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0 pointshumanrebar9y ago0 comments

> unless you're some sort of leftist hacktivist

...or any citizen activist, really. The citizen journalists who broke the Planned Parenthood story last year were indicted with "tampering with government records" for faking identities so they could go undercover.

And two years ago, a story broke that the IRS was targeting certain nonprofits because of their names and political leanings.

Nobody has been held criminally accountable or 'overzealous' prosecution in either case. There was one early retirement (not even officially a resignation) after the IRS scandal.

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dctoedt9y ago· 2 in thread

You betray your political leanings here:

+ If by "the Planned Parenthood story" you mean the allegations of selling body parts from fetuses, the story was fake from the get-go and the "citizen journalists" [sic] edited their recordings to push their right-wing agenda. [0]

+ Contrary to what right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed, the IRS wasn't targeting conservative nonprofits specifically; it was looking at other characteristics based on keyword searches. [1]

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/19/politics/planned-parenthood-vi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

humanrebarOP9y ago

I disagree about your characterization of the stories, but that's really a digression from the conversation at hand: corruption of the American justice system. I'm providing examples from the other side of the aisle on purpose, to show it's not a partisan issue.

In the first case, prosecutors were waging political battles with at best tangential tick-tack charges. In the second case corruption (even bipartisan corruption!) was ignored, again, for political reasons.

If you want more examples, the mayor of Houston subpoenaed sermons of pastors a couple years ago as part of a political witch hunt. Thankfully, there was some political rebuke afterwards, but, again, no criminal charges were filed in the aftermath after that abuse of power.

In all cases, the punishment is entirely political, so it's clear that there are no consequences to this sort of injustice if the action is politically popular enough. The point of the Bill of Rights is that there are some things that are wrong, even if they're popular.

dsfyu404ed9y ago

The IRS isn't idiots. Nor is any gov't agency. Any agency that audits compliance will scrutinize whoever has more degrees of separation from whoever they answer to. It's a scaled up cousin to why town selectmen never get traffic violations, they have power over the $ pipeline.

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