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The Obama campaign has shown a disturbing lack of commitment to freedom of political speech. Letters  on law firm stationery calling for McCain ads to be pulled , law enforcement in Missouri contacting political opponents of Obama  and Obama’s notorious “truth squads”are egregious examples of the Obama campaign’s willingness to abuse the legal system to stifle political dissent.

The cancellation of Sarah Palin’s appearance at an anti Ahmadinejad rally was presented as a craven cave in to political pressure. According to political blogger Sultan Knish the truth is considerably more sinister.

Organisers of the rally were contacted by a law firm that advised them that a Palin appearance would jeopardise their tax exempt status. Such letters are rarely intended as friendly pro bono legal advice.  This letter was no exception. Sultan Knish quotes the Jewish Telegraphic agency as follows.

“A former top IRS official warned Jewish groups that they would likely face a financial penalty and expensive audit process if they went through with plans to have the Republican vice-presidential candidate speak at an anti-Iran rally.

The warning came from Marcus Owens, a 25-year veteran of the Internal Revenue Service and the former director of its tax-exempt unit. According to the general counsel of the UJA-Federation of New York, it echoed the advice of several other lawyers.

Zimmerman’s version of events, confirmed by Owens, would appear to poke a major hole in the claim by right-wing critics that organizers of the rally were motivated primarily by partisan politics in deciding to disinvite Palin and other American elected officials.”

There is a problem with the JTA spin on the warning from Marcus Owens. It comes up in an examination of Owen’s resume. Owens is very concerned with the separation of non profit organisations from the political process. Unfortunately, his concern is tendentious and selective. According to Sultan Knish, he regularly protects liberal  religious organisations on their political forays while selectively hamstringing conservatives of whom he disapproves with threats against their tax exempt political status.

According to Sultan Knish and Insight Magazine “The problem with this little charade by the Federation and the JTA is that the only named lawyer consulted here, Marcus Owens is very much a partisan source.

He quotes insight Magazine as follows.

You will often find Marcus Owens being quoted on tax exempt church and politics matters, not so much because he’s an authority as because Owens is the go to guy among liberal Churches and non-profits when it comes to protecting their political speech, while assailing the political speech of conservative churches.

Marcus Owens has vigorously defended liberal groups and churches such as the NAACP and the All Saints Church when they launched blistering attacks on Republicans.

At the same time, with the usual liberal respect for civil rights, Marcus Owens has vigorously gone after conservative churches that talk politics and is currently pushing hard to go after the ADF initiative, actually authoring a letter demanding that the IRS go after the churches involved.

It’s safe to say that not only is Marcus Owens a wildly partisan source, but he has a clear agenda in the case of Palin. He supports liberal political speech by churches and non-profits but works to destroy conservatives churches or groups that engage in it.”

The letter by Owen was coauthored with Mortimer Caplin, who is a founder of the  Caplin and Drysdale law firm, at which Owen works. The third signatory to this letter was Cono Namorato, who also works at Caplan and Drysdale.

This law firm specialises in use of the tax code to take down political groups of whom they disapprove. According to the Sultan Knish article “Mortimer Caplin was JFK’s former IRS Commissioner, Ted Kennedy’s former law professor and of course a major Democratic donor. In fact Caplin has dropped a cool 5 grand on Obama this year and 2300 dollars on him in the primary last year. He was even on the spot when Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama

And Mortimer Caplin held down much the same duty for JFK that he’s doing now for Obama, taking down opposition groups using the tax code, except back when he was the commissioner of the IRS.”

According to an article in Insight Magazine on September 16, 2003 “The groups the IRS audited ranged from strongly anticommunist organizations such as the John Birch Society to traditional conservative organizations such as the National Education Program of Harding College. Coincidentally or not, the Reuther memorandum had singled out many of these groups. Bits and pieces of this targeting of conservatives have surfaced over the years, but Andrew shows it was an operation similar in scale to Nixon’s infamous Special Services Staff. Called the “Ideological Organizations Project,” the covert Kennedy scheme lasted through the Johnson years into the mid-1960s.

Reached by telephone for an interview, Caplin, who cofounded the Washington law firm Caplin & Drysdale upon leaving the IRS, admitted there was some direction from the administration to look at right-wing groups. But he said he insisted the IRS draw up a list of liberal groups to make sure there was balance.

But Andrew said his research showed the list of liberal groups largely was a cover for strikes against Kennedy’s political opponents on the right. He points to an internal IRS report that found “75 percent of the audits completed were of right-wing groups.” Furthermore, Andrew argues that the groups were targeted because of their prominence rather than any alleged tax problems. Caplin had written in a memo that “we are not certain any of these organizations or their benefactors are failing to comply with the tax laws.” Andrew noted that “both the Birch Society and Robert Welch Inc., moreover, had been examined in 1960 [before Kennedy came to office], but the IRS had been unable to uncover significant problems. They were included for 1961 [quoting the IRS] ‘because of widespread interest in the activities of these organizations.’”

Some critics have noted that the auditing of left-wing groups among JFK’s enemies served Kennedy’s purposes as well. One of the few left-wing groups selected for audit was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee a pro-Castro organization.”

In an additional twist to this storyn Ellen Zimmerman, general counsel to the UJA  who  helped make the decision to disinvite Palin has a history of left wing political activism that includes working with Caplin and Drysdale law firm members on political projects.

According to Sultan Knish “Ellen Zimmerman herself has worked together with Caplin and Drysdale lawyers before and a former Caplin and Drysdale partner, Stuart Brown plays a prominent role in the Foundations as well as distributing grants to left wing anti-israel groups including Peace Now, New Israel Fund and B’Tselem, via the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation. Groups naturally opposed to taking any action against Iran.”

As has been established, Caplin and Drysdale are long standing players in the game of using tax codes to stifle political dissent. They did it for Kennedy, and now they are doing it for Obama. JTA provided a shaky defense for the disinvitation of Sarah Palin to the Ahmadinejad rally. So shaky was her defense of this disgraceful measure that it provided a critical clue into the strategy being used by the Obama campaign to strangle political discourse.

It is very difficult for a Freshman Senator with no political experience to prove what he would do if elected to office. The toxic mass of  legal intimidation that has metastasised in the Obama campaign is a notable exception. The Obama campaign has made free speech itself an issue in this campaign. Considered together with Obama’s dangerously naive foreign policy, the spectre of an Obama presidency is a frightening one. The contempt for free speech that has spanned the entire Obama campaign has been too much for America. Four more years of a muzzled and bullied opposition is intolerable. We should send Obama back to illinois in November and investigate the contract he seems to have taken out on free speech in America.