Lerner, Paz say they fear physical harm from enraged public, want IRS testimony sealed permanently

Treasonous Bitch Who Sent Death Threats to Democracy 

From The Washington Times:

Former IRS executive Lois G. Lerner told a federal court last week that members of her family, including “young children,” face death threats and a real risk of physical harm if her explanation of the tea party targeting scandal becomes public. 

Ms. Lerner and Holly Paz, her deputy at the IRS, filed documents in court Thursday saying tapes and transcripts of depositions they gave in a court case this year must remain sealed in perpetuity, or else they could spur an enraged public to retaliate. 

“Whenever Mss. Lerner and Paz have been in the media spotlight, they have faced death threats and harassment,” attorneys for the two women argued. 

Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz gave taped depositions in a class-action lawsuit brought by tea party groups demanding answers and compensation for having been subjected to illegal targeting for their political beliefs. 

The government settled the class-action lawsuit in Ohio and another tea party challenge in the District of Columbia in two agreements last month, admitting to the illegal behavior. 

The Ohio settlement also called for the government to pay $3.5 million to the tea party groups, according to one of the plaintiffs. 

Ms. Lerner came in for particular criticism, with the government admitting she not only didn’t stop the targeting — contradicting the Obama administration’s claims — but also hid it from her superiors in Washington. 

During the course of the Ohio case, the tea party groups filed thousands of pages of documents, but testimony from Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz was left out of the public record because of their earlier request for privacy. 

Now Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say that since the case has been settled, there is no reason for their testimony to ever become public.

IRS Employee Looking for Lois Lerner Emails Was Blind, LITERALLY!

From PJM:

An IRS employee tasked with trying to restore and obtain emails on Lois Lerner’s IRS computer’s hard drive was legally blind. Stephen Manning, the deputy chief information officer for strategy and modernization at the IRS, submitted an affidavit in the True the Vote vs. 

IRS litigation regarding the persons and procedures used to attempt to recover Lois Lerner’s hard drive containing emails pertaining to Tea Party targeting. The affidavit can be read here. 

 Paragraph 14 describes the educational background of the person searching for data on Lois Lerner’s hard drive: 

“According to the Specialist, prior to joining the Internal Revenue Service … training was completed through Lions World Services for the Blind.” 

Sources familiar with the litigation confirm to me that the government confirmed that the IRS employee searching for the lost data was legally blind. It was also revealed today that backup tapes of Lois Lerner’s emails were discovered in an off-site storage facility in West Virginia. 

The inspector general of the Treasury Department learned that the tapes existed and drove to West Virginia to retrieve them. 

Lawyers for the Justice Department as well as IRS officials have stated under oath or to the federal courts that no such backup tapes existed. They were “recycled,” DOJ lawyers told the court.

Bank Account Seizures By The IRS

On the grounds of suspicion, no crime required.

From Bunkerville (citing the New York Times):

For almost 40 years, Carole Hinders has dished out Mexican specialties at her modest cash-only restaurant. For just as long, she deposited the earnings at a small bank branch a block away — until last year, when two tax agents knocked on her door and informed her that they had seized her checking account, almost $33,000.

The Internal Revenue Service agents did not accuse Ms. Hinders of money laundering or cheating on her taxes — in fact, she has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the money was seized solely because she had deposited less than $10,000 at a time, which they viewed as an attempt to avoid triggering a required government report....

I almost always make deposits of less than $10,000. Furthermore, because of the nature of my small business, I make frequent deposits (mostly checks). I'm probably safe on this one. So far.

Still our government keeps stepping outside the bounds of our Constitution.

How long are WE THE PEOPLE going to submit to creeping tyranny?

Re: That IRS "Scandal"

Jawa Report comments:

Digging A Hole 

And its getting deeper and deeper... 

Nevermind all the other scandals perpetrated by this administration. The IRS scandal alone should be enough to bring down any administration (and would if this were a Republican administration.) 

We have a computer crash that deleted emails on an individual computer. The hard drive on that computer was destroyed. 

The IRS hired an email archiving company to preserve emails through 2009, but that contract was canceled only days after the computer crash that deleted Lerner's emails. 

What we have is a deliberate and concerted effort to eliminate evidence. This by itself is a huge scandal, but every day its getting worse and worse.

YES,

AND,

The IRS Scandal is an attack right at the heart of the two things which most epitomize our Constitutional Democracy. That is, the IRS "Scandal" is the Obama Administration attacking

1) Free Speech

and

2) The election process

In other words, the Obama Administration has attacked our most fundamental right - the one upon which all our other freedoms rest - during an election cycle, in order to subvert the Democratic process within our nation.

I don't think a more direct attack upon our nation is possible short of outright war.

IRS CANCELLED Contract with Email-Storage Firm Weeks After Lerner’s Computer Crash

UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST

The questions not addressed by this article are:

DOES THE SONASOFT RETAIN COPIES OF THE ARCHIVES AFTER A RELATIONSHIP IS SEVERED, 

OR, 

DOES IT SONASOFT ROUTINELY RETURN THE ARCHIVES WHEN A RELATIONSHIP IS SEVERED, 

AND, IF SO,

DOES IT MEAN, SONASOFT TURNS OVER THE ARCHIVES AND THE IRS SUBSEQUENTLY DESTROYED THEM?

From the Daily Caller:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed. 

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” 

Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?” Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails. 

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right. 

Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. 

Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011. Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. 

Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot. IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax allegedly suffered her own computer crash in December 2011, three months after the IRS ended its relationship with Sonasoft.

UPDATED --- SONASOFT STILL CONSIDERS THE IRS A CUSTOMER 

Nicole Flax, Whose Emails The IRS "Lost", Visited The White House A LOT!

Another One Of "Those Things"

Somehow I missed this story, dated February 27, 2014.  Probably because of some goings-on at work.

Via Gateway Pundit:

After 3 Years, 2 Months & 10 Days – Tea Party Patriots Granted Tax Exempt Status By Phone Call on Eve of Congressional Testimony

After 3 years, 2 months, and 10 days; after thousands of man-hours, after tens of thousands of dollars in legal and accounting fees – the IRS called Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots to inform her that the conservative 501(c)(4) group was given tax-exempt status.

This was just hours before her testimony today before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Subcommittee on the IRS targeting scandal....

This morning, I stumbled across this in the Wall Street Journal:

Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal: The 'smoking gun' in the targeting of conservative groups has been hiding in plain sight

The mainstream press has justified its lack of coverage over the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups because there's been no "smoking gun" tying President Obama to the scandal. This betrays a remarkable, if not willful, failure to understand abuse of power. The political pressure on the IRS to delay or deny tax-exempt status for conservative groups has been obvious to anyone who cares to open his eyes. It did not come from a direct order from the White House, but it didn't have to....

Worth reading.

Preferential Treatment By The IRS

One group, one with delinquent tax filings from 2007-2011 and terrorist connections, certainly didn't testify before Congress's recent hearings regarding IRS's targeting of certain groups with the word "tea" and "patriot" in their names when those groups filed for 501(c) status.

The group that received preferential treatment? CAIR.

From this source:

...[I]n June 2012 … in plenty of time to get voters recruited and registered for the November 2012 election … and during the time that the IRS was targeting conservatives … the IRS miraculously sent a letter to the CAIR-Foundation indicating that the group had regained its tax-exempt status, with the spokesperson indicating all filed paperwork had been completed and filed. Concerned groups researched the claims and have shown that NOT to be the case however. In fact, the 2007-2010 returns cannot be produced, and CAIR filed an extension for 2011....

Read the rest HERE.

CAIR has ties to Hamas, yet was considered worthy of having 501(c) status restored. More about CAIR HERE at Anti-CAIR.

What should we make of CAIR's restored 501(c) status? That the restoration is more of Obama's outreach to Muslims?

CAIR also has strong ties to the Democratic Party:

...Though Democrat-connected CAIR did not officially endorse Obama, many of its staffers helped turn out the Muslim vote for his re-election. CAIR boasted that its own polling showed more than 85 percent of Muslim-Americans voted for Obama....

We shouldn't be surprised that CAIR's 501(c) status was restored.  Under our present government, "Some animals are more equal than others" — particularly those animals that would revise the principles upon which our nation was founded. We are living in Orwellian Times.

Coincidentally — or not — George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 was published sixty-four years ago yesterday.

Paul Ryan: Eloquent!

Message clear but totally ignored by the mainstream media:

IRS Hearings Today: Stunning ... Maddening

Added by AOW:

IRS Commissioner: Don't Worry, If You Don't Buy Health Insurance You'll Only Lose Your Tax Refund

Lying Obama lacky. Why are they hiring 16,000 new IRS agents? To not stringently enforce the individual mandate?...

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman.

After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Click on the title to read the whole story.

How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your records?

CBS NEWS:

Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer identity information, including the filing status, the modified adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and "other information as is prescribed by" regulation. That information will be provided to the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used to determine who qualifies for "affordability credits."

Section 245(b)(2)(A) says the IRS must divulge tax return details -- there's no specified limit on what's available or unavailable -- to the Health Choices Commissioner. The purpose, again, is to verify "affordability credits."

Section 1801(a) says that the Social Security Administration can obtain tax return data on anyone who may be eligible for a "low-income prescription drug subsidy" but has not applied for it.

Over at the Institute for Policy Innovation (a free-market think tank and presumably no fan of Obamacare), Tom Giovanetti argues that: "How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your records? The privacy of your health records will be only as good as the most nosy, most dishonest and most malcontented federal employee.... So say good-bye to privacy from the federal government. It was fun while it lasted for 233 years."

Have you ever wanted to just go off the grid and tell them all to go to hell?

Some non entity with the right active directory role and rights will be able to just copy everything I've done and share it with, whoever?

Just look at what they tried to do with Joe the Plumber in a week.

Can't you just hear the the nauseating shushing and 'don't worry, security will be in place' smarmy gag me with a spoon reassurances which reassure absolutely no one?

This is just ALL WRONG.