Where is this report and why is it still sealed??? The better question is why isn't the Main Stream Media asking this question? Could it be because this report destroys the Clinton Presidency worse than it already is? The report describes the abuses of the Clintons using the IRS to go after political enemies. When the NY times can write a hit piece with a banner headline that is false, just by the statements alone in the article about Bush doing Secret Wiretaps and call a civil liberties issue. Not what it realy is which is a promotion for an upcoming book that will be released in 10 days buy one of their reporters. This case involved real abuses to people civil liberties. The things investigated in this report are worse than anything Richard Nixon ever did. Yet where is the cry from the Press? The following article is a little background information for anyone who has no idea what the Barret Report is since there has been a press blackout on it. Take Note of the names of the Senators that have been trying to keep this information suppresed.
May 5, 2005
Investigating the IRS
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A Senate rider inserted in an emergency appropriations bill in the dead of the night, which would close a rare window into political foul play at the Internal Revenue Service, was quietly removed Tuesday in Senate-House negotiations. That offers full disclosure of a major scandal that has been percolating for a decade.
The rider would have de-funded the investigation begun in 1995 of then-Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros by Independent Counsel David Barrett. The amendment was sponsored by three highly influential Democrats, purportedly to stop leakage of federal money in a run-on program and end persecution of a no-longer-prominent Democratic politician. In fact, Barrett's investigation is the first independent probe, with subpoena power, of the IRS.
Passage of the amendment probably would have meant Barrett's voluminous report on the Cisneros case never would see the light of day. The document has been inspected by attorneys for prominent Democrats mentioned in it. That inspection was followed by belated efforts from Senate Democratic leaders to terminate Barrett, raising suspicions.
Democrats and their friends in the news media complain with sudden new urgency that Barrett has squandered $21 million over 10 years on a case in which Cisneros admitted in 1999 to lying to an FBI background investigation about his payments to a former mistress to keep her quiet. He was fined $10,000 and then pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001. Cisneros' bigger problem is an allegation of fraud in not paying taxes on funds used for the hush money.
The report, described as 400 pages long with over 2,000 footnotes, is sealed by court order. So are Barrett's lips. But enough has leaked from sources familiar with its content to suggest political dynamite. Sources indicate an IRS whistle-blower contends the tax fraud investigation was transferred from a regional office to Washington, where the IRS and the Justice Department suffocated it. That raises the question of whether Cisneros, then a rising Democratic star, was improperly protected by Clinton administration officials. Barrett's use of the subpoena, according to sources, has fleshed out the story.
The investigation has been so protracted because of delaying motions by the Williams & Connolly firm, attorneys for Bill and Hillary Clinton. These lawyers, headed by David Kendall, are described as poring over the sealed Barrett report, according to sources, because clients are named. Coincidentally or not, the case aroused sudden interest within the Senate's Democratic power structure.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, Senate Democratic Policy Committee chairman, in the middle of a long floor speech on April 5, gave notice he would try to amend the emergency money bill "to shut off the funding" for Barrett.
Dorgan was the amendment's principal sponsor. Co-sponsors were Sen. Richard Durbin, the minority whip, and Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 nominee for president. In the collegial Senate Appropriations Committee, the amendment was routinely added to the emergency bill to fund hostilities in Iraq. It passed the Senate without debate or comment late in the evening of April 21.
The first public notice of their plans was an April 22 editorial in The Wall Street Journal that elicited a letter to the newspaper from Dorgan, Durbin and Kerry that was published April 27. It asserted Barrett's "report should be made public, and we hope that it will be," even if the independent counsel is stripped of funds. This marked the first mention by the de-funders about making the report public.
Maneuvers like this de-funding are best done quietly, but that no longer was possible. On April 27, two freshman Republican senators (Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint) and two more senior colleagues (Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe) wrote Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran. They urged elimination of the de-funding because of "the risk that the final report on this investigation will not be released."
Although none of the four Republican letter-signers sits on Appropriations, they prevailed. In the Senate-House conference Tuesday, the House objected to the Dorgan amendment, and the Senate receded. The report may soon be public, and people who have read it say the worst suspicions about the IRS will be confirmed.
Byron York also wrot this in November.
November 18, 2005, 5:43 p.m.A Cover-up of the Barrett Report?Congress’s action might keep it under wraps.
There has been a major setback for people working to secure the full public release of the report by Clinton-era independent counsel David Barrett. A House and Senate conference committee has agreed on language that could keep key portions of the report secret forever, despite the efforts of Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to make it public. Democrats, led by North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, led the fight to keep the report away from public scrutiny.
The conference report gives the judiciary panel that oversees Barrett the authority to "make such orders as are appropriate to protect the rights of any individual named" in Barrett's report. What that means, in practical terms, is that Section 5 of Barrett's report, the portion of the document that is thought to be most controversial, dealing with the behavior of the Internal Revenue Service during the independent counsel's investigation, might never be released.
Barrett was appointed in May 1995 to investigate allegations that Henry Cisneros, Bill Clinton's secretary of housing, lied to the FBI about payments he had made to his mistress. In September 1999, Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine. But the investigation did not stop there, because during the course of the probe, Barrett reportedly sought information about Cisneros' taxes and ran into a roadblock erected by the IRS. There have been reports that Barrett then spent a significant amount of time trying to investigate possible IRS misconduct, and what happened in the course of that investigation is apparently the subject of some of Barrett's final report.
The report has been finished since the summer of 2004, but the panel of judges never gave Barrett the O. K. to release it publicly. Frustrated by the inaction, Grassley last month demanded that the court give him a copy. The court then ordered that parts of the report — excluding Section 5 — be made public, but so far that has not happened. Why even those portions of the report thought to be non-controversial have not been released is not clear.
Now, the language of the House-Senate conference, giving the authority over release of the report back to the judges, seems likely to guarantee that Section 5, and perhaps other parts of the report as well, will never be released. It is a major defeat for Barrett, who last month told National Review that, "The Congress and the public have a right to know the contents of the entire report."
It is also a setback for taxpayers. Barrett has so far spent about $20 million in public funds on the investigation. If it is not released, there will be no way for the public to determine whether such an enormous expenditure was justified, or whether Barrett wasted the taxpayers' money.
This is a classic cover up to protect the Clintons and the Civil Rights Abuses they commited using the IRS . The SILENCE FROM THE PRESS IS DEAFENING.
Update .... Tony Snow has done a real nice piece on this
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