The Armstrong Op

Scientology's fair game on Gerry Armstrong

Introduction 

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Mike Rinder: Keeping the IRS tax exemption working (Part 2) (February 16, 2018)

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Rinder quotes Yingling’s February 1 letter and continues:

Now, let’s consider a few of her statements and some of the glaring omissions.

The unaddressed elephant in the room and the big thing missing from the IRS review: no mention of the enormous amount of money spent by scientology to spy on and try to destroy whistleblowers and critics. 1

Wikipedia says:

“Elephant in the room” is an English-language metaphorical idiom for an obvious problem or risk that no one wants to discuss, or a condition of groupthink that no one wants to challenge.2

The elephant in the room is always unaddressed. Once it’s actually addressed, it no longer is the elephant in the room. Addressing can be lied about or faked, in which case the elephant remains the elephant in the room.

What Rinder is floating is the dumbo in the room, an overblown fake elephant in the room.

I am a real, unmetaphorical whistleblower and critic, and victim, and wog. The real metaphorical elephant in the room is Rinder and his coconspirators’ conspiracy to spy on and try to destroy me — or silence me, or imprison me, or ruin me, or obliterate me. The same elephant – also called “Scientology v. Armstrong, the thirty-six year war,” or “the Armstrong Op” – occupies many rooms.

I can’t help that. I have never tried to be the elephant in any room. I have sought, as sensibly as possible, to not be the elephant in anyone’s room. I’m trying right now to end my endless elephant in the room beingness. It’s threatening and can be torture to be the elephant in anyone’s room, let alone the rooms of so many people who hate me so much.

No one in those rooms wants to discuss what the Scientologist conspirators – Hubbard, Miscavige, Rathbun, Rinder, Yingling, et al., the operators3— have done and are doing to me to silence or destroy me. Yet that elephant of a criminal campaign against my rights and my person is key to overturning the IRS tax exemption. I am going to be a problem and a risk to the conspirators until I’m dead, a condition that the conspirators doubtlessly desire. Even then, my record will be a problem and a risk, and an elephant in their rooms.

Funny, in 2012, Rathbun wrote an article to celebrate, he said, “the thirtieth anniversary of [his] introduction to the strange case of Gerry Armstrong,” and I used the “elephant in the room” idiom in a reply.

Seriously, Marty, is the Scientology v. Armstrong case conceivably strange? Is the elephant in the room ever really strange?

Or are there multiple elephants in the room, and my case is the strange one? 4

The enormous amount of money spent by the conspirators to violate public policy by spying on and trying to destroy whistleblowers and critics, etc. would be nice to know, but not at all necessary to know, probably irrelevant for rescission of the IRS tax exemption, virtually impossible to obtain, and not an elephant in any room.

That enormous amount of money can be adequately estimated from identifying and detailing the actions taken against persons. If the conspiracy spent, let’s say, fifteen million to silence or destroy me over thirty-six years, and there are, let’s say, five hundred whistleblowers or critics; then, let’s say, seven and a half billion. As Rinder observes, this “money is disguised and difficult to trace.” It is not the elephant in the room.

What Rinder did to me and to other human beings in violation of public policy, however, is easy to trace. Rinder possesses detailed high-level knowledge of it. So far, he has lied and refused to tell the truth about what exactly he did and made others do to us. It is obvious to me that, whatever he has said or claimed to be doing since saying he had left his conspiracy, he is keeping the unlawful IRS tax exemption working. He is keeping the unlawful injunction he obtained against me working, and he is keeping his black PR of me and others working.

I am glad Rinder is finally talking about public policy. I zeroed in on public policy years ago as the route in which to get the unlawfully obtained and unlawfully used IRS tax exemption pulled.5

From my introduction to the Armstrong op:

The “type of allegations that were being made” against the Scientologists, for which they sought and obtained the “First Amendment immunity” that came with IRS tax exemption, were the type of allegations made by the class of people who sued the Scientology entities, and whose cases the Scientologists identify in their submissions to the IRS. These types of allegations were what the [Fred T.] Goldberg IRS team had to have asked about in relation to the issue of the Scientologists’ violations of public policy in the service of their Scientology seniors.

Obviously the IRS accepted the negotiated statements that justify its grant of tax exemption. Obviously too, the IRS would not have granted the tax exemption without the negotiated statements. There are many pages I’ve now found of black PR on [my attorney Michael] Flynn and me that the IRS solicited, and knew to be false. The IRS did not contact me at any time to verify, refute, clarify or contextualize the Scientologists’ claims about me. Hubbard’s death took care of the inurement problem the Scientologists had with the IRS. But a criminal conspiracy does not take care of their public policy problem. It confirms that the tax exemption is unmerited and unlawful. 6

Notes

Fred T. Goldberg Jr.

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Fred T. Goldberg, Jr.
Fred T. Goldberg, Jr.

Wikipedia: Fred T. Goldberg Jr.

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Allegedly, Scientology officials, including Church leader David Miscavige, paid private investigators to acquire some unspecified compromising information on Goldberg during his time as commissioner, and then strode into his office without an appointment one day to demand terms.[1][2] The meeting was not listed on Goldberg’s appointment calendar, which was obtained by The New York Times through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

While details are not known, it was under Goldberg’s administration that the long running IRS/Scientology legal conflict ended, though it took two years (under two other Commissioners) to work out the details.[3] Scientology received a unique tax exemption in 1993 and the IRS has refused to release the agreement, even after a FOIA request by the NYT and when requested by the court in the Sklar case.[4] (A draft version of the agreement was leaked to the WSJ and published late in 1997.)[5]

In early 2002, Judge Silverman, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote the following:

“If the IRS does, in fact, give preferential treatment to members of the Church of Scientology — allowing them a special right to claim deductions that are contrary to law and rightly disallowed to everybody else — then the proper course of action is a lawsuit to stop to that policy. The remedy is not to require the IRS to let others claim the improper deduction, too.”[6]

References

  1.  Frantz, Douglas (1997-03-19). “Scientology Denies an Account Of an Impromptu I.R.S. Meeting”. New York Times. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  2. Staff (1997-04-02). “Church Of Scientology Denies Impromptu Meeting With US Tax Agency”. The New York Beacon.
  3. Frantz, Douglas (1997-12-31). “$12.5 Million Deal With I.R.S. Lifted Cloud Over Scientologists”. New York Times. Retrieved 2008-08-24.
  4.  Frantz, Douglas (1997-03-09). “Scientology’s Puzzling Journey From Tax Rebel to Tax Exempt”. New York Times. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
  5. “Scientologists, IRS Settle Dispute”, The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 1997.
  6. Sklar v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 00-70753, Tax Court No. 1556-97, Amended Opinion, Appeal from the United States Tax Court, Amended, February 27, 2002.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_T._Goldberg,_Jr.

Tampa Bay Times: Scientology vs. The IRS ( June 21, 2009)

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Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology
By Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, Times Staff Writers
Sunday, June 21, 2009 1:06am

This account comes from executives who for decades were key figures in Scientology’s powerful inner circle. Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the highest-ranking executives to leave the church, are speaking out for the first time.

[…]Now they provide an unprecedented look inside the upper reaches of the tightly controlled organization. They reveal:

[…]

  • With Miscavige calling the shots and Rathbun among those at his side, the church muscled the IRS into granting Scientology tax-exempt status. Offering fresh perspective on one of the church’s crowning moments, Rathbun details an extraordinary campaign of public pressure backed by thousands of lawsuits.

[…]

Scientology vs. the IRS

By the late 1980s, the battle with the IRS had quieted from the wild days of break-ins and indictments. But Miscavige was no less intent on getting back the church’s tax exemption, which he thought would legitimize Scientology.

The new strategy, according to Rathbun: Overwhelm the IRS. Force mistakes.

The church filed about 200 lawsuits against the IRS, seeking documents to prove IRS harassment and challenging the agency’s refusal to grant tax exemptions to church entities.

Some 2,300 individual Scientologists also sued the agency, demanding tax deductions for their contributions.

“Before you knew it, these simple little cookie-cutter suits … became full-blown legal cases,” Rathbun said.

Washington-based attorney William C. Walsh, who is now helping the church rebut the defectors claims, shepherded many of those cases. “We wanted to get to the bottom of what we felt was discrimination,” he said. “And we got a lot of documents, evidence that proved it.”

“It’s fair to say that when we started, there was a lot of distrust on both sides and suspicion,” Walsh said. “We had to dispel that and prove who we were and what kind of people we were.”

Yingling teamed with Walsh, Miscavige and Rathbun on the case. She said the IRS investigation of Miscavige resulted in a file thicker than the FBI’s file on Dr. Martin Luther King. “I mean it was insane,” she said.

The church ratcheted up the pressure with a relentless campaign against the IRS.

Armed with IRS records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Scientology’s magazine, Freedom, featured stories on alleged IRS abuses: lavish retreats on the taxpayers’ dime; setting quotas on audits of individual Scientologists; targeting small businesses for audits while politically connected corporations were overlooked.

Scientologists distributed the magazine on the front steps of the IRS building in Washington.

A group called the National Coalition of IRS Whistleblowers waged its own campaign. Unbeknownst to many, it was quietly created and financed by Scientology.

It was a grinding war, with Scientology willing to spend whatever it took to best the federal agency. “I didn’t even think about money,” Rathbun said. “We did whatever we needed to do.”

They also knew the other side was hurting. A memo obtained by the church said the Scientology lawsuits had tapped the IRS’s litigation budget before the year was up.

The church used other documents it got from the IRS against the agency.

In one, the Department of Justice scolded the IRS for taking indefensible positions in court cases against Scientology. The department said it feared being “sucked down” with the IRS and tarnished.

Another memo documented a conference of 20 IRS officials in the 1970s. They were trying to figure out how to respond to a judge’s ruling that Scientology met the agency’s definition of a religion. The IRS’ solution? They talked about changing the definition.

Rathbun calls it the “Final Solution” conference, a meeting that demonstrated the IRS bias against Scientology. “We used that (memo) I don’t know how many times on them,” he said.

By 1991, Miscavige had grown impatient with the legal tussle. He was confident he could personally persuade the IRS to bend. That October, he and Rathbun walked into IRS headquarters in Washington and asked to meet with IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg. They had no appointment.

Goldberg, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, did not see them that day, but he met with them a week later.

Rathbun says that contrary to rumor, no bribes were paid, no extortion used. It was round-the-clock preparation and persistence — plus thousands of lawsuits, hard-hitting magazine articles and full-page ads in USA Today criticizing the IRS.

“That was enough,” Rathbun said. “You didn’t need blackmail.”

He and Miscavige prepped incessantly for their meeting. “I’m sitting there with three banker’s boxes of documents. He (Miscavige) has this 20-page speech to deliver to these guys. And for every sentence, I’ve got two folders” of backup.

Miscavige presented the argument that Scientology is a bona fide religion — then offered an olive branch.

Rathbun recalls the gist of the leader’s words to the IRS:

Look, we can just turn this off. This isn’t the purpose of the church. We’re just trying to defend ourselves. And this is the way we defend. We aggressively defend. If we can sit down and actually deal with the merits, get to what we feel we are actually entitled to, this all could be gone.

The two sides took a break.

Rathbun remembered: “Out in the hallway, Goldberg comes up to me because he sees I’m the right-hand guy. He goes: ‘Does he mean it? We can really turn it off?’ ”

“And I said,” turning his hand for effect, ” ‘Like a faucet.’ ”

The two sides started talks. Yingling said she warned church leaders to steel themselves, counseling that they answer every question, no matter how offensive.

Agents asked some doozies: about LSD initiation rituals, whether members were shot when they got out of line and about training terrorists in Mexico. “We answered everything,” Yingling said, crediting Miscavige for insisting the church be open, honest and cooperative.

The back and forth lasted two years and resulted in this agreement: The church paid $12.5 million. The IRS dropped its criminal investigations. All pending cases were dropped.

On Oct. 8, 1993, some 10,000 church members gathered in the Los Angeles Sports Arena to celebrate the leader’s announcement: The IRS had restored the church’s tax exemption, legitimizing Scientology as a church, not a for-profit operation.

“The war is over,” Miscavige told the crowd. “This means everything.”

Retrieved on 16 March 2014 from http://www.tampabay.com/news/scientology-the-truth-rundown-part-1-of-3-in-a-special-report-on-the/1012148.

New York Times: $12.5 Million Deal With I.R.S. Lifted Cloud Over Scientologists

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By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
Published: December 31, 19971

The Church of Scientology paid $12.5 million to the Federal Government in 1993 as part of a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service that granted tax-exempt status to the church and ended a long and bitter battle with the agency.

The payment was part of a landmark agreement, whose details had been kept secret until yesterday, that saved the church tens of millions of dollars in taxes and provided Scientology with an invaluable public relations tool in its worldwide campaign for acceptance.

In addition to the $12.5 million payment, the agreement required the church to create an internal oversight committee of high-level church officials to monitor its compliance with tax laws and report annually to the tax agency for three years, according to a copy of the 76-page settlement agreement.

As part of the settlement, the church agreed to drop its lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service and its officials and to stop helping church members who, along with the church itself, had brought 2,200 lawsuits against the agency and its officials over the years. In exchange, the tax agency stopped its audits of 13 major Scientology organizations, dismissed tax penalties and liens against some church organizations and granted tax-exempt status to 114 Scientology-related entities in the United States.

The outline of the agreement was announced by the tax agency in October 1993. But the details had been kept secret as private taxpayer information. Those details were first disclosed yesterday by The Wall Street Journal and copies of the agreement were posted on at least two Internet sites, including one operated by The Journal.

The agreement, signed on Oct. 1, 1993, represented a sharp reversal for the tax agency. For 25 years, the agency had refused to provide Scientology with the blanket tax exemption accorded bona fide churches.

The agency had contended that Scientology operated as a for-profit business that enriched some church officials. In response, the church had mounted an aggressive campaign against the revenue service and individual agency officials. In a campaign first described last March in The New York Times, private detectives dug into the backgrounds of agency personnel and the church helped finance an organization of agency whistle-blowers. According to the settlement document, two church leaders, David Miscavige and Mark Rathbun, approached the agency in October 1991 seeking to negotiate a resolution of the longstanding dispute.

Fred T. Goldberg Jr., the Commissioner of Internal Revenue at the time, met with the church officials and indicated that he, too, wanted to resolve the outstanding issues, the document said. Over the next two years, the agency conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the finances and operations of the church. The result was the final agreement reached in October 1993.

The Church of Scientology was founded in the 1950’s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer who died in 1986. Its adherents believe that Scientology’s self-help techniques and counseling sessions, known as auditing, can help people live more productive and satisfying lives. But the cost of the auditing sessions, which can run into thousands of dollars an hour, have drawn criticism as have the church’s aggressive tactics toward its critics.

The newly disclosed details of the agreement show that the church agreed to more Federal Government intrusion than perhaps any religious organization has ever allowed.

Along with creating the oversight committee, called the Church Tax Compliance Committee, Scientology agreed that the tax agency could impose penalties of as much as $50 million on specific church organizations if they repeatedly spent money on noncharitable purposes from the time of the agreement through the end of 1999.

Mr. Rathbun, a senior Scientology official and member of the oversight committee, said the church had nothing to hide. ”When you are as pure as the driven snow, it doesn’t mean anything,” he said of the oversight. ”We’re doing what we have always done, and that is operating for religious and charitable purposes.”

Frank Keith, a spokesman for the revenue service, declined to comment on any details of the settlement because of the taxpayer privacy law. He said only that the agency had determined after a long inquiry that Scientology was entitled to its tax exemption. The settlement document does not disclose how much in back taxes the agency had sought from the various Scientology entities under investigation.

But Mr. Miscavige, the church’s highest ecclesiastical leader, told a gathering of members in 1993 that the tax bill could have been as much as $1 billion. Along with dismissing the audits and erasing any back-tax liability, the revenue agency reversed an earlier ruling and said that Scientologists could deduct from their taxes the money that they paid to the church for auditing sessions.

In recent years, the church has used the tax agency’s decision both to raise money from its members and to counter criticism from foreign governments about its practices.

It is not known how much the tax agency has spent investigating Scientology or defending itself against the hundreds of lawsuits filed by the church and its members.

[…]

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