doing.
According to the report, only about a third of of the groups that were checked by the Cincinnati group were associated with the names, and only about 10% of the total applications were sent for review.
It is interesting how often the IG uses ‘election cycles’ as a unit of time. If these aren’t political groups, why would election cycles be important to them? I don’t get the feeling that the IG really understands the purpose of 501(c)(4) groups.
As ‘Noz notes, the IRS Commissioner at the time of these events was Douglas Shulman, a Bush appointee who left in November 2012. Steven Miller, the man Zero forced out, was made acting commissioner after Shulman left. Throwing innocent people under the bus to please the mob it a defining characteristic of the Obama administration.
If they mess with any of the civil service employees involved based on this report, they are going to get their heads handed to them by union attorneys.
4 comments
Steven Miller, the man Zero forced out, was in charge of the Cincinnati office’s activities at the time though since he was Deputy Commissioner of Enforcement in charge of, amongst other things, Tax Exempt and Government Entities, before he was promoted to Acting Commissioner. He was the person whose desk the buck *really* stopped at during that time period, since political appointees try to avoid bucks whenever possible by the simple expedient of rarely being anywhere near their desk :twisted:. Hey, y’know, those golf games are important too, right? 😉
One of the interesting things about Miller is that he started his career in Washington as a Congressional aide. I have not yet discovered whose aide he was, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been an aide to a Republican Congressman before joining the IRS, which would give Zero a double incentive to get rid of him so that a more… Democratic… candidate can be promoted in his place. Not saying this is what Zero did. But it’s the sort of thing he likes to do, something about “never throw away any opportunity presented by a crisis” or some such drivel.
They tried out the ‘couple of bad apples’ ploy and it didn’t take, so they are feeding the media.
The IRS should be rejecting all of the political groups going for the 501 c 4 and pull them for Rove’s and Obama’s organizations. This was supposed to be for civic groups and volunteer fire companies, groups that provide services to their communities and need to be politically involved to accomplish those services. They have let in all kinds of grifters, and the numbers have been growing.
When I was an officer in a my public employees union we had to meet in ‘neutral territory’, a restaurant, when we were dealing with doling out our political contributions. We couldn’t meet in the union offices, and the money for the political stuff was totally separate, including being in a different bank. You had to do all of the political stuff on your own time, so that it was totally disconnected from normal union activities. It was a major PITA, but those are/were the rules.
Let these other political clowns put up with that crap, instead of the fraudulent 501 c 4 operations.
I have noticed that Zero has shown much favor to Democrats, although he hasn’t had many opportunities with Harry Reid refusing to change the filibuster rules.
Yah, when the Bush IRS audited a number of these groups back in 2006, they discovered that 75% of them didn’t actually qualify for the status. Nothing got done, of course, because it wouldn’t benefit either Congress or the President for anything to be done, they luvs them some anonymous donor monies to “non-partisan” groups that just happen to be run by *exactly* the same people as their former re-election committees. Funny, that, eh? 😈
My gut feeling if I worked at the IRS would be to start ‘cleaning out the stable’. If Congress wanted to create a new tax exempt class [501(c)(666)] for political groups, they could do it, but there is no need to group them with volunteer fire departments.
I would start with the big guys, OFA and Crossroads, and then work down through the list. The IRS won’t don’t it because they don’t want to make themselves a target.