What’s the other half of this story? What Mark Steyn attributes here to behavior of the IRS in the audits, leaking of info to rival groups isn’t just scandalous.
“Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by El Presidente. More to the point, he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the Government of the United States went ahead, anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too – as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.
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Mr. VanderSloot is big enough, just about, to see off the most powerful government on the planet. Most of those who’ve caught the eye of the IRS share nothing in common with him other than his political preferences. They’re nobodies – ordinary American citizens guilty of no crime except that of disagreeing with the ruling party. Yet they were asked, under “penalty of perjury,” to disclose the names of books they were reading and provide the names and addresses of relatives who might be planning to run for public office – a kind of pre-enemies list. Is that banana-republic enough for you yet? Not apparently for Juan Williams, fired from NPR for thought crime a couple of years ago, but who was nevertheless energetically defending the IRS exertions on Fox News on Thursday evening.
Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4) applications approved in weeks; right-wing groups were delayed for months and years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts, and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer service” – which it was, in the sense that your call is important to him and may be monitored by George Soros for quality control.”
