Hey! I got audited, too!

by: Joseph Farah 

I have some experience with politically motivated tax audits.
I also have some experience with the tea-party movement.
I wrote the “Tea Party Manifesto,”which I am making available for a limited time for 99 cents because it is more relevant than ever. I was a headline speaker, along with Sarah Palin, at the first national tea-party convention, and you can see what I said there that I knew – and predicted – would lead to politically motivated audits of my tax returns.
I predicted this would happen in a column in March 2010.
I wrote about it when it came to pass in November 2011.
I don’t claim the gift of prophecy.
I just know the nature of people like Barack Obama and those he places in positions of authority. I know this because I was just like him. I even had some of the same friends and acquaintances as a misguided youth – people like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

But my experience with politically motivated tax audits goes back long before the Obama administration.
I was a prominent target of Bill Clinton’s reign of Internal Revenue Service hell on individuals and tax-exempt organizations. And I was the guy who broke the story about it – long before there was a WND. Back then, I had to get the help of the Wall Street Journal, which, to its credit, gave me commentary space to lay out the whole story and turned the sordid tale into an 11-part series of editorials.
But in this day of historical forgetfulness, no one in the media seems to remember how Bill Clinton used the IRS to terrorize Paula Jones and many other women who had the misfortune of crossing his path along with a virtual who’s who of those who made his “enemies list” like me.

In my case, we finally got the evidence from the Treasury Department years later that showed it wasn’t some “rogue agent” who instigated the audit. It was Bill Clinton personally who dispatched a letter to the head of the IRS tax-exempt division.
Bill Clinton was allowed to skate for that kind of abuse.
And that’s why I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it would happen again under the watch of Barack Obama.
It’s been three years now that Obama has gotten away with targeting his enemies using the IRS. I’ve heard the horror stories from many friends – most of whom don’t want the limelight. Tax-exempt organizations hate to admit they are being audited because it tends to dry up donations. That was the problem telling the story in the 1990s, and it’s a problem now.
You will hear many horror stories about politically motivated audits now because people and organizations are starting to see it as a badge of honor to be audited by Obama – now that the story has legs.

Some will be tempted to discount these stories. Don’t make that mistake. They’re true. The abuse is far more than anyone can imagine. That’s why Obama publicly dispatched a sacrificial lamb, his IRS commissioner, so quickly. He thinks he may be able to cut his losses by finding a scapegoat.
Whether he’s right remains an open question.
Sadly, it depends primarily on two institutions that have a less-than-stellar track record in holding him accountable – the Republican Party and the media establishment.
I’m not holding my breath.
But I can say this without any equivocation: If Obama serves out his second term by merely blaming others beneath him, this will not be the last administration that uses the IRS to target its enemies. It will become a matter of course for leaders without scruples and integrity to continue the harassment and abuse Obama ensured would happen.

I’m not suggesting we will find any written authorization from Obama to do this – as we did with Clinton. As Rush Limbaugh so aptly pointed out, Obama didn’t need to do that. In politics and government, personnel is policy.
He hired people who would do his bidding. They didn’t need to be told by Obama to do it. All they needed to do was listen to what he said publicly about his enemies in the tea-party movement, the patriot movement and all those who crossed him.
Lastly, let me say this: Not only does Obama have to be chased from the Oval Office to ensure the IRS doesn’t victimize others in the future, but the IRS also has to go. It has proven once again to be the U.S. version of the Gestapo – there for future would-be fuehrers to abuse.