Stand by Me Protest held at state capital in honor of Lavoy Finicum

A protest was held Saturday on the steps of the State Capitol. A few dozen protestors, who say they gathered to honor the life of the late LaVoy Finicum, also vowed to carry on his legacy by taking a stand against the federal government.
Stand By Me for LaVoy and Liberty was one of a number of similar rallies slated in states across the nation, including Texas, Florida and in Oregon.
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Inquiries Stall as White House Puts Leash on U.S. Watchdogs

Justice Department watchdogs ran into an unexpected roadblock last year when they began examining the role of federal drug agents in the fatal shootings of unarmed civilians during raids in Honduras. From Our Advertisers


The Drug Enforcement Administration balked at turning over emails from senior officials tied to the raids, according to the department's inspector general. It took nearly a year of wrangling before the D.E.A. was willing to turn over all its records in a case that the inspector general said raised serious questions about agents' use of deadly force.


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Senate Republicans decry Democrat abuse of Corporate Kicker

Following a release from left-wing activist group Our Oregon, Senate Republicans drew attention to an abuse of Oregon’s corporate kicker system: Democrat leaders intentionally underfunded K-12 education and refused to use money from the corporate kicker to increase funding for K-12 education, as directed by Oregon voters.

Instead, they used the corporate kicker to fund pet partisan priorities, not Oregon classrooms.


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In Trashing Land, The EPA Has Nothing On The Forest Service

Americans now comprehend fully the disdain the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has for truth-telling, the rights of others, and the environment. Forget the last six spiteful years; the Colorado mine disaster suffices. The EPA’s wanton malfeasance — experts warned of a catastrophic blowout — unleashed three million gallons of orange arsenic-, cadmium-, and lead-laden wastewater into an Animas River tributary trashing public, private, and tribal lands and waters in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation. Even so, the EPA has nothing on the U.S. Forest Service.


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Judicial Watch: New Documents Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Plan to Seek Criminal Charges...

Judicial Watch: New Documents Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Plan to Seek Criminal Charges of Obama Opponents (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.
The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.


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IRS official: ‘Lois Lerner was the tip of the iceberg’

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure division testified Wednesday that the tax agency set up a special team with hundreds of lawyers to handle the probe into whether Tea Party groups were targeted, but repeatedly said she had no idea how it operated.
Mary Howard, who also works as the head Freedom of Information Act officer in the IRS, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that once the “special project team” was created and operational, she never saw requests for information.
Asked who was on the team, she said: “My first hand knowledge of that is none.” But she did say the Chief Council of the IRS — one of only two political appointees in the IRS; the other is the commissioner — was on the “special project team,” as were “hundreds of attorneys.”


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IRS Pummeled by Court for Suggesting it's OK to Discriminate Against Pro-Israel Group

Chief Judge Garland to the IRS's lawyer: 'Go back and ask your superiors whether they want us to represent that the government's position in this case is that the government is free to unconstitutionally discriminate against its citizens for 270 days."
In a highly unusual public thrashing of a government lawyer for the Internal Revenue Service by the second highest U.S. court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked: “You don’t really mean that the IRS is free to discriminate against its citizens, do you?”


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Lois Lerner Received $129K in Bonuses

Former IRS official Lois Lerner received $129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013, records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

Over a three-year period, Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt division at the heart of the IRS targeting scandal, received a 25 percent retention bonus—averaging $43,000 a year—on top of her regular salary.

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Revealed: 2,500 new documents in IRS / W.H. harassment cases

In a shocking revelation, the Treasury Inspector General has identified some 2,500 documents that “potentially” show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.

The discovery was revealed to the group Cause of Action, which has sued for access to any of the documents. It charges that the IRS and White House have harassed taxpayers.

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IRS Admits to Court it Hasn’t Searched for Missing Lerner Emails

Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved.

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IRS Shocker: Filing Reveals Lerner Blackberry Destroyed

The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan’s court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner’s Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner’s hard drive.

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Judicial Watch: DOJ Admits Lois Lerner’s Emails Exist

A Justice Department official admitted that former IRS official Lois Lerner’s apparently missing emails actually exist on a backup server, but the government doesn’t plan to retrieve them.  “A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News’ Shannon Bream.

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Judge orders IRS to come up with better explanation of missing Lerner e-mails

The dog-ate-my-homework – er, excuse me, hard-drive-ate-our-emails excuse did just about as well in federal court as it would during an IRS audit. Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected the IRS’ response to the Judicial Watch complaint about missing e-mails from Lois Lerner and other IRS employees involved in the targeting scandal yesterday. Sullivan in effect took steps to conduct his own independent probe, issuing an order demanding specific answers — and demanding them by one week from today:

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New Emails: Lois Lerner Referred to Conservatives As ´***holes´ and ´TeRrorists´

A newly discovered email exchange from Lois Lerner´s official IRS email account "directly demonstrates Ms. Lerner´s deep animus towards conservatives, which she refers to as ´---holes,´" House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday. In that Nov. 9, 2012 email, Lerner further suggests that conservatives will ruin the country: "So we don´t need to worry about alien teRrorists (sic). It´s our own crazies that will take us down," she wrote.

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

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 severs?

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No Wonder the IRS Is ‘Losing’ E-mails: It Was Trying to Throw Innocent Conservatives in Jail

Even a small child can connect these dots.

The IRS is announcing the “loss” of mass numbers of e-mails (do they have any computers that don’t crash?) even as the e-mails that do exist are beginning to show the extent of IRS corruption. Let’s take this exchange (previously uncovered by Judicial Watch) between Lois Lerner, the director of exempt organizations at the IRS, and Nikole Flax, then the IRS commissioner’s chief of staff. (To be clear, these are not “low level” employees.)

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GOP fury after report claims IRS 'recycled' Lerner hard drive

The top Republican on one of the House committees investigating the IRS targeting scandal reacted furiously late Wednesday to a report that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner's hard drive had been recycled, making it likely that many emails sent to and from Lerner prior to the summer of 2011 will never be recovered.  The Politico report cited two anonymous sources, as well as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who confirmed that the Senate Finance Committee had been told that the hard drive had been discarded.

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What the IRS Commissioner Said About Those Lois Lerner Emails Back in March

Friday’s revelation that the IRS “lost” Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash came ten months after Congress first requested them and seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. But what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified about the emails at a hearing in March appears to be at odds with his agency’s newer reported claims that the emails are irretrievable. Under questioning by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on the House Oversight Committee, Koskinen said IRS emails “get taken off and stored in servers.” That was part of the reason, he said, it was so difficult to provide them in a timely fashion. Read more at SharylAttkisson.com Read More......

Report: IRS Sent Database Containing Confidential Taxpayer Information to FBI

The Internal Revenue Service may have been caught violating federal tax law: In October 2010, the agency sent a database on 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups containing confidential taxpayer information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents obtained by a House panel.  The information was transmitted in advance of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s meeting the same month with Justice Department officials about the possibility of using campaign-finance laws to prosecute certain non-profit groups. E-mails between Lerner and Richard Pilger, the director of the Justice Department’s election crimes branch, obtained through a subpoena to Attorney General Eric Holder, show Lerner asking about the format in which the FBI preferred the data to be sent.

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House Republicans find 10% of tea party donors audited by IRS

Despite assurances to the contrary, the IRS didn’t destroy all of the donor lists scooped up in its tea party targeting — and a check of those lists reveals that the tax agency audited 10 percent of those donors, much higher than the audit rate for average Americans, House Republicans revealed Wednesday.

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