Tuesday, March 29, 2016

IRS Cover-Up Continues

Yes, the IRS Scandal may seem like old news (And I will get into one reason why in a minute.), but there has been an interesting development of late.   The Sixth U. S. Court of Appeals has openly showed they are fed up with IRS slowness to fork over key court-ordered documents.

Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian —should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own Inspector General for Tax Administration. Those findings include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called “unnecessary information.”

. . . At every turn the IRS has resisted the plaintiffs’ requests for information regarding the IRS’s treatment of the plaintiff class, eventually to the open frustration of the district court. At issue here are IRS “Be On the Lookout” lists of organizations allegedly targeted for unfavorable treatment because of their political beliefs. Those organizations in turn make up the plaintiff class. The district court ordered production of those lists, and did so again over an IRS motion to reconsider. Yet, almost a year later, the IRS still has not complied with the court’s orders. Instead the IRS now seeks from this court a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district court. We deny the petition.

And the court then more or less tells the IRS there had better be no more delays.

A federal agency caught targeting citizens based on their politics then being verrrrry slowwww to cooperate with the federal courts concerning the scandal to the point a Federal Appeals Court says they’ve had enough of the foot-dragging and cover-up.  Newsworthy, is it not?

The thing is the Mainstream “News” Media, particularly ABC, NBC, and CBS have joined the cover-up.  It has been over 513 days since any of the Big Three have reported on the IRS Scandal.

No wonder it seems like old news.  The Democrats and the Mainstream Noos Media (But I repeat myself.) want it that way.

Thus the IRS Cover-Up continues.

Imagine the media uproar if this were a Republican administration.

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