The two IRS agents who blew the whistle on the Hunter Biden tax investigation and significantly altered the course of the case, on Friday night sued the first son’s lawyer Abbe Lowell for defamation.
The two whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, are suing for libel because of the alleged damage done to their careers, and are requesting a jury trial in Washington, D.C.
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With the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop having been verified again – this time in court – data extracted from it about the first son’s long-history of tax problems will likely be key to federal prosecutors in Biden’s upcoming tax evasion trial.
The contents of the hard drive, obtained and authenticated by the FBI as early as December 2019 will show the first son’s tax delinquency and unsuccessful efforts to settle his massive debts with the IRS while continuing to spend beyond his means, according to emails obtained from the laptop by Just the News.
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Federal agents gathered evidence during the 2016 election that Hunter Biden had used access to his father on an official government trip to Beijing aboard Air Force Two to connect prospective Chinese business partners with then-Vice President Joe Biden, according to a massive cache of documents recently turned over to Congress and obtained by Just the News.
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The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.
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The whistleblower group that represented the IRS agents in the Hunter Biden case is warning that the Biden administration is preparing an “unconstitutional“ power grab to regulate private gun sales by requiring a background check.
In a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Empower Oversight said it had learned from two sources that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was directed by the White House to make the change and “has drafted a 1,300-page document in support of a rule that would effectively ban private sales of firearms from one citizen to another by requiring background checks for every sale.”
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Former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison on Monday after leaking former President Donald Trump’s tax records, according to NBC News.
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The Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday announced roughly $1 billion in penalty relief to those owing back taxes from 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The sweeping tax evasion indictment brought by federal prosecutors against Hunter Biden in California vindicates the testimony of two IRS whistleblowers while leaving one tantalizing question unanswered: how did the first’s son transfers of funds and profligate spending intersect with Joe Biden, if at all?
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler say they weren’t allowed to pursue evidence that might answer that question. But lawmakers pursuing an impeachment inquiry in Congress might just get the chance.
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Hunter Biden’s offer to testify before the House Oversight Committee is a clever evasion, nothing more. The president’s son says he will testify only if the hearing is publicly televised. Nice try. Subpoenaed witnesses don’t get to set the terms. The committee does.
Why make an offer that is bound to be rejected? For two reasons. The PR goal is for Hunter to appear willing to testify, when he actually wants desperately to avoid it. The legal goal is to prevent, or at least delay, the committee from enforcing its subpoena. Hunter and his hardball attorney, Abbe Lowell, probably figure the Biden administration’s Department of Justice won’t go to court and demand compliance. That’s not a bad bet. If the DOJ does refuse, the House will go to court itself, but that will take time and may not succeed.
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As Joe Biden marched toward the presidency in 2020 with a promise to force the wealthy to pay their “fair share” of taxes, his son Hunter was scrambling behind closed doors to clean up a trail of his own delinquent taxes before they became an election scandal, according to once-secret IRS memos made public recently by Congress.
IRS agents would soon discover that the future first son was continuing to allegedly misrepresent his income and deductions to the very accountant he had hired to help, the memos show.
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The IRS is investigating the tax-exempt status of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) following its reporting on President Joe Biden’s nominees, several of whom withdrew their nominations, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The IRS is requesting AAF submit internal financial data as well as communications, including meeting notes, publications and newsletters, according to the letter from the IRS to AAF obtained by the DCNF. The conservative nonprofit organization, which the IRS approved for tax-exempt status in August 2021, alleges the investigation is in retaliation for the AAF reporting on several recent Biden nominees who later withdrew their nominations.
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The IRS commissioner announced last month that the agency will now deploy artificial intelligence in pursuit of “wealthy tax cheats” who are using partnership structures to pay “little to no tax.” But the announcement’s logic doesn’t pass the smell test — the real intent seems to be to intimidate successful small businesspeople away from using legal tax minimization strategies.
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The FBI and IRS probed allegations that Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign may have benefitted from “campaign finance criminal violations” by allowing a politically connected lawyer to help pay off Hunter Biden’s large tax debts but agents were blocked by federal prosecutors from further action, according to new information uncovered by congressional investigators.
The previously unreported campaign finance inquiry was first alluded to in transcribed interviews by House investigators with two IRS agents and a retired FBI supervisor, and the allegations since have been augmented in recent weeks by new evidence uncovered by the House Ways and Means Committee, the House Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee.
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“Nonprofit voter registration” doesn’t sound interesting. Yet nonprofit voter registration, or the use of tax-exempt charitable organizations to conduct and fund voter registration drives, is one of the most important and underreported political scandals of our time.
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IRS Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley’s legal team issued a statement Monday in reaction to Hunter Biden filing a federal lawsuit against the IRS.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced new enforcement initiatives Friday to crack down on 1,600 millionaires and 75 large companies it said owe hundreds of millions in unpaid taxes.
IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel said the agency will use Inflation Reduction Act funding to focus on high-income earners, partnerships, large corporations and promoters. He said the IRS won’t increase audit rates for those earning less than $400,000 a year.
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Banking whistleblowers first began raising alarms about Hunter Biden’s business deals as long ago as Spring 2015 while his father was still serving as vice president, flagging what they feared were “suspicious” transactions and “fraudulent” schemes. One of the bankers became so concerned he eventually escalated his concerns to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) only a few days before Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, according to documents provided to Congress and obtained by Just the News.
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Lawmakers investigating reports that the IRS destroyed tens of millions of taxpayer records say the federal tax agency is not cooperating with the investigation.
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert, R-Ariz., sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel demanding he comply with the documentation request.
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The IRS on Monday said it is ending its decades-long practice of agency revenue officers making unannounced visits to taxpayers, citing concerns over agent safety and an increase in scammers.
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The House Ways and Means Committee took final steps Tuesday to release to the public as early as this week the testimony and evidence from an IRS whistleblower who alleges the Justice Department gave favorable treatment to Hunter Biden and engaged in political interference in the criminal tax case against the first son.
Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., scheduled an executive session for 8 a.m. Thursday where lawmakers are expected to vote to free the whistleblower evidence and testimony of IRS supervisory criminal agent Gary Shapley from the 6103 privacy requirements that normally shield Americans’ tax information from public disclosure.
Read MoreThe conspiracy between a corrupt set of bureaucracies (including the Justice Department, the IRS, and the intelligence community) and an equally corrupt and enabling elite media is astonishing. The Durham Report is just one more confirmation of the devastating level of dishonesty and manipulation which have characterized the last few years.
Some analysts believe the open corruption can be traced back to Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, in which she clearly stonewalled conservative organizations from getting tax status. When she was found to be in contempt of Congress, the Obama Justice Department spent two years ignoring the congressional contempt charge and then decided not to prosecute her.
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Benjamin Franklin famously wrote in 1789 that “our new Constitution is now established and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Death and taxes are fated. However, are enormous tax hikes also a fait accompli? Is it a certainty – ‘an accomplished fact’ – that the White House and Congress will repeal tax reforms that worked? Tax breaks that helped small business owners and families.
For the past several days Americans have been scrambling to make the deadline to complete their 2022 tax returns. Most taxpayers will be relieved once the ordeal is done. However, here’s an unfortunate reality: if Washington fails to act, the federal tax code is headed for major changes in just a couple of years, including massive tax hikes on families and small businesses.
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Adecorated supervisory IRS agent has reported to the Justice Department’s top watchdog that federal prosecutors appointed by Joe Biden have engaged in “preferential treatment and politics” to block criminal tax charges against presidential son Hunter Biden, providing evidence as a whistleblower that conflicts with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent testimony to Congress that the decision to bring charges against Biden was being left to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware.
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In a statement on Thursday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) declared that it will hire almost 30,000 new employees over the next two years, as part of an $80 billion investment plan.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the moves are part of the agency’s broader Strategic Operating Plan, aimed at increasing its workforce and implementing new technologies for the alleged purpose of increased efficiency, stricter tax enforcement, and improved customer service.
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President Joe Biden’s call for funding for 87,000 IRS agents to audit Americans has raised questions about whether the new rash of auditing will target poorer Americans or be politically motivated.
The Inflation Reduction Act included $80 billion to beef up IRS efforts, which Biden says will more than pay for itself in new audits.
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The American public has long held an unfavorable view of the Internal Revenue Service, as evidenced by several historical surveys. A Gallup poll taken more than 25 years ago in October 1997 found that 69 percent of the American public held the opinion that the IRS “frequently abuse[d] its powers.” Fast forward to October 2022, when another Gallup poll was taken on the American public’s job-performance rating of 11 federal agencies. The poll ranked the IRS dead last, with only 34 percent of Americans regarding the job performance of the IRS as “excellent/good.”
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The new head of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee blasted the Biden administration for giving few answers after thousands of taxpayer files were leaked to an outside group.
House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent a letter to Russel George, the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration, raising concerns about the leak of “confidential tax information” and the lack of accountability over that leak.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is partnering with a George Soros-funded nonprofit to study and establish a “direct file” tax return system, according to FedScoop.
The nonprofit, New America, alongside Loyola Law School Associate Professor of Law Ariel Jurow-Kleiman, will create a feasibility study authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which requires that the IRS work with independent third parties to establish free, online direct tax-filing, according to FedScoop. New America draws funding from a litany of left-learning philanthropic organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures LLC and the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, according to New America’s funding disclosure.
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Next month, the U.S. Postal Service will be busier than usual. Not because of late Christmas cards or thank-you letters, but because of the extra Form 1099-Ks the IRS will be mailing out.
Under the American Rescue Plan, third-party payment facilitators like Venmo, eBay, Etsy, and Airbnb are now required to send Form 1099-Ks to individuals reporting 2022 gross annual income of as little as $600. That’s $50 a month.
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The IRS this week warned taxpayers about its new $600 reporting threshold for third-party payments and the need to fill out a 1099-K form should taxpayers exceed that limit.
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August 7 was a big day for the Spendthrift Seven. In just 12 hours, these Senate Democrats — all facing re-election Tuesday — gave the middle finger to middle-class taxpayers, hugged illegal aliens, and high-fived the IRS.
Arizona’s Mark Kelly, Colorado’s Michael Bennet, Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Georgia’s Raphael Warnock, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Washington’s Patty Murray did these things while the Senate considered President Joe Biden’s deceptively titled, 273-page Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their votes should appall every American.
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The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sent over $1.1 billion in child tax credit payments to incorrect recipients during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an audit by the Department of the Treasury’s Inspector General (IG) for Tax Administration on Tuesday.
The IRS sent the payments to 1.5 million people between July and November of 2021 during the pandemic, according to the audit’s report. Additionally, the IG noted that 4.1 million taxpayers did not receive payments they should have, amounting to $3.7 billion withheld.
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President Joe Biden sparked controversy for pushing through Congress increased federal funding for 87,000 new IRS employees to audit Americans, but Republican leadership has pledged to overturn that expansion if they win the majority.
House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., pledged at a Pennsylvania event to “repeal” the IRS expansion.
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The conservative Landmark Legal Foundation (LLF) has asked the IRS to audit the second-largest teachers union in the United States for allegedly misreporting its political spending.
In a letter to the IRS, which the Washington Examiner obtained, the group alleges that the American Federation of Teachers inaccurately claimed that it did not “engage in direct or indirect political campaign activities on behalf of or in opposition to candidates for public office” on their Form 990s from 2016-2019.
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The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there is nothing new under the sun. But there is undeniably something new happening in American history. New and terrible. No hyperbole; we are living through the greatest threat to America since the Civil War.
This new threat, which has been germinating its poisonous fruit for decades in the darkened earth of sheltered universities, federal agencies, and media newsrooms has erupted into such full and ugly view today that it cannot be met and defeated, or even retarded, with any of our normal methods.
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President Joe Biden’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) gave a huge number of prison inmates at least $1.3 billion in COVID-19 stimulus checks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
There are more than 1.1 million incarcerated individuals who took in the stimulus money, according to IRS data provided to the Free Beacon, as part of Biden’s $1.4 trillion American Rescue Plan. Those incarcerated who received the stimulus money includes roughly 163,000 people serving life sentences without parole, the IRS told Republican Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon in a letter obtained by the outlet.
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The IRS briefly made public the personal financial information of roughly 120,000 taxpayers, the agency announced on Friday.
Taxpayers’ Form 990-Ts were temporarily available to public viewing on the IRS website, but the agency has since removed them, according to the Wall Street Journal. Individuals file the form to disclose certain types of income within their retirement accounts.
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The Biden administration’s decision to recruit nearly 90,000 new IRS auditors could have a chilling effect on small businesses and economic growth, permanently impeding our nation’s ability to recover from its current economic malaise.
As part of the misleadingly titled “Inflation Reduction Act,” President Biden and his allies secured roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding to hire 87,000 auditors. This is bad news for the American economy.
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Despite claims from Biden administration officials that new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will not increase the auditing burden on individuals and small businesses, a Friday letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reveals new auditing activity targeting taxpayers who report less than $400,000 per year will be expected to contribute to about $4 billion in revenue.
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Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a video showing potential IRS agents training Friday and urged Americans to notice a billionaire wasn’t the target.
“Notice the scenario in this IRS recruiting program is ‘taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles,’ not ‘taking down a billionaire who uses the corporate jet for private trips,’” Massie posted.
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In an open letter posted on LinkedIn, Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) vowed that Republicans plan to roll back the hiring of 87,000 new tax collection agents for the IRS, a key provision in the inaptly named “Inflation Reduction Act.”
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Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, said on Fox News Tuesday that the expanded Internal Revenue Service wouldn’t just go after billionaires and large corporations.
“They are targeting people that they keep telling us they think are – restaurants and barber shops and so on,” Norquist told “America Reports” guest host Gillian Turner. “That’s their target, and we know this because every single Democrat in the Senate voted against, to defeat an amendment which said this law will not allow any increase in audits on people making less than $400,000 a year.”
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Connecticut GOP U.S. Senate candidate Leora Levy observed Senator Richard Blumenthal’s (D-CT) mockery of Americans expressing concern over Joe Biden’s creation of 87,000 new IRS Agents in his legislation that will increase taxes on middle-income Americans and will do nothing to reduce inflation.
“I think the IRS is going to target the highest income Americans,” Blumenthal minimized concern over the Inflation Reduction Act on CNN’s State of the Union recently. “As the saying goes, that’s where the money is. That’s where they’re going to look to collect. The idea that there’s going to be this army of IRS agents defending descending on the average American is just preposterous.”
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Amid spreading alarm about the Internal Revenue Service stockpiling ammunition and Senate Democrats’ passge on Sunday of a spending bill that would fund the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents, the tax collection agency is listing a job opening for a Criminal Investigation Special Agent who must must “be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.”
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“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
Those were the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, referring to the depredation of King George III. The sentence was part of a long list of grievances that bolstered the argument that England’s king and Parliament were becoming tyrannical.
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During a “vote-a-rama” on their $739 billion reconciliation spending bill that has hundreds of billions for climate and health care programs, Democratic senators had to take a series of uncomfortable votes on hot-button issues — particularly tough for those representing swing states.
The bill, which also includes federal funding for 87,000 new IRS agents, passed on a party line vote 51-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.
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Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill this week that would ban the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from purchasing any more ammunition, after having already reached an alarmingly high amount.
As reported by Just The News, Gaetz’s bill, the “Disarm the IRS Act,” would forbid the tax-collecting agency from buying ammunition after the agency has already acquired up to 5 million rounds. In 2022 alone, the agency has purchased at least $725,000 worth of ammo.
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A senior Justice Department official recently flagged by a U.S. senator in an FBI whistleblower probe into alleged politicization of prosecutions played a key role in the Lois Lerner IRS scandal a decade ago in which conservative Tea Party groups were improperly targeted for scrutiny, government emails and congressional evidence shows.
Richard Pilger, the current chief of the DOJ Elections Crime Branch of the department’s Public Integrity Section, engaged in discussions in 2010 and 2013 with Lerner and other IRS officials about ways to pursue criminal prosecutions of conservative nonprofits, the records show.
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Democrats in Congress have proposed a new spending bill that would allocate $80 billion for the sole purpose of expanding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ostensibly to fight inflation by raising government revenues.
As reported by The Daily Caller, the bill is called the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” The bill would see the size of the IRS increase as part of a broader effort to increase “taxpayer compliance.” Under the new bill, the IRS would spend an additional $80 billion over the course of the next 10 years, up significantly from its current budget of $13.7 billion, with a primary focus on hiring thousands of new agents, and expanding operations, facilities, and services.
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The Internal Revenue Service is warning taxpayers of several tax scams.
The scams cover four transactions involving charitable remainder annuity trusts, Maltese individual retirement arrangements, foreign captive insurance, and monetized installment sales.
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