Tea Party Groups Tell Congress Harassment Continues

"Bow before me and my golden halo. And remember dissenters will visited by the ATF, OSHA, FBI, EPA, etc. Oh, and you're all racist!"

But Obama reassured us that there wasn't any harassment in the first place...

From The Washington Examiner:

Tea Party officials told a congressional panel Thursday they are still being targeted for harassment despite claims by President Obama and top IRS officials that the illegal activities were stopped last year. 

“It's shocking, it's repugnant, it's infuriating,” Becky Gerritson told a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “And most troubling of all, those responsible have not stopped.” 

Gerritson is president of the Wetumpka Tea Party Inc. in Wetumpka, Ala. She said IRS officials demanded names of everybody who attended the group's meetings, as well as names of donors, texts of speeches given and biographies of the speakers.   

The Wetumpka group applied for 501(c)(4) non-profit status in May 2010 but was not approved until July 2012. The process normally takes only a few months. 

Catherine Englebrecht described the government's response to her Houston-based True the Vote group's nonprofit application in 2009 as “the weaponization of government.”
She said she and her husband experienced multiple business and personal tax audits, as well as visits by officials from the FBI, OSHA, ATF and EPA. 

Neither she nor her husband had ever before been audited, and their 20-year-old high-tech manufacturing business had no previous OSHA inspections. 

“All of these incursions into my affairs began after filing applications for tax exemption,” Englebret said. “There is no other remarkable event, no other reason, to explain away how for decades I went unnoticed but now find myself on the receiving end of inter-agency coordination into and against all facets of my life, both public and private.” 

The hearing was the latest round in an intensifying battle between President Obama and House Republicans following a senior IRS official's admission in May 2013 that the tax agency had targeted and harassed more than 200 Tea Party, conservative and evangelical groups during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. Only seven liberal groups were subjected to similar treatment. 

Obama initially described the IRS actions as “unacceptable” and promised a full investigation, but more recently he has called the controversy “a phony scandal.”
In an interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that was broadcast before last Sunday's Super Bowl activities, Obama said there “isn't a smidgen of evidence” of corruption in the scandal.

Clearly there's no political harassment here. Obama said there "isn't a smidgen of evidence." So now I'm convinced.

Obama's political harassment is beneath contempt. This is kind of crap that Argentina would pull back in the day-- prior to the military dictatorship following Peron. It is unacceptable by any people in a free-thinking country.

But hey... it's racist to disagree with Obama. Or something.