IRS Scandal Widens For Obama As It Reaches Indiana

Malick Obama serving as best man at Barry's wedding

As intense political pressure builds over the growing scandal of the placement of political operatives within the supposedly independent, nonpartisan Internal Revenue Service to target political enemies of President Barack Obama, Obama conducted a brief address to White House reporters to announce the forced resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller. Tonight's announcement is likely to do little to calm Republicans and conservative organizations whose worst fears of the IRS being used as a political weapon have been proven true. Despite the surprise admission by the agency that conservative Tea Party organizations applying for tax-exempt status had been targeted for extra scrutiny by bureaucrats working in the agency's Cincinnati office, an Inspector General's report made the incredulous claim that partisan politics had not been the motivation of the involved employees.

The Daily Caller has revealed that the Barack H. Obama Foundation established in 2008 by President Obama's reputed half-brother, Malik Obama, solicited tax-deductible contributions as a nonprofit organization for nearly three years before filing an application for tax-exempt status with the IRS after the National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS. I say reputed half-brother because anyone with any intelligence who has bothered to do some basic research would have long ago concluded that President Obama is not the biological son of Barack H. Obama of Kenya. The IRS official in charge of the IRS division responsible for reviewing applications made by tax-exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, approved an application made on behalf of Malik's foundation within 30 days of the date of the application and, in an unusual move, granted the organization's status retroactive to the date of its establishment to avoid legal liability. The organization had not even bothered to file its registration with the commonwealth of Virginia according to the Daily Caller despite having a functional website used for soliciting contributions for the foundation.

It is also not clear what the Barack H. Obama Foundation actually does. Its website claims the organization has built a madrassa and was building a imam’s house but there is no other evidence that the nonprofit was actually helping poor Kenyan children.

“The Obama Foundation raised money on its web page by falsely claiming to be a tax deductible. This bogus charity run by Malik had not even applied and yet subsequently got retroactive tax-deductible status,” Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told The Daily Caller. Boehm described Malik Obama’s attempt to raise money as constituting “common law fraud and potentially even federal mail fraud.”

Boehm doubted that the charity is doing what it says it’s doing and wondered why the charity was given tax-exempt status so quickly after the evidence of wrongdoing came to light.

By contrast, conservative organizations have had their applications for tax-exempt status held up for years and have been subjected to improper requests for information by the agency that were totally irrelevant to establishing the facts required for adjudicating their applications. While many of the complaining Tea Party organizations were located in the 2012 battleground state of Ohio, closer to home a Tea Party group in Richmond, Indiana claims it was targeted by the IRS as well. Indiana Tea Party organizer Ken Johnson tells WISH-TV that he filed a tax-exempt application for his organization in 2011, which languished for many months without action. Johnson claims that when he finally heard from the IRS, it demanded a hard copy of everything that had ever appeared on the group's website and everything it had ever distributed, along with other information requested in a five-page letter. Johnson tells WISH-TV that he eventually gave up on the application.

There's yet another Indiana connection to the growing controversy. During the 2012 presidential campaign, an Obama campaign committee co-chair, Joe Solmonese, obtained a confidential financial document the National Organization for Marriage had filed with the IRS and made it public to tie Mitt Romney as a financial supporter of the group. Solmonese, who had served as the executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, cut his teeth in politics as a young campaign aide in an extremely dirty campaign run by former U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, who ran all of her congressional campaigns from the gutter. Solmonese was brought to the Carson campaign by the late Joe Miller, a drug dealer and accused pedophile who had been one of the largest campaign contributors to Carson's and other Hoosier Democrats' campaigns before taking his life in August, 2010 as the feds finally began to move in on his illicit activities. Solmonese claimed that he got the document from a whistle blower. Solmonese accused Romney of using "racially divisive tactics" and funding "a hate-filled campaign designed to drive a wedge between Americans," a move reminiscent of every campaign Carson ran, including the one in which Solmonese was involved. NOM announced yesterday that it will file a lawsuit against the IRS over the document leaked to Solmonese.