The American Pundit

Seriously? Seriously. This guy, Dan Pfeiffer, was sent out by the White House to speak for Barack Obama.

I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again.

“The law is irrelevant”? Whether those involved were merely acting inappropriately or committing felonies is “irrelevant”? Whether they were violating constitutional rights is “irrelevant”?

No wonder employees of the Internal Revenue Service saw nothing wrong with politically persecuting Americans. They have a boss who considers the law of the land to be “irrelevant” so long as he condemns what happened later.

A Florida man who forged his father’s signature on a prescription and tricked his pregnant girlfriend into taking abortion-inducing pills has been charged with first-degree murder.

According to a federal arrest affidavit, Welden swapped out his girlfriend’s antibiotics with abortion pills, specifically Cytotec.

“I was never going to do anything but go full term with it, and he didn’t want me to,” explained Remee Lee, 26, Welden’s now ex-girlfriend.

On Easter Sunday, Lee went to an area hospital complaining of severe cramping and excessive vaginal bleeding. Doctors told Lee her unborn baby no longer had a heartbeat.

His father’s a doctor and he allegedly forged the dad’s signature to acquire the abortion pills. He then allegedly changed the label indicate the pills were antibiotics for her.

Lee said when she learned she was pregnant, Welden took her to see his father, who is an obstetrician in Lutz. A sonogram and blood test confirmed Lee was six-weeks pregnant.

The next day, Welden called his girlfriend with bad news. Her blood test apparently showed she had a bacterial infection and she would need to take Amoxicillin to clear it up.

On Good Friday, Lee said Welden showed up at her Tampa home with a care package that included the bottle of antibiotics. The label said the pills were A moxycillin .

“He told me to keep taking them. I was supposed to take three a day for days,” she recalled of Welden’s instructions.

Those pills, of course, were the abortion-inducing Cytotec.

“Everyone dreams of becoming a mom. This was my chance,” she said.

First-degree murder is a capital offense, and Florida — where the crime took place — regularly imposes the death penalty as punishment.

Officials at the Treasury Department knew the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was engaged in political targeting back in June 2012 – months before the presidential election – and kept it quiet, according to testimony by the Inspector General today.

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was investigating allegations that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

And yet the IRS only went public with this information last Friday, and even then the admission only came because the Inspector General was set to go public with his investigation.

The official at the Internal Revenue Service who oversaw the illegal targeting of political dissidents is now in charge of the agency’s division responsible for implementing ObamaCare, ABC News reports.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the
IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

So the person who oversaw political persecution will be making your health care decisions for you. Sleep well.

By a federal grand jury.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury for allegedly, misappropriating almost $1 million in charitable funds, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.

You’ll recall the Department of Justice secretly seized the phone records of journalists for the Associated Press, allegedly as part of an investigation into the “leak” of security information pertaining to a foiled terrorism plot.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder have insisted the seizure wasn’t an attempt to intimidate the press but rather a serious investigation into a leak that, they claim, placed American national security at risk.

One problem: According to the Washington Post, the AP held the story for five days at the request of the CIA, which was reviewing it for security purposes. Then the CIA cleared it. And the Obama Administration was planning to go public with it.

They had a big announcement planned, where the president would brag about how his administration had foiled another plot. So they asked the AP to hold off reporting it until the administration could go public. The AP refused and ran the story.

So the alleged security threat? No longer existed. The story had been cleared for publication by intelligence officials. And the White House itself was going to tell the world. If the Washington Post report is accurate, the only problem with AP’s publication is that it stepped on the White House’s political toes. It denied Obama a great political moment.

More good news from Washington today. CNN reports federal law enforcement has lost track of two known terrorists who participated in the Witness Protection Program. And they may have left the country.

The U.S. Marshal Service has been “unable to locate” two former participants in the federal Witness Security Program “identified as known or suspected terrorists,” states the public summary of an interim Justice Department Inspector General’s report obtained by CNN.

The Marshals have concluded that “one individual was and the other individual was believed to be residing outside of the United States.”

The news comes from an audit of the Witness Security Program by the IG’s office , which states that “the Department did not definitively know how many known or suspected terrorists were admitted into the WITSEC program,” among other “significant issues concerning national security.” The report makes 16 recommendations.

The “Interim Report on the Department of Justice’s Handling of Known or Suspected Terrorists Admitted Into the Federal Witness Security Program” notes that while in the midst of an audit of the WITSEC program, the Inspector General felt the need to notify the Justice Department of national security vulnerabilities, and the IG’s office “developed the interim report to help ensure that the Department promptly and sufficiently addressed the deficiencies we found.”

Oh, also, the Department of Justice forgot to add their names to the no-fly list.

Attorney General Eric Holder is under increasing pressure from the left to resign his office…or be fired.

First came Esquire, which called on Holder to go. Then Daily Kos (Kos linked it from Facebook).

And now liberal talk show host Bill Press:

I still haven’t heard a legit justification for the subpoenaing the AP phone records. They didn’t notify AP, they didn’t narrow search.

What “breach of national security” are we talking about re the AP story? It’s BS and Holder should be fired.

For once we agree.

Yep.

Not only did IRS employees improperly target groups based on politics, but they also improperly demanded a host of details about the groups’ activities, according to a report on the abuses by a Treasury Department inspector general.

Some groups, including several interviewed by The Washington Post, were asked to provide names of donors or membership lists, which experts say the IRS cannot legally do. The agency also demanded names of board members, copies of meeting minutes and résumés, details of community organizing efforts and numerous other details, according to questionnaires obtained by The Post.

It was a mixture between stalling in the hopes the group would go away, and trying to intimidate people into silence. Coincidentally, almost exclusively critics of their bosses in the Obama Administration.

We’re supposed to be impressed that Barack Obama had his Treasury Secretary ask for the resignation of IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. Miller agreed and is now out at the agency. This supposedly shows the worsening scandal is being taken seriously by the president.

But hold on.

It turns out Miller was set to resign next month anyway.

‘Lew took the first step by requesting and accepting the resignation of the acting director of the IRS,’ Obama said.

‘It’s important,’ he added, ‘to institute new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward.’

But in an email to IRS employees, Miller claimed he would only be leaving next month because his assignment would be over.

So basically he’s leaving a few weeks early. That’s a sufficient response to the revelation that a federal agency engaged in political persecution for years?