Trampling the First Amendment

The head of the department where the IRS actions took place has plead the fifth in a letter and is not expected to testify. Should get interesting....



Lerner’s attorney William Taylor III asked committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., in a letter if she could skip Wednesday’s hearing since she would be pleading the Fifth. Taylor argued in the letter that forcing Lerner to appear “would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.”
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Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...ent-wednesday-in-house-hearing/#ixzz2U1mVcLJO
 
The head of the department where the IRS actions took place has plead the fifth in a letter and is not expected to testify. Should get interesting....
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She was, however, permitted to read an unsworn self-serving prepared statement before raising her 5th amendment privilege. That should never have been allowed to occur.
 
Regarding Lerner's appearance, I cannot say if she has waived her Fifth Amendment right or not. I know that in civil cases and in front of a grand jury, a witness is not normally allowed not to testify at all. They must invoke their Fifth Amendment right to individual questions. In civil cases, the fact finder can draw adverse inferences on the witness's refusal to answer questions.

At criminal trials, they are not usually allowed to testify at all if they are going to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to some of the questions because it is simply unfair to both parties to get only part of the story. At least I think that is the rationale as I have never seen a witness take the stand knowing he or she is going to take the Fifth.

If I'm not mistaken, one doesn't have to be under oath to be guilty of misleading or obstructing Congress. I believe that Lt.Col. Oliver North had made unsworn statements to members outside of committee meetings which misled them in their duties. He was convicted of obstruction of Congress but that conviction was vacated because of an unrelated foul up.
 
Apparently the suppression of Political groups was going on for longer than suspected as early as 2010:

Hofacre’s Cincinnati bureau used a “be-on-the-lookout” (BOLO) list that included the words “Tea Party” and “Patriot” that was used to flag conservative applications for extra scrutiny. Many targeted groups have come forward in the days since the scandal broke and said the IRS held up their applications, asked invasive questions and tried other tactics to slow the approval process.
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Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...-2010-not-2011/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz2W2NnErI8
 
Just for the record, the IRS has been used to target political opponents (and dissenters in general) by every administration since at least that of President Eisenhower. The IRS was one of the main tools of the illegal COINTEL program, begun by J. Edgar Hoover in 1956. Under that program, the FBI used information provided by the IRS to target a wide range of "subversive" individuals and groups under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

During the Nixon administration, the IRS was given lists of (left-wing) activists by the Dept. of Justice, and instructed to audit and harass them. Around 3,000 groups and 8,000 individuals were so targeted, solely on the basis of their political speech.

The Kennedy, Clinton, and both Bush administrations all used the IRS in similar ways.

There's nothing new about any of this. What's actually different about the current "scandal" is that the Ohio IRS office was conducting routine investigations of whether 501(4)(c) organizations were eligible for tax-exempt status. They seem to have been more zealous in investigating groups with "Tea party" or "Patriot" in their names, but it was their legitimate job to investigate applications by all such groups.
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http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/1...servatives-anchored-in-long-history-of-abuse/
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013...liberal-and-conservative-administrations.html
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/
 
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Under that program, the FBI used information provided by the IRS to target a wide range of "subversive" individuals and groups under both Republican and Democratic administrations.


What's actually different about the current "scandal"...
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What is also different is that some of those organization were trying to over throw the government through illegal means, some had backings of foreign powers unfriendly to the US (USSR, Cuba etc) or out right enemies (Vietnam, North Korea). There were a lot of other differences too such as Hoover essentially considering himself to be the embodiment of the law himself. Oh, wait, maybe there is not that much difference after all. It just moved up the chain a bit.
 
I find it ironic that the author of the Patriot Act now says the act was supposed to specifically prevent exactly the type of data mining that has been carried out. Can we say "We told ya so"?

Also, that same author of the Patriot Act has stated that he does NOT consider the NSA leaker to be a traitor.
 
Also, that same author of the Patriot Act has stated that he does NOT consider the NSA leaker to be a traitor.
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The more we learn, the more it seems he may just be a malcontent. There have been real questions raised about how sinister the Prism program really is, and many aspects of Snowden's story appear to be exaggerated.

While the outrage is grounded in real concerns, I'm not seeing the campaign of disinformation I'd expect to if Snowden had a real smoking gun.
 
I'm not seeing the campaign of disinformation I'd expect to if Snowden had a real smoking gun.
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I'm of the opinion that this is by design. The more silence from those in the know, the less damaging it seems to be.
 
While the outrage is grounded in real concerns, I'm not seeing the campaign of disinformation I'd expect to if Snowden had a real smoking gun.
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You may not be looking in the right places, Tom. There's a major effort underway to discredit Mr. Snowden, both by questioning his motives and attacking him personally in other terms: He's been called self-indulgent (yup, you've gotta be really self-indulgent to walk away from a $200,000/year job and risk being jailed for the rest of your life...), a "total slacker," a narcissist, a traitor, an individualistic loner (!), and he's been attacked for his lack of higher education and his support of Ron Paul.

He's been attacked in these terms by columnists from Politico, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News and the New York Times -- just to name a few.

And as to disinformation, the government is eating its cake and having it:
The U.S. government has two contradictory responses to the leaks. First, it says, the stuff Snowden has leaked is no big deal and the media are guilty of “hyperbole” in their reporting on it.

On the other hand, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “For me, it is literally — not figuratively — literally gut wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.”

So take your pick.​
 
Tom Servo. I will withhold opinion on Snowden.

I would suggest, though, that it is not unheard of for our government to deal with potentially embarrassing situations by publicly awarding medals to people involved, then quietly sidelining their careers.

For that matter, how much did our government talk about Omar Torrijos in the 1970s and early 1980s?
 
On the phone records portion, the government is evidently going to say that since the records were meta-data, or electronic records, that they are not covered by the 4th Amendment. However, and you can see by the quote below, that we are covered under our "effects".

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

Also, it is impossible to gain a blanket warrant on every US citizen, when we have done nothing suspect, nor any wrong.

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I am pretty sure that the IRS scandal goes to the top, but Obama has too many in his administration willing to fall on their sword for him, so we'll never get to see him get the blame. An old adage holds true here, "The fish rots from the head down".
 
The content of the calls is the least important part when you are able to collect the entire web - essentially the entire communications network of this country and collate it in any manner you wish. Instead of having to weed through vast amounts of peripheral, unimportant communications (which even among criminals incriminatory information is likely to be an infinitesimally small percentage), you can very quickly, with the aid of massively powerful computers and sophisticated data mining tools, identify your enemies (foreign and domestic), and assemble lists of their networks. Everyone they call. Everyone who calls them. Exactly what you'd want if you're looking to take concerted action at some point.

And no one - NO ONE is asking the right questions. The most important of which is - how do we KNOW that this is only being used against presumed terrorist threats? How are we to be reassured that this isn't being used to amass data on presumed political adversaries and distributed to the administration's political allies for their use?

We don't know any of that. No one has asked that question, certainly not publicly. And with this administration, I think skepticism on the part of folks like this who deeply distrust the president and his administration, is quite rational and reasonable.
 
csmsss,

I'm sure everyone would agree that nobody would trust Obama and his administration in an outhouse with their muzzles on. Not after all the tales they've told, and after the last poll I saw, at The Washington Post, that was proved two times+ over to be wrong by the replies it got. 1000 was in the supposed poll, that nobody was contacted by who replied, with 3500+ replies, saying they sure never thought that way, nor agreed with it. I was one of those who didn't either. The poll was to "select" people.

No, it will take a congressional subpoena to demand every document connected to this, and they'll try to deny sending anything on the grounds of confidentiality and national security.

No, the people had learned their lesson well, and the framers of the Constitution, from what was brought upon our families from Britain, and they wanted to make sure that our privacy was protected, to the tooth, with the Constitutional Amendments, which the first 13 were added shortly after the signing. The Slaughterhouse case even agrees with this, in that the framers of the amendments were afraid of the federal government.

Now, to the 4th Amendment, and the reason I said our effects, is I do not believe the framers intended that to mean only personal effects, and if they had, they would have said so. Effects means that it coves anything that we have originated or caused to come into effect; any record. That is the standard definition of it, and is what will need to be used before SCOTUS. Also, to me, it would be impossible for any judge, with knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to issue a blanket warrant against every US citizen, because it would be impossible to have any true probable cause, and any truthful and honest judge would know this.
 
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