Acting IRS commissioner resigns in wake of agency scandal

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President Obama announced Wednesday that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller has resigned in the wake of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were targeted.

The president made the announcement in a brief statement at the White House, following a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew  and other top department officials in which they reviewed a highly critical inspector general’s report on the practice. The report concluded poor management allowed agents to improperly target Tea Party and other groups for more than 18 months, starting in 2010.

Obama said Lew asked for the resignation and Miller agreed, after being on the job since November 2012.

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said from the White House. 

Republicans, who along with Democrats have slammed the IRS for the practice, welcomed the resignation Wednesday but made clear they would continue to investigate and press for accountability. 

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., said the resignation "is a necessary first step but more heads need to roll." 

Miller’s resignation was part of three-step plan Obama outlined to fix the problem.

The other steps are to put in place the safeguards recommended in the IG report and to work with Congress as it investigates. 

“The good news is we can fix this,” Obama said. 

Miller became acting commissioner after Commissioner Douglas Shulman completed his five-year term. Shulman had been appointed by President George W. Bush.

The president has proceeded cautiously since the IRS controversy was made public Friday. While he initially said the accusations were "outrageous," he also said he wanted to wait until the report was released before addressing what should be done to hold accountable those responsible.

Obama said he would hold a press conference Thursday.

The report lays much of the blame on IRS supervisors in Washington who oversaw a group of specialists in Cincinnati who screened applications for tax-exempt status. It does not indicate that Washington initiated the targeting of conservative groups, but it does say a top supervisor in Washington did not adequately supervise agents in the field even after she learned the agents were acting improperly.

The Justice Department is also investigating the IRS targeting, as are three congressional committees.

Sources told Fox News that Miller will remain on the job "for a couple of weeks." 

The House Ways and Means Committee said after the announcement of Miller's resignation that he still will attend a hearing Friday.

And the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs sent a letter Wednesday afternoon to the IRS  requesting five employees named in the IG audit be made available for transcribed interviews by committee staff.

The Republican-led committee wants to start the interviews Monday.

The names and titles of the IRS employees requested are Holly Paz, a director; John Shafer, a manager; Gary Muthert, a screener; Liz Hofacre, a case coordinator; and Joseph Herr, a manager.

"The resignation of Steven Miller is a positive and important step as this agency struggles to try to regain the public’s trust," said Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. "A clean slate at the IRS with new leadership is imperative to fix this egregious encroachment on the lives of honest, hard-working Americans whose only sin was that they want to express their beliefs."

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sidestepped a question about whether Obama still had confidence in Miller, saying he wouldn't discuss personnel matters. He said Obama has expressed his overall view that IRS personnel had acted inappropriately. 

"He wants to see that the actions taken, as revealed by the Treasury report, that are inappropriate, are met with consequences," Carney said. "He will make clear to Treasury Department leaders that he expects action." 

Carney said Obama wants the public to "understand and believe that the IRS applies our tax laws in a neutral and fair way to everyone."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Acting IRS commissioner resigns in wake of agency scandal

President Obama said Wednesday that acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller has resigned in the fallout of the agency scandal in which conservative groups were targeted.

The president made the announcement in a brief statement at the White House, following a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew in which they reviewed an inspector general’s report on the issue.

Obama said Lew asked for the resignation and Miller agreed, after being on the job since November 2012. The targeting of Tea Party groups and others appears to have started as early as 2010.

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Obama said from the White House.

The Treasury Department inspector general report found the tax-collection agency, in examining applications for tax-exempt status, improperly selected conservative groups for further review. 

Miller’s resignation was part of three-step plan Obama outlined to fix the problem.

The other steps are to put in place the safeguards recommended in the report and to work with Congress in its oversight capacity.

“The good news is we can fix this,” Obama said.

Earlier in the day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sidestepped a question about whether Obama still had confidence in Miller, saying he wouldn't discuss personnel matters. He said Obama has expressed his overall view that IRS personnel had acted inappropriately. 

"He wants to see that the actions taken, as revealed by the Treasury report, that are inappropriate, are met with consequences," Carney said. "He will make clear to Treasury Department leaders that he expects action." 

Carney said Obama wants the public to "understand and believe that the IRS applies our tax laws in a neutral and fair way to everyone."

Also early Wednesday evening, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Affairs sent a letter to Miller requesting that he make available five employees, named in the IG  audit, for transcribed interviews by committee staff.

The Republican-led committee wants to start the interviews Monday.

The names and titles of IRS employees requested are Holly Paz, a director; John Shafer, a manager; Gary Muthert, a screener; Liz Hofacre, a case coordinator; and Joseph Herr, a manager.

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New IRS scandal revives past allegations against agency

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WASHINGTON –  The IRS’s admission it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny has drawn political condemnation but it isn’t the first, second or third time the agency has been accused of playing fast and loose with the law.

The latest scandal has effectively revived past allegations of partisan behavior at the IRS, with some lawmakers as well as the alleged victims calling for those complaints to now get a second look. The unresolved cases include claims of media leaks on private donor information during last year’s presidential race and other instances of political profiling.

"This whole episode reinforces and confirms the American people’s worst fears about big government run amok,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News. 

"The startling revelations give real credibility to numerous reports over the last year that the IRS 'inadvertently' released donor information from conservative groups -- and that information ended up in the hands of political opponents," Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who is pressing the Treasury Department and IRS for more details on those past cases, said in a statement.  

The newest allegations of the IRS overstepping its authority only feed into claims that those within the powerful agency routinely disregard the law and use their authority to intimidate and target at will. 

The latest startling claim came Tuesday from an unexpected source -- ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning progressive journalism group -- which said the same Cincinnati IRS branch accused of targeting conservative groups released nine confidential applications of conservative groups to them last year. 

Critics had long questioned how ProPublica got that information. ProPublica put the speculation to rest on Tuesday. The media outlet said it had requested 67 applications for nonprofits in 2012. They were given 31. Of those, nine had not been approved and therefore should not have been made public.

ProPublica ultimately published six of them, despite late-breaking objections from the IRS -- the agency apparently told the organization that it should not have received the confidential applications. 

Considering this and other cases, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney took some heat Tuesday after he told reporters that nobody in the Obama administration had targeted conservative groups in the past. 

Many questioned the statement and pointed to a 2010 incident involving Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Goolsbee told reporters on Aug. 27, 2010 that Koch Industries, a billion-dollar energy company run by the politically influential Koch brothers, paid no income taxes.

The tax records of Koch Industries -- a private company – would not have been public information and therefore should not have been known to Goolsbee. At the time, the Obama team backpedaled and said the information was made public in two places – which turned out to be untrue. Then the Obama administration said Goolsbee had misspoken and that he had guessed the company’s confidential tax information.

At the time, the IRS had promised to look into the Goolsbee gaffe but a report was never publicly released.

A source familiar with the situation suggested to FoxNews.com Tuesday that Goolsbee’s comments were a “calculated” attempt by the administration to insert Koch’s name into his discussion about companies that don’t pay taxes.

Accusations of improper IRS behavior surfaced again in 2012 when a prominent anti-gay marriage group accused the agency of leaking private tax files that listed then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney's group as a contributor. The National Organization for Marriage documents were later published by a group whose president was tied to the Obama re-election campaign.

NOM claimed that someone from the IRS fed the liberal Human Rights Campaign documents listing its 2008 contributors. On that list was a $10,000 donation from Romney’s political action committee. The Human Rights Campaign then published the documents online, saying it had uncovered one of the group’s “top secret donors,” and accused Romney of attacking lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality.

The donation came as NOM and other conservative groups were fighting for the Proposition 8 measure banning gay marriage in California. 

Conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation said they, too, were targets of the IRS.

“We endured politically-motivated audits under both the Carter and the Clinton administrations,” Heritage senior media associate Kim McIntyre told Fox News. “Back then, Washington’s ‘enemy lists’ were restricted to well-established groups. But targeting fledging Tea Party groups is different.”

McIntyre questioned whether smaller groups targeted by the IRS can even afford to fight back and says that “expensive audits could very well strangle them in a cradle. Bringing the weight and resources of the federal government to bear against small organizations threatens not just punishment, but extinction.” 

Some say the allegations against the IRS are not a surprise given the agency’s storied past of mean-spirited power plays that stretch back to President Franklin Roosevelt -- accused of using his political sway to get the independent agency to lean on his critics.  

President Kennedy’s administration authorized the “Ideological Organizations Project” that went after conservative organizations, while President Johnson was accused of promising tax favors in exchange for votes.

Claims of shady moves made by IRS saw a sharp rise in the 1960s and 1970s. Some say the agency has not been able to shake off the bad rap.

The IRS now says that its latest program of flagging conservative groups for additional scrutiny was inappropriate, but not partisan. An inspector general report unveiled Tuesday urged the IRS to clean up its operation, and Attorney General Eric Holder also announced he had “ordered an investigation” into the IRS controversy and that his office was “examining the facts to see if there were criminal violations.”

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Top agency official was first told of flagging in 2012, IRS says

Published May 13, 2013

Associated Press

WASHINGTON –  The Internal Revenue Service says acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller was first informed in May 2012 that tea party groups were inappropriately targeted for scrutiny.

A month later he wrote a member of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without mentioning the controversy.

Over the past year, numerous lawmakers raised concerns with the IRS about complaints that tea party groups were being harassed. Each time the agency responded without mentioning that groups had been targeted. Miller provided some of those responses.

The agency apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see whether they were violating their tax-exempt status. In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.

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Reps challenge DHS ammo buys, say agency using 1,000 more rounds per person than Army

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  Shown here are Federal Premium hollow point bullets.AP

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz said Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security is using roughly 1,000 rounds of ammunition more per person than the U.S. Army, as he and other lawmakers sharply questioned DHS officials on their "massive" bullet buys.

"It is entirely ... inexplicable why the Department of Homeland Security needs so much ammunition," Chaffetz, R-Utah, said at a hearing. 

The hearing itself was unusual, as questions about the department's ammunition purchases until recently had bubbled largely under the radar -- on blogs and in the occasional news article. But as the Department of Homeland Security found itself publicly defending the purchases, lawmakers gradually showed more interest in the issue. 

Democratic Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., at the opening of the hearing, ridiculed the concerns as "conspiracy theories" which have "no place" in the committee room. 

But Republicans said the purchases raise "serious" questions about waste and accountability. 

Chaffetz, who chairs one of the House oversight subcommittees holding the hearing Thursday, revealed that the department currently has more than 260 million rounds in stock. He said the department bought more than 103 million rounds in 2012 and used 116 million that same year -- among roughly 70,000 agents. 

Comparing that with the small-arms purchases procured by the U.S. Army, he said the DHS is churning through between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer, while the U.S. Army goes through roughly 350 rounds per soldier. 

He noted that is "roughly 1,000 rounds more per person." 

"Their officers use what seems to be an exorbitant amount of ammunition," he said. 

Nick Nayak, chief procurement officer for the Department of Homeland Security, did not challenge Chaffetz's numbers. 

However, Nayak sought to counter what he described as several misconceptions about the bullet buys. 

Despite reports that the department was trying to buy up to 1.6 billion rounds over five years, he said that is not true. He later clarified that the number is closer to 750 million. 

He said the department, on average, buys roughly 100 million rounds per year. 

He also said claims that the department is stockpiling ammo are "simply not true." Further, he countered claims that the purchases are helping create broader ammunition shortages in the U.S. 

The department has long said it needs the bullets for agents in training and on duty, and buys in bulk to save money. 

While Democrats likened concerns about the purchases to conspiracy theories, Republicans raised concern about the sheer cost of the ammunition. 

"This is not about conspiracy theories, this is about good government," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said. 

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the full Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he suspects rounds are being stockpiled, and then either "disposed of," passed to non-federal agencies, or shot "indiscriminately." 

If that is the case, he said, "then shame on you."

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EPA acknowledges releasing personal details on farmers, senator slams agency

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  FILE: Sept. 6, 2012: Dairy cows at the Sunburst Dairy farm are seen eating in Belleville, Wisc.REUTERS

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged Tuesday that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, following concerns from congressional Republicans and agriculture groups that the release could endanger their safety. 

According to a document obtained by FoxNews.com, the EPA said “some of the personal information that could have been protected … was released." Though the EPA has already sent out the documents, the agency now says it has since redacted sensitive details and asked the environmental groups to “return the information.”

But Sen. John Thune, who originally complained about the release, slammed the EPA for trying to retroactively recover the sensitive data. 

"It is inexcusable for the EPA to release the personal information of American families and then call for it back, knowing full well that the erroneously released information will never be fully returned," he said in a statement to FoxNews.com. "While EPA acknowledging that it erred is a first step, more must be done to protect the personal information of our farmers and ranchers now and in the future. I will continue to demand answers from the EPA on how this information was collected and why it is still being distributed to extreme environmental groups to the detriment of our farm and ranch families."

The information on livestock and produce farmers was sought through a Freedom of Information Act request by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. The groups, which have not commented on whether they plan to return the documents, were originally given information on roughly 80,000 farmers and ranchers. 

The agency acknowledged the information included individual names, email addresses, phone numbers and personal addresses. 

Thune, of South Dakota, where 500 farmers and ranchers had their information made public, sent a letter Monday to the EPA requesting the agency answer a list of questions -- including whether agency officials reviewed the information to see whether the release complied with the federal Privacy Act of 1974.

“The EPA has threatened the health and safety of agriculture producers and their families and has damaged the security of our food system,” Thune said. “There is a growing gap of trust between America’s farm and ranch families and the EPA. Much of this lack of trust is due to EPA’s aggressive regulatory agenda.”

Other concerns expressed by Thune, farm bureaus and others include whether the EPA first consulted with the departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security, which had already advised against compiling a public database with similar information and whether the EPA still intends to create such a record.

“Does the EPA intend to gather any more personal information on livestock producers?” Thune asked in his letter to agency Acting Administrator Bob Perciasepe.

The EPA said the data was related to farms in 29 states with “concentrated animal feeding operations” and that the released information was part of the agency’s commitment to “ensure clean water and public-health protection.”

The groups wanted the information, they say, because such large-scale operations are a major source of water pollution and they want to hold the EPA accountable for enforcing the Clean Water Act.

Critics have characterized Earth Justice and the organizations as being “extremist groups” and say the released information included data on family farmers who feed fewer than 1,000 animals, which excludes them from having to comply with the Act.

“This information details my family’s home address,” J.D. Alexander, a Nebraska cattle farmer and former president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, told FarmFuture.com. “The only thing it doesn’t do is chauffeur these extremists to my house.”  

In response, Jon Devine, an attorney, wrote in a blog for the Natural Resources Defense Council: "The most irresponsible charge made by NCBA is that providing this information to public interest groups somehow may facilitate criminal acts against facilities. That accusation is entirely unwarranted. NRDC and Pew condemn such illegal activities."

The EPA said the majority of the data was already publicly available through state databases, web sites and federal and state permits, or is required to be released under federal or state law.

However, in response to privacy concerns raised by agricultural groups, the agency redacted sections of information from 10 of the 29 states that contained some personal data, the release said.

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Whitney Houston file released by FBI, shows agency investigated singer's fan mail

The FBI has released its files on a trio of investigations the agency conducted on behalf of Whitney Houston.

The records, released Monday, reveal the agency investigated an alleged attempted extortion of the singer back in 1992.

Documents included in the 128-page file about Houston detail a time when someone the star “[considered] to be a friend” threatened to go public with personal information about the singer.

In one letter sent to Houston, the “friend” boasts to have already received several offers for the personal information about the singer that are “in the six figures range.” He then notes he would “expect a similar offer from you” if he decides not to go public with the information.

The FBI interviewed Houston about the alleged extortion, but the records from that conversation are heavily redacted.

Eventually, agents and prosecutors determined no extortion crime occurred.

The records also shed light on the FBI’s investigation into a seemingly obsessive Whitney fan. The unnamed fan sent Houston more than 79 letters, some of which are included in the file. He also sent letters to her family, friends and business associates, according to the documents.  

In one letter, the fan expresses his desire to meet Houston. “I might hurt someone with some crazy idea…” he writes.

He also threatens to take his story to The National Enquirer, in the hopes of getting the star to acknowledge him publicly.

After the investigation, agents also found no evidence of criminal threats in the fan mail. Copies of the letters were sent to the FBI in 1988 and 1999.

The Houston file covers the height of the Grammy-winning singer's popularity but does not contain any new personal details. The file was released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by FoxNews.com and other media.

Houston drowned in a hotel bathtub on the eve of the 2012 Grammy Awards.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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