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TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

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Glenn's Show Prep

ACLJ: We are drafting complaints against IRS agents, federal government

May 13, 2013
Wilson

Writer

GLENN: Jay Sekulow has been a frequent guest on the program and he has been a guy who has stood and his organization, the ACLJ, stood for a long time on freedom issues and stood against government tyranny. He is one of the main guys taking this case on with the IRS. Jay, welcome to the program.

SEKULOW: Hey, it's good to be with you, Glenn. Little known in fact, I had my first job out of law school was as a trial lawyer for the office of chief counsel, the Internal Revenue Service, and the tax‑exempt group was under our jurisdiction. So ‑‑

GLENN: Holy cow. So you need it inside and out.

SEKULOW: ‑‑ (inaudible) what's going on here and it's more than troubling.

GLENN: Okay. So tell me, you have 27 cases, and I know that one of them is not the national 9/12 group because national, when they started to file income tax and wanted tax‑exempt status, they got hassled like crazy and they just said it's not worth it and so it's really hurt them on fundraising but they just did not want the hassle from the government. They knew they were being set up. So you have 27 cases now. Tell us exactly what happened and why it's so troubling.

SEKULOW: Well, we got 27 cases. We were contacted early last year when the second round of questionnaires came from the Internal Revenue Service to these groups that were either 9/12 groups or TEA Party groups or conservative organizations and they started asking for donor information, membership lists, communications between members and members of the House and Senate or local legislative bodies and assemblies. And that's when we realized this has taken on a whole new dimension. So we simply and aggressively wrote back to the IRS. We started representing the groups and said we're not giving you that information, you're not entitled to it. We gave them the list of cases why they are not entitled to it going back to the 1950s, the NAACP cases and ultimately they were ‑‑ the questions were very aggressive and we maintained a very aggressive response. 15 of the groups have been granted status exemption. But there are still 10 pending and like you just mentioned, again, we had two that said it's not worth the hassle.

GLENN: Not worth it.

SEKULOW: Of waiting two and a half years with these intrusive questions coming in from the government. So the reaction is understandable: People got frustrated. But this was a coordinated effort in this attempt to lay the defeat of, quote, low‑level employees. I used to work for that office of chief counsel of the IRS. I was a lawyer there. The fact is the tax‑exempt group is what's called a specialty group. They are specially trained Internal Revenue Service agents, specially trained in tax‑exempt orgs. These are not low‑level bureaucrats and now we know there were meetings as high up as the chief counsel's office which is the highest level office inside the IRS. So that's nonsense. And by the way, the chief counsel and the head of the IRS are both presidential appointments.

GLENN: So let me ‑‑

SEKULOW: So they can't say this is an independent agency.

GLENN: So let me ask you this. Read the Nixon impeachment clause here. This is I think the first charge.

STU: This is out of Article II, Section 1

GLENN: Article II.

STU: Just skipping through it a little bit, but he has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law and to cause in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

GLENN: Okay. That was against Nixon. Better, worse, or about the same?

SEKULOW: No, this is worse because this isn't only tax information and selective prosecution. This was then going after the people that supported these organizations by requesting the donor lists, something they are not even required to put in their tax return. In other words, the tax return itself, Glenn, for these nonprofits does not include a list of your donors because they're not entitled to it. Yet the IRS asked for that. That's more than Nixon did by a long stretch. And that's where the real difficulty is. We sent out a letter this afternoon or this morning to the IRS commissioner, the acting commissioner Steve Miller as well as the chief counsel demanding that the remainder of our clients be granted their exemption immediately. And I will tell you this: We are drafting complaints against the federal government and the agents involved right now. That's in process today.

PAT: Jay, the other thing this administration is trying to do is hide behind the fact that Douglas Shulman who was the commissioner of the IRS when this happened was a Bush appointee.

SEKULOW: Right.

PAT: Can they lay that at Bush's feet now or ‑‑ I mean ‑‑

SEKULOW: Of course not, and this is why. He was finishing up his point in term, I think he had six months left on it when he made that statement. They probably gave him incorrect information. Obviously they did. I don't think he was hiding the ball. I think he was based on the information he was told. What he was ‑‑ unfortunately what was actually happening was his people within the IRS themselves were engaged in this and the chief counsel is appointed by the president. So the chief counsel was an Obama appointee and the tax‑exempt head that previously worked with the FCC. So I mean, you can blame ‑‑ you can't blame this on Bush. These letters are coming out in 2012.

GLENN: Can they separate ‑‑

SEKULOW: They can't do it.

GLENN: Can he separate himself enough to say, "Oh, boy, they were just out of control"?

PAT: They are an out‑of‑control agency?

SEKULOW: Well, here's the problem. You know, you've got Jay Carney saying it's an independent agency which is factually not true and constitutionally not true. I mean, it's ‑‑ the IRS is the enforcement on the treasury. Treasury's an executive office function. So that's bogus. That's what they are going to try to do. The question will be whether the American people buy it. And I suspect even as you said, the mainstream media has picked this up and they are running with it. They realize that this is not just a tempest and a teapot. This teapot is boiling over.

GLENN: Okay. You said that you went back to the Fifties to see this kind of abuse. I have said since we were together as a people at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, I said this is a Civil Rights Movement, that we are going ‑‑ it will catch up to us, that we will begin to understand that the tactics used in the Fifties and in the late 1800s without the physical terror ‑‑

SEKULOW: Right.

GLENN: ‑‑ except for the stuff that happened with the labor unions, those same kind of tactics are being used and this is a Civil Rights Movement now. Would you say that's accurate?

SEKULOW: I think it is. And the government which, you know, unfortunately is going back to the same attempts they made to stifle these civil rights movement for African‑Americans, for black Americans in the United States led by Dr. King, they are using the same tactics. What did they ask the NAACP: Who is your members? Give us your mailing list. Who do you get money from? And the NAACP led by ‑‑ a legal charge led by Thurgood Marshall, who did a brilliant job of taking cases all the way to the Supreme Court establishing that government has no right to ask for that information. But it's like they don't learn. It did not work out very well for the government in the 1950s, especially these states that were trying to squash the Civil Rights Movement. And it's not going to work out very well for the administration in 2013 either.

GLENN: Okay. So Jay, what needs to happen and how can the average American help?

SEKULOW: Well, I think there's going to be two things that need to happen immediately. Number one, the groups that are pending need to get the recognition because as you've said, they are getting worn out. That needs to happen, period. So that we can get in play, and we're demanding that. Number two, the people that are ‑‑ that have done this need to be held accountable and that will take place in two forms: Congress will have extensive oversight hearings. These aren't just going to be photo opportunities. This is going to be the real deal and I expect many of them. And then as I said we're looking at right now federal court action against the individual agents that were involved in this and we'll see where that goes. So we're looking at that right now.

GLENN: Jay, I appreciate it. I don't know if this would fall with you, but we were targeted and nobody cared. We were targeted by the White House for smear campaigns and for boycotting of my business.

SEKULOW: Right.

GLENN: And it was Van Jones, it was Jim Wallis, it was the labor unions, and they were all the people that were in the White House at the time that it was going on. Is there any connection at all to things like that to this?

SEKULOW: Well, I don't ‑‑ you know, there's another aspect to this, Glenn, and that is it's not just conservative Christian groups that have been targeted here. There's Jewish conservative groups that also have been targeted. So it makes sense, and they were targeted because their position on Israel was counter to what the administration's has been. And I think you could tie what happened to you, what's happening now, what's happening to these conservative Jewish groups, it's all the same.

GLENN: It is.

SEKULOW: It is stifling dissent. And when you have the government trying to stifle dissent, that's really when ‑‑ it's bad enough when individuals do it, but it's a free country. Hey, I could disagree with you, you can disagree with me, but your government doesn't get to do that.

GLENN: Most people have ‑‑ they're worn out from this.

SEKULOW: Yeah.

GLENN: Mainly from this media, that media, they just don't care. And so the media will pick something up and then they will dismiss it and then they move on and then you never hear about it again and it just gets worse. Two questions: One, if this isn't corrected, how dangerous is the IRS and this administration?

SEKULOW: Unbelievably so because if they can ask these groups for this kind of information, I shudder to think what they can ask of individuals on audits as well. So I ‑‑

GLENN: Especially with healthcare.

SEKULOW: If this goes unchecked, you've sent the IRS into a version of the CIA into the American people. I mean, the intrusiveness of it would be unprecedented.

GLENN: And what do you expect to actually happen? Do you think this is ‑‑

SEKULOW: I think heads are going to roll, Glenn. I think that ‑‑

GLENN: Serious heads or little heads?

SEKULOW: People are going to be held accountable but the question is what the White House knew when they knew I, what the appointees, the political appointees knew. But the fact that the agents themselves thought they could do this and it was sign off on by group managers and probably chief counsel's office, that in itself raises a whole specter and I don't know if we know yet where those consequences will be.

GLENN: Jay, thank you so much.

SEKULOW: Thanks, Glenn.

GLENN: It's good to have you out there fighting.

The great switch: Gates trades climate control for digital dominion

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Antifa isn’t “leaderless” — It’s an organized machine of violence

Jeff J Mitchell / Staff | Getty Images

The mob rises where men of courage fall silent. The lesson from Portland, Chicago, and other blue cities is simple: Appeasing radicals doesn’t buy peace — it only rents humiliation.

Parts of America, like Portland and Chicago, now resemble occupied territory. Progressive city governments have surrendered control to street militias, leaving citizens, journalists, and even federal officers to face violent anarchists without protection.

Take Portland, where Antifa has terrorized the city for more than 100 consecutive nights. Federal officers trying to keep order face nightly assaults while local officials do nothing. Independent journalists, such as Nick Sortor, have even been arrested for documenting the chaos. Sortor and Blaze News reporter Julio Rosas later testified at the White House about Antifa’s violence — testimony that corporate media outlets buried.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened.

Chicago offers the same grim picture. Federal agents have been stalked, ambushed, and denied backup from local police while under siege from mobs. Calls for help went unanswered, putting lives in danger. This is more than disorder; it is open defiance of federal authority and a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

A history of violence

For years, the legacy media and left-wing think tanks have portrayed Antifa as “decentralized” and “leaderless.” The opposite is true. Antifa is organized, disciplined, and well-funded. Groups like Rose City Antifa in Oregon, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in Texas, and Jane’s Revenge operate as coordinated street militias. Legal fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild provide protection, while crowdfunding networks and international supporters funnel money directly to the movement.

The claim that Antifa lacks structure is a convenient myth — one that’s cost Americans dearly.

History reminds us what happens when mobs go unchecked. The French Revolution, Weimar Germany, Mao’s Red Guards — every one began with chaos on the streets. But it wasn’t random. Today’s radicals follow the same playbook: Exploit disorder, intimidate opponents, and seize moral power while the state looks away.

Dismember the dragon

The Trump administration’s decision to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization was long overdue. The label finally acknowledged what citizens already knew: Antifa functions as a militant enterprise, recruiting and radicalizing youth for coordinated violence nationwide.

But naming the threat isn’t enough. The movement’s financiers, organizers, and enablers must also face justice. Every dollar that funds Antifa’s destruction should be traced, seized, and exposed.

AFP Contributor / Contributor | Getty Images

This fight transcends party lines. It’s not about left versus right; it’s about civilization versus anarchy. When politicians and judges excuse or ignore mob violence, they imperil the republic itself. Americans must reject silence and cowardice while street militias operate with impunity.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened. The violence in Portland and Chicago is deliberate, not spontaneous. If America fails to confront it decisively, the price won’t just be broken cities — it will be the erosion of the republic itself.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.