Reid J. Epstein
Politico
5/14/2013
The IRS came after Billy Graham, too, his son charged Tuesday in a letter to President Barack Obama.
Franklin Graham, the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the family’s international humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse, said that the IRS notified the organizations in September that it was conducting a “review” of their activities for tax year 2010.
With the IRS admitting it gave extra scrutiny to conservative political organizations, Graham says he now believes that the review was part of an Obama administration effort of “targeting and attempting to intimidate us.”…
…“While these audits not only wasted taxpayer money, they wasted money contributed by donors for ministry purposes as we had to spend precious resources servicing the IRS agents in our offices,” Graham wrote in the letter, which was shared with POLITICO. “I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us. This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.”…
The article continues at Politico.
Related: IRS intimidation forced founder to shut down Tea Party group
The IRS scandal is growing by leaps and bounds in a way that must be terrifying to an Administration already dealing with fallout from the uncovering of their Libya lies and the knowledge that the Department of Justice seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters. Tuesday morning, ABC News revealedwhat might have been the political motivation behind the IRS’s decision to target Tea party groups — to ensure they weren’t as effective in 2012 as they were in 2010…
…”In the documents that were sent to me, if you did not tell the whole truth by not putting all your personal information out there by Facebook, by Twitter, of your personal relationship with candidates and parties … it could be considered perjury and perjury carried jail time,” Stefano, 39, told ABC News.
“That was frightening and that’s why I shut it down. I shut my group down.”…
…Other Tea Party groups interviewed complained of getting bogged down by the paperwork. One group claims that “500 pages of stuff” went “back and forth” between them and the IRS:
There was kind of a cloud over us. … It did curtail the things we could do. We could not go outside the IRS rules. Tax-exempt status allows you to do certain things, and we did not go outside them…
Rand Paul wants criminal charges against officials involved in IRS targeting
…“The IRS has been using taxing power as a political tool to bully these conservative groups and this type of intimidation is a major violation of our U.S. Constitution,” Paul said in a statement released by his office. “This act of discrimination should not be tolerated and I demand a formal investigation seeking criminal charges against any individuals who authorized or were involved in targeting people of the United States based on their political views.”
Levin: Republican establishment bought into ‘kooky tea party slander’
…Levin pointed out that Landmark was able to put together a full report despite not having the powers of subpoena that Congress has.
He thinks that Congress didn’t hold the type of hearings they should have because the GOP establishment “bought into this argument that these were right-wingers who were not reliable, and they didn’t want to put their political necks on the line. The House must take its responsibility for investigating corruption seriously, much more seriously.”
Levin is critical of the lack of due diligence by House Republicans…
…After Obama was elected, I faced my first IRS audit shakedown after decades of filing income tax returns. Overdue coincidence? Perhaps.
Given the headlines of the past 48 hours, perhaps not.
My audit experience was a headache, as anyone who has experienced one can attest. When it happened, a former IRS lawyer with whom I associated in private practice told me – “it’s no accident you were audited.”…
CAJ note: J. Christian Adams is the former DOJ attorney/whistleblower in the New Black Panthers voter intimidation scandal.
