‘You should give increased scrutiny to those groups because a lot of them are just f***ing fronts for the Koch brothers or whatever…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The fourth in a series of ‘Deep State’ exposés from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas on Tuesday brought the most shocking look to date at the callous disregard for law and country among radical socialists who have infiltrated the federal bureaucracy.
While previous undercover videos showed questionable activism at the State Department, Justice Department, Health and Human Services, and the Government Accountability Office, the fourth one, profiling two IRS employees, goes beyond partisan mischief-making into the realm of seditious malfeasance.
Thomas Sheehy, an IRS tax examiner and member of the Austin Democratic Socialists of America, candidly confesses that, if given the opportunity, he would work to actively undermine the United States’ most sacred and fundamental of principles.
“Unfortunately, I am not allowed by the bylaws of my union to go against the constitution,” he says, before admitting that he would if he could.
It is particularly shocking in light of the 2013 Lois Lerner controversy—generally considered one of the top 5 scandals of the Obama administration—in which the agency’s director overseeing tax-exempt organizations pleaded the Fifth to avoid criminal prosecution.
The wrist-slapping rebuke that Lerner got for targeting conservative nonprofits with additional scrutiny during the 2012 election seems to have resulted in little to no reform—or even so much as contrition among the IRS pencil-pushers moonlighting as domestic terrorists.
“The IRS indeed has fought for privacy for itself while simultaneously demanding for more disclosure from citizens,” O’Keefe said, pointing out the agency’s maneuvering to seal testimony from Lerner and her conspirators in order to protect them from public scrutiny.
For his part, Sheehy speaks admiringly of a former IRS commissioner who attempted to delete tens of thousands of emails related to the scandal.
“John Koskinen. He got a lot of flak for giving increased scrutiny to these Tea Party groups; conservatives got really mad at him,” Sheehy tells the undercover interviewer. “He was so cool, though, because he deleted all the emails, so they could not hold any evidence against him.”
Sheehy then unleashes a profanity-laden screed showing just how little he regards the rule of law that he is entrusted by the public both to follow and enforce.
“Yeah, I don’t give a s**t if that is a crime for doing that,” he says. “ … You should give increased scrutiny to those groups because a lot of them are just f***ing fronts for the Koch brothers or whatever.”
Project Veritas is able to do in its undercover interview what few were able to do on the public record, which is to acknowledge that Lerner’s office knowingly engaged in unseemly—and illegal—activity while specifically targeting conservative groups.
Jerry Semasek, an IRS attorney, says he worked with people in the Tax Exempt Government Entities division during the 2013 scandal.
Although more prudent than Sheehy in his comments–insisting that Congressional Republicans blew the scandal out of proportion and that Lerner was unfairly singled out as its mastermind–Semasek repeatedly confesses to the undercover interviewer that “mistakes were made.”
“Lois Lerner and maybe some of her employees were more liberal leaning or Democrats,” he says, “so I don’t know if they disallowed them, but they required them to produce more documentation to try to prove that they weren’t partisan.”
O’Keefe says that the series of investigations, which began last week, so far has resulted in the removal of two federal employees, the GAO’s Natarajan Subramanian and the Justice Department’s Allison Hrabar.
On a special page devoted to the official responses to its report, it also offers comments from the other agencies featured, which assure that they are investigating the criminal and ethical violations.
O’Keefe promises that even more reports are forthcoming: “Stay tuned to see which government agency we unmask next.”
Frighteningly, Sheehy, in his own candid words, reveals that Project Veritas may only be scratching the surface in the network of corruption that leftist extremists have managed to hack into. He mentions one such comrade of his, named Chris, who helps manage the Democratic Socialists of America’s tech stuff and social media, and also helps write its bylaws:
“He actually is on the national social media working group. So, he helps run the national Twitter account,” Sheehy says.