Crime and Punishment

Obama’s IRS Management Problem

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The Obama administration has a huge “management problem” with its spin of the nakedly partisan and highly illegal IRS denial of Tea Party non-profit tax status. One that makes the IRS scandal an “on-going criminal conspiracy” in the RICO sense and places “Nixon offense” impeachment charges in Pres. Obama’s future.

This is the IRS Tea Party Case Timeline Courtesy of ABC News:

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Appendix%20VI%20and%20Appendix%20VII.PDF

This is my list of the Cincinnati, Ohio and IRS HQ management positions involved in Tea Party cases by title, location and first date mentioned from the linked document.

1. Determinations Unit Group Manager (Ohio?) [1] — 1 Mar 2010
2. Acting Manager, Technical Unit [1] (Ohio) — 16 Mar 2010
3. New Acting Manager, Technical Unit [2] (Ohio) — 1 Apr 2010
4. Determinations Unit Program Manager (Ohio?) — 25 Apr 2010
5. Determinations Unit Area Manager (Ohio?)– 26 Oct 2010
6. Technical Unit manager (Ohio) — 16 Nov 2010
7. Senior Technical Advisor to the Director, EO (IRS Washington DC) — 13 Dec 2010
8. New Technical Unit Acting Manager [3] (Ohio) — Jan 2011
9. Acting Director, Rulings and Agreements [1] (IRS Washington DC) — 1 June 2011
10. Director, EO. (IRS Washington DC) — 29 June 2011
11. -Title or titles unknown- in EO function (IRS Washington DC) Headquarters office — 5 July 2011
12. IRS Chief Counsel (IRS Washington DC) — 4 Aug 2011
13. New Acting Director, Rulings and Agreements [2] (IRS Washington DC) — October 2011
14. New Acting Group Manager “of the team of specialists” (Ohio?) — March 2012
15. Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement (IRS Washington DC) — 8 Mar 2012
16. Senior Technical Advisor to the Acting Commissioner, Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division (IRS Washington DC) — 23 Mar 2012
17. Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement (IRS Washington DC) — 23 Mar 2012
18. Senior Technical Advisor to the Acting Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division Commissioner (IRS Washington DC) — 23 Apr 2012
19. Director, Rulings and Agreements (May be same as #10 above, IRS Washington DC)– 17 May 2012
20 -Title(s) Unknown- Quality Assurance Unit (Ohio?) — May 2012
21 -Title(s) Unknown- Operations Unit (Ohio?) — May 2012
22. New Acting Determinations Unit Group Manager [2] (Ohio) — 15 July 2012

In August March 2012 then IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman testified before Congress that the IRS was not harassing or making a special effort to deny Tea Party affiliated organizations their non-profit tax status. The above list either makes IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman a liar or a sock puppet for Obama administration IRS appointees who did lie. Douglas Shulman is going to need to lawyer up regardless.

The fact that there were, by my count three different “Manager, Technical Unit” and two “Determinations Unit Group Manager” in Cincinnati, Ohio involved over several years makes this Tea Party witch hunt anything but a “local IRS unit run amok.” This was an on-going criminal conspiracy involving IRS senior management over a matter of years.

A class action RICO lawsuit by the Tea Party against the IRS is very much on the table and the IRS won’t have sovereign immunity for “criminal actions taken under the color of law.” That point about federal government criminality was decided decades ago in various US Government high level nuclear waste dumping law suits before the Supreme Court.

Impeachment of President Obama for IRS-related “Nixon Offenses” is now on the table.

Note — This is the 3rd 4th Update of this post

History Friday: The Haunting of Mason County

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The so-called Mason County Hoo-Doo War was one of those particularly impenetrable frontier feuds which mixed up all the classic western feud elements into one bloody and protracted mess; legal possession of land provided one cause for conflict, there was also a clash between cattle ranchers and local farmers and townsmen, wrangling over the ownership of cattle branded and otherwise ethnic resentment between German and native-born American or Anglo settlers, the passions of Unionist and Confederate partisans still at a simmer in the aftermath of the Civil War, and finally, that Mason County was situated on the far frontier, where enforcement of the law was a sketchy and erratically enforced thing.

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Progress in closing Guantanamo

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In his campaign, president Obama famously promised to “close Guantanamo Bay prison ” early in his administration. It didn’t happen. Then Eric Holder determined that he would try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal court in New York City. That didn’t happen.

The death blow was struck by New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who had previously pledged his support to Holder. On January 27th, Bloomberg distanced himself from the Justice Department, saying that a trial in New York would be too expensive. For months, companies with downtown real-estate interests had been lobbying to stop the trial. Raymond Kelly, the commissioner of the New York Police Department, had fortified their arguments by providing upwardly spiralling estimates of the costs, which the federal government had promised to cover. In a matter of weeks, in what an Obama Administration official called a “classic City Hall jam job,” the police department’s projection of the trial costs went from a few hundred million dollars to a billion dollars.

Eventually, the conservative movement relaxed and concluded that the idea of granting terrorists American style civil rights had lost. Not so fast.

In another of those Obama fast moves, the concept of civilian trials just won the contest. As Mark Twain said, the lie is half way around the world, while the truth is still getting its boots on.

In the blink of an eye, the second Obama term has turned the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when al-Qaeda was a law-enforcement problem, not a national-security challenge.

Of course, it was a Friday afternoon. That’s when Obama does his best work.

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The Normalization of Abusive Government

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Consider:

1) The Drug Enforcement Administration is attempting to seize a $1.5 million building owned as a retirement-investment property by a dentist and an engineer. Grounds are a $37 sale of pot ..to an undercover agent..by one of the building’s tenants, a medical-marijuana dispensary.

As the judge in the case notes, the Obama administration (in 2009) sent a memo instructing federal prosecutors to not target medical-marijuana patients..before deciding to crack down and sending threatening letters to landlords.  He even wondered aloud if President Obama would change his mind about marijuana again, after the building had already been seized.

This, in a country whose current President pretty clearly was himself a marijuana user, not to mention former President Bill Clinton, who “didn’t inhale.” Neither Obama nor Clinton are in any danger of having their property seized, however.

2) When financial questions arose regarding the Mountain Pure Water Company, Washington did not send a few staffers to inspect documents. Instead, last spring, some 50 armed Treasury agents breached the company’s  headquarters in Little Rock, Ark. They seized 82 boxes of records, herded employees into the cafeteria, snatched their cell phones, and..according to reports..refused to let them consult attorneys.

“We’re the federal government,” Mountain Pure’s comptroller, Jerry Miller, says  one pistol-packing fed told him. “We can do what we want, when we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

3) In Alexandria, Virginia, a 10-year-old was suspended and arrested for bringing a toy gun to school

4) In Tennessee, an Ohio couple was pulled over by  pair of black police SUVs.  “They were very serious,” said the woman who was driving. “They had the body armor and the guns.”

On the back of the couple’s car was a Buckeye leaf decal, similar to the one Ohio State players have on their helmets.

“What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” asked one of the cops, who had apparently never heard of the First Amendment.

5) In 2005, an Iowa couple purchased a small lot.  When they began to lay gravel on the land, which is located in a residential neighborhood, they were hit by an order from the Environmental Protection Administration informing them that the property had been designated a wetland under the Clean Water Act. They were ordered to stop grading their property and were told that they would face fines of up to $75,000 per day if they did not return the parcel to its original state. When the Sacketts attempted to contest the order, the agency  denied their request for a hearing.

Last March, the Supreme Court overruled the EPA  and stated that the Sacketts are entitled to appeal  the EPA order, rejecting the agency’s claims to the contrary.

“The EPA used bullying and threats of terrifying fines, and has made our life hell for the past five years,” said Mr. Sackett. See my post A Defensive Victory Against Administrative Tyranny.

6) Bob Wallace and Marjorie Ottenberg, California residents in their 80s, started a business to make water purification devices for backpackers. Their enterprise has been crippled by the Drug Enforcement Administration and state officials, on grounds that iodine crystals–a key ingredient in their product–can also be used for  methamphetamine production.

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Helter-Skelter

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I was a teenager when the Manson murders went down, in the autumn of 1969 of course, the cruel and inexplicable murder of a movie star and several of her friends made all the headlines, and had lots of law-abiding citizens looking over their shoulders and being very careful about locking the doors and windows of their homes at night. It wasn’t until some time later that the associated murders of an elderly retired couple also hit the headlines of the LA Times, and other national newspapers. A blood-drenched, hippy cult with a weirdly charismatic leader had committed those murders in order so they claimed to trigger a devastating racial war, which they termed ‘helter-skelter’ from a Beatles song moderately popular at the time.

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