Finding these transcripts led me back to Rathbun’s 2009 Tampa Bay Times video interview about the IRS. He says that before Miscavige and he visited IRS Commissioner Fred Goldberg in 1991, the Scientologists had “a lot of expensive attorneys from D.C. and Washington” who had been “attempting at different levels to start negotiations.” Rathbun says that his surprise visit with Miscavige to Goldberg “opened the door [ ] to get negotiations going.” In this context, “negotiate” means to confer to reach an agreement or to arrange or settle by discussion and mutual agreement.
Rathbun says that after the surprise visit or door opening, the negotiation “went on for at least two years.” He says that he and primarily Miscavige “were literally commuting to Washington D.C. almost every week.” Rathbun says they would “see the IRS, present the answers to [the IRS’s] set of questions, get another set of questions, go back to L.A., get the information together [ ] Boom! Next Sunday, back on a plane, back to D.C., another meeting [ ] That went on for two years.”
Rathbun says that Goldberg opened up the door for the Scientologists to make a case for tax exemption. Rathbun says Goldberg opened that door by creating “a team that didn’t really have a long track record on this.” “This” here has to be understanding and standing up to the Scientologists’ lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior against citizens and even against the US Government. Rathbun says that Goldberg brought in IRS personnel to deal with the Scientologists who were “fresh, who [ ] knew exempt organizations but didn’t have a long history with Scientology.”
Rathbun black PRs the IRS personnel who had a track record and a long history with the Scientologists as “some real haters, some real Scientology haters within.” He says they “had an attitude of, no matter what you said, they were going to [ ] deny the exemption.” Rathbun is lying, and his reason for lying is obvious. The IRS personnel with track records and a knowledge of history, and, I suppose, consciences, hated the Scientologists’ lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior against citizens and Government. These knowledgeable IRS personnel might have especially hated, just as many knowledgeable non-IRS people hate, lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior being directed and justified by “religion.”
With knowledgeable, incorrupt track record IRS personnel, the Scientologists would have had to tell the truth in their submissions to “make a case for exemption.” And, of course, if they told the truth, the Scientologists could never obtain an exemption. Goldberg, according to Rathbun, got rid of the knowledgeable, track record personnel, and replaced them with a team of agents, supposedly selected for their ignorance, but definitely selected for their corruptness, who would then allow, and in fact require, that the Scientologists continue to lie to make the case for exemption. The Scientologists had to provide statements, facts and answers to the Goldberg team’s questions that were acceptable to the Goldberg team. The Scientologists and the Government conspirators reached an agreement on what would be acceptable by negotiations over two years. By law, what the Scientologists submitted had to be true. The Government conspirators had to have required that in vital areas what the Scientologists submitted be false. Even though Rathbun only admits to the “Goldberg team,” the term “Government conspirators” is proper because the various decisions, from the first door opening, involved other US Government departments and personnel beyond the IRS.
Rathbun says in his Tampa Bay Times interview that Goldberg’s getting rid of the team with the track record and bringing in a team without a long history with Scientology was “so positive and unique.” This is because it let the Scientologists get away with lying, indeed required them to lie. From the Scientologists’ viewpoint, that is as positive as it gets. Before then, having to deal with the track record IRS team, for years the Scientologists had not been able to get away with lying for their exemption; so finally being able to get away with their lying was unique. When Goldberg got rid of the incorrupt track record team, the Scientologists had to lie to give the Government conspirators both the basis for the exemption and the justification for actions the Government conspirators took to make it possible for the Scientologists to lie and have their lies accepted and work. The Scientologists’ submissions to the IRS that resulted in the exemption contain black PR about the knowledgeable IRS personnel that Goldberg took off the Scientology case or cases.
In the Times interview, Rathbun provides what he says were the Scientologists’ purposes for all their efforts to obtain IRS tax exemption: to facilitate getting away with the torts and crimes their victims were alleging in legal proceedings; and to keep, and keep making, money.
Rathbun said:
t was always perceived that the IRS was the most important thing to handle because if you have tax exemption you have [ ] religious recognition, you’re treated differently in courts, you know, there’s [ ] some level of almost immunity, First Amendment immunity, to a lot of the type of allegations that were being made.
So, the IRS was the big thing to handle. [W]hen I was involved in that in the late ’80s, we had calculated that they, the IRS, considered that the churches had upward of a billion dollars in liability.
And the total reserves of the church were [ ] a fraction of that. Maybe in the 200 million range. So, literally, they could have wiped Scientology out five times through.
So [ ] between having got rid of a lot of the civil suits in the mid ’80’s and ’93, when we ultimately got exemption, I mean the number one mission was to obtain [ ] tax exemption from the IRS and [ ] that was the bulk of what my attention was on and what I worked on.
The Scientologists considered their attitude, intention and actions against the IRS personnel who opposed their tax exemption demands over many years, war. The Scientologists even organized a monstrous “The War Is Over” celebration when the IRS granted the exemption in 1993. The Scientologists also considered they were at war with the Suppressive Person class, who were not IRS or Government agents from other departments, but citizens in many walks of life. These are people, the Scientologists declare, who impede or threaten them in their push to have their lies accepted and to get away with other antisocial or criminal behavior. The way ordinary citizens impede or threaten the Scientologists, naturally, is telling the truth about their lies and other antisocial or criminal behavior. In his scripture, Hubbard called the Scientologists’ “battle tactics,” how they were to treat or handle the SPs who they think threaten or impede them, “Fair Game,” or War.
In the Times interview, Rathbun only provides a couple of generalities about his actions and battle tactics against the IRS personnel who knew the Scientologists’ history of lies and other antisocial and criminal activities and impeded them in their seizure of tax exemption.
Rathbun said:
n the late [ ] ’80s [ ] and going into the early ’90s [ ] I was tasked with [ ] implementing [ ] strategies to try to overwhelm the IRS like they were attempting to overwhelm us. And it was sort of like a “fight fire with fire” situation.
[W]e brought [ ] Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, um, in numerous different jurisdictions. We had [ ] litigation strategies to [ ] counteract their strategies to deny certain churches exemption and that sort of thing. But [ ] it was a huge battlefield. It was nation-wide. It was literally twenty-seven hundred suits at one point.
And I was very much involved in coordinating and coming up with strategies and then executing a lot of that between the late ’80s and the early ’90s.
In a March 9, 1997 New York Times article, writer Douglas Frantz reported some more detail about the Scientologists’ war with the IRS, the “negotiations” with Goldberg’s new IRS team, and the war’s settlement conditions.[13]
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 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 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.
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[13] See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/nytimes.html
From Introduction to the Armstrong Operation
