“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” said Elizabeth Hofacre, an employee of the Cincinnati IRS office, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal.Hull has apparently pulled his Facebook page and retired. Obviously not a "spring chicken": he even looks older than me. Very convenient disappearance, if I do say so.
Hofacre’s office, which oversaw tax-exempt applications, reportedly requested help from the agency’s Exempt Organizations Technical unit in Washington, D.C. in 2010 to deal with an influx of new applications from Tea Party groups.
IRS attorney Hull sent Hofacre additional information request letters [pdf] that he’d already sent to two tea party groups and instructed her to use them as a “foundation to prepare and review” cases and prepare her own letters to new applicants.
Having gone over that pdf linked above, it's his name on it, and he does appear to be the HMF behind the orders to the field offices. With him out of the way, it's hard to know if it stopped with him, or if someone higher up had him write the briefs (my guess). Institutionally, it's disgusting that nobody in the IRS stopped to say "they're asking me to do something wrong" and stood up against it. Institutionally, they're still "The Untouchables" in their minds.
His mocking laugh in the picture is just him telling the world that he's proud of what he did, and why he did it, and taunting anyone not inebriated in progressivism with a royal, "so what are you going to do about it, peasant."
ReplyDeleteA quick look in Hamilton Co. Ohio in the online white pages, court records, property records, probate records, and notary registration in the Ohio Secy of State, turns up nobody by the name of Carter Hull.
ReplyDeleteHe's either been scrubbed from the public record, or he wasn't recorded in any way on the state or county level as a lawyer. All lawyers in Ohio are notaries also automatically, but I don't know if that automatically gets them into the SOS website as notaries, or if they'd have had to file something there. Could be he was in northern Kentucky instead, or maybe being federal, if he came from elsewhere and rented, he might not have had occasion to get in the state or local level public record.
Prominent people often get a trustee to be on the deed to their home. Even so, they often take out a mortgage in their own name. Didn't find one.
For anyone thinking I'm being nosy, this is the public record, and he's a public figure / lawyer. One would think his name would be somewhere on the public record, just from lawyering. It's not like I'm tapping his phone or something.
Plus, turnabout is fair play.
Oh well, I tried.
Thanks for trying.
DeleteAll I know is that the first link said, "an IRS lawyer in Washington", but that's not much help. He could be in Virginia, Baltimore, even Pennsylvania - anywhere he thought was a reasonable commute from DC. With the FB page removed, that makes it harder.