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It is likely the largest unauthorized disclosure of tax-return information in history: the transfer of some 1.25 million pages of confidential tax returns from the IRS to the Department of Justice in October of 2010. And it was almost certainly illegal. #ad#The documents, which consisted chiefly of non-profit tax returns, were transferred to the DOJ’s criminal division from the IRS at the request of Lois Lerner, who wanted to get the information to the DOJ in advance of a meeting where she and several of the attorneys in the public integrity section of the department’s criminal division discussed their concerns about the increasing political activity of non-profit groups. The Justice Department later told Congress that the documents contained confidential taxpayer information protected by federal law. The nature of that information hasn’t been made public, but the so-called Schedule B form, for example, which non-profit groups are required to attach to their tax returns, known as 990s, asks for the names and addresses of donors to the organization. But we already knew that. The transfer of information at Lerner’s request came to light during a congressional investigation in 2014. What we know now, thanks to additional documents unearthed in years-long litigation by the good-government group Cause of Action, is that Lerner almost certainly broke the law when she transferred the documents. That casts a new light on the Justice Department’s decision last year not to prosecute Lerner, who had become the face of the IRS’s ham-handed effort to crack down on right-leaning groups, but against whom a criminal case might have been difficult to build. “It took an organization over 50 months of investigation and multiple lawsuits to get clarity on the IRS’s own compliance with the rules it enforces against others,” says Dan Epstein, the executive director of the Cause of Action Institute and a former attorney for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The IRS, in the midst of its political targeting of groups engaged in policy advocacy, was engaging in the disclosure of millions of records aimed at ginning up prosecutions of these groups without going through the legally required channels.” Federal law prohibits the IRS from sharing tax returns filed with the agency, with very limited exceptions. “The IRS has a special obligation to keep information confidential, that’s how our tax system works,” says Eileen O’Connor, who served as assistant attorney general for the tax division of the DOJ in the George W. Bush administration. ‘The IRS has a special obligation to keep information confidential, that’s how our tax system works.’ — Eileen O’Connor Documents suggest that Lerner’s massive document transfer to the DOJ didn’t meet any of those exceptions, including one that allows the agency to disclose returns for use in criminal investigations — if they’ve been requested in relation to “an actual investigation about a person to whom the investigation is related,” says O’Connor. Both Lerner and the DOJ were interested in figuring out how to prosecute non-profit groups they believed were engaging in improper political activity, and Lerner sent the documents over to the department days before an October 8 meeting with several of her IRS colleagues, an FBI agent, and attorneys from the DOJ’s public-integrity section. There they discussed their mounting “concern that certain 501(c) organizations are actually political committees ‘posing’ as if they are not subject to FEC law, and therefore may be subject to criminal liability,” according to a DOJ summary of the meeting. A lawful transfer of the documents would have required a formal request from the DOJ to the IRS, but DOJ trial attorney Stephanie Sasarak told Cause of Action in a March 9, 2016, letter that the department did not make any requests to the IRS for the documents it received. Alternatively, the secretary of the Treasury could have turned the documents over to the DOJ. In either case, section 6103 requires the Treasury secretary to disclose the transfer to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which releases publicly a list of disclosures each year. But the Joint Committee on Taxation’s 2010 disclosure report does not show a transfer to the Department of Justice that matches the one Lerner sent in October of that year. According to Epstein, Cause of Action Institute’s executive director, the transfer wasn’t disclosed because there was “no legal justification for sharing the documents,” and because going through the proper channels would have brought it to public attention through the Joint Committee on Taxation. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment for this story. “It is disappointing to be learning significant details in 2016 about how poorly taxpayers were treated in 2010,” says Peter Roskam, the oversight chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over issues related to taxpayer privacy. Roskam, an Illinois Republican, spearheaded the passage of legislation through the House earlier this month that would prevent the IRS from requiring tax-exempt organizations to submit any information about their contributors. Congress moved to protect taxpayer privacy in the Tax Reform Act of 1976. It was a direct response to the Watergate hearings, which revealed that the Nixon White House had both sought and received information on its “enemies” from the IRS, and that White House staffers routinely requested audits — and the IRS performed them. Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, which was part of the tax-reform bill, made tax-return information confidential with extremely limited exceptions. Lerner’s disclosure occurred against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed issue-oriented social-welfare groups to pour unlimited money into the political process and keep their donors anonymous. She shared the documents to aid the DOJ’s preliminary attempts to re-criminalize this activity. DOJ concern about the “misuse of non-profits for indirectly funding campaigns” prompted the meeting between IRS and DOJ officials. It looks increasingly likely that the file sharing was part of a broader effort on the part of bureaucrats to push back against the Supreme Court’s ruling, an effort that not only almost certainly violated the law but undermined the spirit of the law and the purpose for which it was written in the first place. — Eliana Johnson is the Washington editor of National Review.

The 2016 Democratic presidential primary was one of the most contentious in recent history. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s win against upstart Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was full of controversy — and new reports show it was dirtier than first believed. Sanders supporters claim...

Shortly after the United Kingdom voted narrowly to leave the European Union, Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies seized on the moment to cheer the supposed demise of the “globalists.” Trump’s Kremlin-friendly campaign manager, Paul Manafort, explained on NBC with Chuck Todd that Brexit represented the realization that “the promises that globalism is the solution, the promise that government’s going to make your life better if you just give up your freedoms, the promises that we know better than you on how to make your lives better, have been rejected. That’s what Donald Trump has identified, that’s what Brexit identified, and that’s what’s going to be the basis for the election in 2016.” #ad#Manafort is certainly correct that Brexit stood for national sovereignty above international bureaucracy, national democracy above global governance from above. But there is one problem: Brexit’s brand of anti-globalism isn’t Trump’s brand of anti-globalism. Conflating the two is both rhetorically dishonest and ideologically dangerous. In TrumpWorld, “globalism” has been a buzzword bugaboo for months, ever since Trump dumped it in the middle of a foreign-policy speech. “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump thundered back in April. “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” So far, this definition of anti-globalism lines up with Brexit’s: prizing local sovereignty over a faraway, unrepresentative authority. Actually, it’s pure founding ideology — in Federalist 9 and 10, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, respectively, argued in favor of devolving most control to local governance, based largely on the ideas of Montesquieu. Internationally, the idea would be that each civilization ought to be able to control its future, something that certainly holds true for both Britain and the United States. If that were all Trump meant by “globalist” — that we should not delegate control over our republic to Brussels or the assemblage of moral idiots at the United Nations — his critique of globalism would be inarguable. But it isn’t. When Trump decries “globalism,” he goes beyond mere allegiance to the notion of American sovereignty: He means rage at international relations generally, including trade relations. Those who celebrate Brexit could still be “globalists” in Trump’s world if they support free-trade agreements. In April, Trump continued to thus define “globalism”: I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down, and will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our ability to control our own affairs. NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. But NAFTA isn’t an example of giving up control over our republic. It’s a free-trade agreement. This is the problem with Trump’s redefined “globalist” slur: It lumps together free-marketeers — small-government advocates who don’t wish to see international institutions dominate free-market exchanges between individuals and nations — with people who want global bureaucrats controlling internal and external national affairs. Robert Merry did just that in a recent column for The National Interest: “Globalists were too focused on global trade and commerce to notice the horrendous plight of America’s internal refugees from the industrial nation of old.” No, actually. Those of us who champion free trade do so not out of an altruistic desire to enrich people abroad, but because free trade has made America the most powerful economic force in human history. The history of free trade demonstrates that when unshackled from government bureaucracy, private parties trading with one another both see benefit. The history of protectionism in the United States is long and inglorious. The so-called Tariff of Abominations, initiated under John Quincy Adams in 1828, helped drive distrust and conflict between the North, which wanted it, and the South, which didn’t. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 was so unpopular that it resulted in the Republicans’ being booted from control of Congress and the presidency. One of the worst political deals of all time — the passage of the 16th Amendment, allowing the federal government to collect an income tax — occurred only because Republicans were so addicted to protectionism that they agreed to accept the income tax in return for Democratic support for tariffs. The disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff, which helped deepen and lengthen the Great Depression, was the last gasp of a failed ideology; the revival of protectionist ideology in Latin America has doomed the people of Venezuela, among others, to breaking each other’s heads in disputes over loaves of bread. The history of free trade on the other hand demonstrates that, when unshackled from government bureaucracy, private parties trading with one another both see benefit. The American Revolution was fought largely in an attempt to break free of protectionist measures from the mother country. The early republic placed low tariffs on foreign goods to raise government revenue, but not out of a widespread desire to “protect” domestic industry. America’s economic growth during the Tariff of Abominations period came largely from territorial expansion to the West, not from locking out competitors from domestic markets. In the aftermath of World War II, free trade helped America outcompete the Soviet Union and raise the standard of living more dramatically both in the United States and across the world than ever before. America’s global power was built not on the back of protectionism, but on the back of free trade. Yet Trump and company have the gall to suggest that Americans who support free trade are actually “globalists” in thrall to some Bilderberg-style conspiracy in favor of foreigners. The truth is that those in favor of tariffs are the ones who oppose local rule — the ability of individuals to make their own decisions about buying and selling, about control over their own labor without a government intermediary. If truly nasty globalism includes rule by a distant elite, Trump’s economic policy fits that description far better than the free trade his opponents espouse. In fact, Trump himself knows better. Here’s what he wrote on globalism back in 2013: “We will have to leave borders behind and go for global unity when it comes to financial stability. . . . The future of Europe, as well as the United States, depends on a cohesive global economy.” Presumably, Trump didn’t mean that the EU should continue to dominate the U.K. with bureaucracy — he meant economic interrelationships should continue to grow. That’s a lot different from his advocacy of tariffs today. But in reality, Trump’s “globalism” cry isn’t policy-driven. It’s just another insult to toss at anyone who opposes Trump — even if the insult itself makes no sense. — Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of the DailyWire.com.

Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES Last week, the highly respected Dr. James Dobson made an absolute sucker of himself by uncritically passing along his belief that Donald Trump was a recent born-again Christian. Dobson’s remarks were widely ridiculed as the statement of an uncritical partisan dupe, and Dobson does not seem to have taken it too well. As Erick notes, Dobson is now walking | Read More »

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