DHS official P. Jeffrey Black tried to fix problems that he saw in the Department of Homeland Security’s air marshal program. He testified before Congress about it. He appeared in a documentary about it.
Then the IRS magically showed up at his door. What are the odds, huh?
He had taken a long list of complaints to lawmakers about how the air marshals service was run, ranging from problems keeping marshals on flights to allegations of ineptitude and favoritism by managers. The same year he retired, he appeared in “Please Remove Your Shoes,” a documentary critical of the airline security measures travelers endure on every trip.
Then came the audit, which an Internal Revenue Service agent told him about the same day the movie premiered — “almost to the hour,” he said.
They slapped a lien on his home after investigating him for a year. They hassled him, determined that the government owed him money, and then poof! they were gone. The government still owes Black money.
Significantly, it’s CNN that is reporting Black’s story. The mainstream media are now actively looking for and reporting on stories about the IRS abuse of taxpayers and whistleblowers, that are not bubbling up out of alternative conservative media.
The IRS claims, of course, that its audit decisions come from the bureaucracy and not any political appointees. That would be the same bureaucracy that gives very heavily to the Democrats. That would be the same bureaucracy, broadly speaking, that targeted the Tea Party. So that excuse really does not fly.
Black’s case lines up disturbingly with Catherine Engelbrecht’s case. She was targeted by a plethora of executive branch agencies after filing for election security watchdog True the Vote’s tax-exempt status with the IRS. Suddenly the IRS was auditing her, the FBI was nosing around, OSHA was around, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (of Waco infamy) was asking questions in her Houston business. The two cases together suggest that the IRS is a couple of years into morphing into a secret police that targets the Obama administration’s political opponents. A nascent Stasi of the East German variety, in other words.
The Stasi was communist East Germany’s Ministry for State Security. It deployed a technique for eliminating the state’s political opposition called “decomposing.” That strategy called for targeting enemies of the state and discrediting them by investigating them relentlessly both to demoralize them and to divide them from friends, family members and associates.
The IRS isn’t there yet. But it does look like the IRS is working from a Stasi-style playbook.
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