The Patriot Post® · IRS Enemies List Revealed
Barack Obama’s IRS enemies list included a total of at least 466 organizations, the IRS has admitted after three years of legal wrangling. It only took a federal appeals court order. The total is a far cry from the 298 organizations the Treasury Department’s inspector general said had been targeted when the scandal first broke in May 2013. And the number also comes with a caveat: Though the vast majority were conservative groups, some number of leftist groups were on the list, but attorneys for the plaintiffs believe the IRS cast its net wider once the scandal was discovered so as to blunt the charges of an ideological bent to its targeting.
According to The Washington Times, “Sixty of the groups on the list released last month have the word ‘tea’ in their name, 33 have ‘patriot,’ eight refer to the Constitution, and 13 have ‘912’ in their name — which is the moniker of a movement started by conservatives. Another 26 group names refer to ‘liberty,’ though that list does include some groups that are not discernibly conservative in orientation.” The IRS redacted the names of 40 organizations that opted out of legal action. As Mark Alexander recounted, “A legal and tax advisor to The Patriot Post informed us that the Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, our education fund advocating Liberty and constitutional integrity, clearly ‘met the criterion for the corrupt IRS inquisition,’ but for a couple of reasons (which we can’t disclose publicly) we were passed over for review.”
The whole scheme was clearly an effort to derail conservative opposition to Obama’s re-election bid. Many of these groups were essentially unable to participate in the campaign, and we’ll never be able to quantify exactly how much that helped Obama. Yet Lois Lerner, one of the chief IRS officials at the center of the scandal, was able to retire in peace, and no other accountability has been forthcoming. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, confirmed in 2013 on promises to reform the agency, has stonewalled all efforts to do so.
And because Obama successfully avoided any kind of paper trail, we may never know the extent of his involvement. As Alexander wrote previously, the administration was “smart enough to use ‘cutouts’ between their office and the bureaucrats committing the offense. Cutouts are bureaucratic managers who act as surrogates to do the political bidding of elected officials. They are blamed and sacrificed for the ‘good of the cause,’ in order to protect (read: ‘provide plausible deniability for’) elected officials who feign outrage and indignation at the violation of law in support of their political agenda. When the president of the United States is the elected official behind a culture of corruption and abuse of power, the layers of cutouts make it nearly impossible to find impeachable evidence of executive collusion.”
On a final note, the Leftmedia has done nothing but circle the wagons. According to NewsBusters, “[I]t’s been 587 days since any network reported on the IRS scandal, when CBS This Morning made a mention of it on October 28, 2014. NBC last noted the targeting scandal 614 days ago and it’s been over two-years — a whopping 760 days — since ABC last mentioned it on the May 8, 2014 Good Morning America.” Hear no evil, see no evil, report no evil.