Daily Archives: 9 June 2016

IRS Shenanigans

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The IRS, after three years of stonewalling and after a Federal judge’s explicit order to stand and deliver, has at last released the list of the organizations it claims to have targeted for blocking from tax exempt status.  “Claims” because the list has grown, from the 298 avowedly conservative organizations originally identified by the Treasury Department’s IG to a total of 426 that the IRS finally listed for the judge.

Edward Greim, a lawyer for NorCal Tea Party Patriots, a party to the suit demanding the IRS give up its list, had this about the difference in size between the list Treasury released three years ago and the list the IRS released:

Based on these changes, which to date remain unexplained, a very real possibility—if not probability—exists that the IRS modified its targeting in light of the investigations, packing its own internal lists of targeted groups to support its preferred narrative, including by adding ideologically diverse groups[.]

It would be interesting to see the dates of something representing the initial delay applied to each of these groups.

Stonewalling

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This blatantly insults our intelligence.  The Republication National Committee sued in Federal court to enforce a FOIA request for a years’ worth of correspondence involving then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aides, including her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; Jacob Sullivan, one of her advisers; and Patrick Kennedy, a senior State official at the time, a FOIA request against which State had already been stonewalling.  In response, State had a filing:

The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years—and would stretch “generations.”

Generations to check out a year.  State expanded on those 75 years:

…it would take approximately 16-and-2/3 years to complete the review of the Mills documents, 33-and-1/3 years to finish the review of the Sullivan documents, and 25 years to wrap up the review of the Kennedy documents — or 75 years in total[.]

Because, State says, it’ll only process 500 pages, per month, and there are 450,000 pages of these documents.

The presiding judge should hold those State Department bureaucrats in contempt of court and send his bailiff to seize the records and the computers on which they sit, as well as any hard copy files, and bring them to his court where a court-appointed team of evaluators can go over them.

Fat chance, unfortunately.