Email incriminates Lerner in scheme to evade Congressional oversight -- used unarchived instant messages...
"She knew under the Federal Records Act that she had an obligation for these documents to be preserved."...
Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago. “She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”Taylor indicated that Lerner “requested that IT use every possible resource” to try and recover the contents of her hard drive. Regardless of the misfortune of Lerner’s unrecoverable hard drive, many have asked if the emails were printed in hard copy anywhere as a backup. IRS rules specify in part that agency emails “created or received in the transaction of agency business” are to be printed and kept on file. IRS commissioner John Koskinen has said that not all emails are necessarily considered an “official record.”
Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit. The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. “Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.”This admission by the IRS goes back to the vicious fight over the Prop 8 vote in California where HRC and its allies resorted to releasing donation information of individuals and harassing those traditional marriage supporters at their homes and businesses.
President Barack Obama’s June 27 effort to boost the flagging morale of his supporters quickly devolved into a demoralizing pity party. Republicans “don’t do anything except block me and call me names,” he told supporters, only a few days after it was revealed that his economy shrank 2.9 percent in the first three months of 2014. “If we make some basic changes, we can create more jobs and lift more incomes and strengthen the middle class… I know it drives you nuts that Washington isn’t doing it,” he said. “It drives me nuts.”The president also went back to dismissing the many scandals engulfing his presidency as phony. Susan Jones of CNS News:
President Obama warned people in Minnesota Friday not to believe what they hear on television: "They're fabricated issues, they're phony scandals that are generated. It's all geared towards the next election or ginning up a base. It's not on the level," the president insisted.Here's the video: CNS News provided the full transcript of Obama's remarks:
"We know those emails are out there, we know they can be found."...
The embattled head of the Internal Revenue Service blames faulty technology for what he called serious problems under investigation by Congress, the Justice Department and the Treasury inspector general. John Koskinen told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that he apologized to anyone who had their application for tax-exempt status held up by IRS targeting of political labels. "The improper criteria used to highlight organizations for investigation just by their name was a mistake," Koskinen said. "I apologize to anybody who ever had their applications held up needlessly. Everybody needs to be confident that the IRS is going to treat them fairly no matter who they are. Republicans, Democrats, whatever organization they belong to. So it's a serious matter." However, he maintained that evidence uncovered so far by six investigations found no involvement by the White House, as alleged by some Republicans:Koskinen has been under fire in recent days, after congressional hearings on Monday and last Friday, both of which were filled with some quite contentious exchanges. When asked by Blitzer whether someone should be blamed for the “antiquated, awful system” that was the cause of emails lost in Lerner’s hard drive crash having been unrecoverable, Koskinen shifted away from the controversy at hand and focused instead on moving forward. “Well, I think somebody, the IG, is investigating all of the issues about the hard drive crash.” Koskinen went on to explain, “My approach when I parachute into these things is to try to fix the problems rather than try to figure out who to blame, and sometime ago I asked for us to review exactly how the email system runs and whether we couldn’t convert to a more searchable, more retainable email system. I’ve also said we need to respond to the concerns of the archivist, who came out with a very interesting suggestion recently that for agencies struggling, moving forward into an electronic system, they should take the senior people and make sure all of those records and emails are preserved. I should emphasize that all emails are not official records, so if an email is lost, it doesn’t mean we’ve lost an official record.”
#BREAKING: #IRS email dump to Congress reveal Lois Lerner sought to have Sen Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014
Host Megyn Kelly began by discussing the IRS investigation into the lost emails of ex-IRS official Lois Lerner. Initially, Kelly stated, Democrats and Republicans were both equally outraged. But as time has gone by, Democrats have lost their outrage, reinforced by President Obama, who insists not one smidgen of corruption is involved. Kelly said it was like IRS employees were saying, "Whoops! We're sorry, we lost basically all of the evidence you need to prove your case against me."Shapiro explained the role the media plays in the parade of Obama scandals:
"A perpetual adolescent called to do a man's job."...
"I don’t know if you’re floating another conspiracy or if this is a request from Republicans who are floating a conspiracy"...
Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s crashed hard drive has been recycled, making it likely the lost emails of the lightning rod in the tea party targeting controversy will never be found, according to multiple sources. “We’ve been informed that the hard drive has been thrown away,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in a brief hallway interview.House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa issued a terse statement following the POLITICO report Wednesday night:
More emails "lost" from Lerner's IRS colleagues during crucial period of Congressional scrutiny...
Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices. “The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General. “Just a short time ago, Commissioner Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies. Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. This failure of the IRS requires the White House, which promised to get to the bottom of this, to do an Administration-wide search and production of any emails to or from Lois Lerner. The Administration has repeatedly referred us back to the IRS for production of materials. It is clear that is wholly insufficient when it comes to determining the full scope of the violation of taxpayer rights.”Last month, the Ways and Means Committee indicated that the IRS had finally agreed to turn over all Lois Lerner emails to the Committee. But according to Friday's statement, it appears there had not been any mention until now that some of the emails would not be able to be produced because of the supposed computer crash. Apparently, Lerner tried to have technicians reconstruct her hard drive at the time of the crash, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Lawsuit Alleging IRS Discrimination Against Pro-Israel Groups Moves Forward A lawsuit alleging that the IRS discriminates against pro-Israel groups will be allowed to move forward, a federal judge ruled this week in Washington, D.C. The IRS has been fighting to quash the lawsuit filed in 2009 by pro-Israel group Z Street, claiming the court does not have jurisdiction to hear the matter. However, Judge Ketanje Brown Jackson rejected the agency’s request to dismiss the case on Wednesday and ordered the IRS to respond to Z Street’s complaint within the next 30 days. Z Street says its constitutional rights were violated by an IRS policy that allegedly singles pro-Israel groups out for stricter scrutiny when they apply for tax-exempt status. According to the lawsuit, an IRS official told Z Street’s lawyer in 2009 that the group’s application for tax-exempt status would be “sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the administration’s public policies.”Eugene Volokh provides more insight at The Washington Post...
The IRS has agreed to turn over all Lois Lerner emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, according to a statement posted on the committee's website Thursday. From the Ways and Means committee website: Today, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) announced that one...
