Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Austan Goolsbee remains likely name who willfully violated the law and retrieved private IRS data on a perceived Obama opponent, though Obama DOJ won't say and obviously the GOP isn't going to find out anything

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 The Obama admin. isn't exactly afraid of "republicans."

7/20/13, "DOJ Declines to Prosecute Officials Involved in Tax Record Scandal," Washington Free Beacon, CJ Ciaramella

"Confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly accessed by government officials, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute any of the officials involved, even in one “willful” violation of the law, an IRS watchdog reported.

In a July 3 letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the Treasury inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) J. Russell George acknowledged that government
officials had illegally accessed tax records of candidates and donors in four instances since 2006.
TIGTA determined that in three of the cases the access was “inadvertent.”

“In the fourth case, we presented evidence of a willful unauthorized access to the Department of Justice, but the case was declined for prosecution,” George wrote....

 As previously reported by the Free Beacon, there have been longstanding questions about possible unauthorized access to tax documents by former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, Goolsbee, the former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, sparked a mini-scandal in 2010 when he told reporters during a background press briefing that Koch Industries—the company of libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch—paid no income taxes.

Conservative lawmakers and activists said Goolsbee’s statements not only unfairly singled out the president’s political opponents but also used confidential IRS documents to do so. TIGTA announced in response to a letter from six Republican senators it was launching an investigation into Goolsbee’s comments and whether he violated the law. However, the report was never released to the senators or the public.

The Washington Examiner obtained an Aug. 10, 2011, email from Treasury Special Agent Daniel K. Carney, in which he wrote, The final report relative to the investigation of Austan Goolsbee’s press conference remark is completed, has gone through all the approval processes.”

The Free Beacon filed a FOIA request seeking the report, but TIGTA denied the request, saying it could neither confirm nor deny its existence of the report.

“With regard to your request for documents pertaining to a third party, TIGTA can neither admit nor deny the existence of responsive records,” said in its response. “Your request seeks access to the types of documents for which there is no public interest that outweighs the privacy interests established and protected by the FOIA (5 U.S.C. §§ 552(b)(7)(C) and (b)(6)).”" via Free Republic



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