WHY DID THE FBI AND DOJ DO NOTHING?
by Fergus Hodgson, ©2016, Tax Revolution Institute
(Aug. 2, 2016) — Recently released documents show the US Department of Justice was well aware of the Internal Revenue Service’s railroading of advocacy groups as they applied for nonprofit status, specifically those with Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street affiliations. Not only did law-enforcement officials know about the ideological targeting, which began in 2010, they had two years to address the problem before it became known to the public.
The two rounds of documents obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 294 and 105 pages, are the product of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from Judicial Watch. The self-described conservative organization “promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law,” and its president, Tom Fitton, had choice words for federal officials.
“These new smoking-gun documents show [the] Obama FBI and Justice Department had plenty of evidence suggesting illegal targeting, perjury, and obstruction of justice… [They] collaborated with … Lois Lerner and the IRS to try to prosecute and jail Barack Obama’s political opponents.… [Then] the resulting compromised investigation looked the other way when it came to Obama’s IRS criminality.”
Lois Lerner, a former director with the IRS, did resign over her leadership of the Exempt Organizations Unit in Cincinnati, where the wrongdoing took place. However, there has not been a single criminal charge in response to the delayed or rejected approvals of at least 466 organizations.
In 2015, Justice Department officials stated that they had uncovered “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment, and institutional inertia.” However, in their words, “poor management is not a crime.”
That explanation has not squared well with many people, including elected representatives, who saw these acts as methodical and far beyond mere negligence. The “be on the lookout” (BOLO) lists, which acted as a filter, singled out groups with the words “patriot” and “liberty” in their names, along with “9-12,” which meant groups under an umbrella led by paleoconservative media-personality Glenn Beck.
A small minority of the groups did have “occupy” in their names. However, the attorney representing the NorCal Tea Party and leading a class-action lawsuit against the IRS, believes the targeting of progressives most likely came later, to make their actions appear non-political.
Further, attempts to find out who instigated the strategy — presumably high-level officials — have bumped into roadblocks, and thus provoked a second round of allegations directed at the IRS. That includes “lost” emails, lying to Congress, and deliberate efforts to evade public scrutiny.
——————-
Read the rest here.