Will IRS swear under oath that the dog ate Lois Lerner’s emails?
I do solemnly swear, gulp ….
Just a joke, of course. We all know the dog didn’t eat Lois Lerner’s email, or hard drive, or back up tapes.
They were stolen by Martians in bunny rabbit suits, who look like this:
A federal judge has ordered the IRS to explain “under oath” how the agency lost a trove of emails from the official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax agency 30 days to file a declaration by an “appropriate official” to address the computer issues with ex-official Lois Lerner.
The decision came Thursday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which along with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has questioned how the IRS lost the emails and, in some cases, had no apparent way to retrieve them.
The IRS first acknowledged it lost the emails in a letter to senators last month.
“In our view, there has been a cover-up that has been going on,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “The Department of Justice, the IRS, had an obligation, an absolute obligation … to alert the court and alert Judicial Watch as soon as they knew when these records were supposedly lost.”
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Comments
Finally! Lyin’ to a judge is criminal. Lyin’ to congress is okie dokie – just ask Eric Holder.
The Playbook – Ignore, Lie, Stall until we have a new administration.
Looks like this Judge is going to get a lot more people taking the 5th. Hope it’s on TV!
no no no.
obama ate the dog that chewed the hard drive the mail was stored on.
come on Prof J… 🙂
Darn you, dmacleo. You made me log in just to give this a thumbs up. Nicely done.
They won’t be prosecuted for perjury under this Administration – but the statute of limitations is five years. Unless Obama issues a lot of pardons at the end, which I suspect he will.
It is too long to allow a month, they knew about this six months or more ago, it happened 3 years ago, if they don’t have the story straight by now another few weeks won’t help.
And it’s a mistake to let IRS decide who answers, too. It will either be someone with plausible deniability (“to the best of my knowledge and belief” doesn’t mean “I’m positive”) or someone low enough to be expendable.
Contempt is a VERY expansive power, and some Federal judges (these are some of them) are not amused by clever liars.
See Clinton, Bill.
Blanket pardons – Is that the way Obama deals with amnesty, also? When Carter pardoned the draft dodger, that was a finite list. Can a pardon be issued to a class of people?
30 days is 29 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes too long.
LoL! That Kerry picture never gets old.
Sadly Kerry’s work isn’t done — he isn’t done harming America, Israel, and all our allies.
Thank goodness GWB sent him back to the Senate.
And a SECOND Judge does, too
http://washingtonexaminer.com/another-federal-judge-tells-irs-to-explain-itself-on-lost-emails/article/2550394
IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency.
They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn’t be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.
I’m not legally-trained at all, so I have a question:
Is it possible for the Obama administration to scuttle judicial investigations by setting up a phony inquiry, then having the sympathetic judge accept BS explanations?
They’ve already done this “Trojan horse” model before, in lawsuits where the EPA is sued by environmental groups.
Two very different circumstances.
In your “friendly lawsuit” model, an environmental outfit sues one of the Federal agencies, who shortly thereafter “settles” by giving the enviro-fascists what they wanted. “Oh, golly-gee, they made us do it”.
In these lawsuits, the adversaries are NOT friendly. An ancillary investigation by another Federal agency MIGHT stay the proceedings, but it isn’t likely, IMNHO. There would have to be a very compelling argument put to the courts, explaining why their docket should be kludged up pending some other procedure.
Does anyone have a timeline of events. When exactly did this and the other hard drives crash.
When was the first court case filed and or subpoena for records submitted to trigger a document hold.
OK, I have to object to your “Martians in bunny rabbit suits” photo. As a former Space Shuttle worker I can tell you that all of us who entered the crew module had to wear lint-free “bunny suits”, hoods, and booties. The crew module was a clean room with filtered air. We also had to empty our pockets so no spare change or car keys got left behind. The purpose of all this was to keep dirt, lint, and debris out of the crew module. All that stuff would float around on orbit and the astronauts could breathe it in. Also, that stuff would clog up the air filters.
Sure, Kerry is an ass, but in this photo he was just wearing the required garb for crew module entry.
In the same way that Dukakis was wearing the appropriate garb for a tank driver.
Some people are inappropriate, even in the correct clothes.
Right now, I bet the NSA is combing through Judge Sullivan’s e-mails and credit card history … maybe 20-years worth.
This is pure kabuki, and pretty feeble kabuki at that. Nothing will happen, and all of Washington doubtless knows it.
A federal judge has ordered the IRS to explain “under oath” how the agency lost a trove of emails from the official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal.
And what happens when nobody explains anything, under oath or otherwise? Nothing at all happens.
If a judge told someone specific – say, Lerner – that she is required to produce the e-mails – and no excuses – or go to jail and stay there until the e-mails appear, that would be different. Something might actually happen then. At the very least, a criminal might go to jail, and the other criminals might be slightly more reluctant to pervert the government in the name of the Party.
But demanding a declaration by an “appropriate official” is just a show. There’s no way to exert unpleasant pressure on an “appropriate official” when there is no such person actually in the vise.
I must agree with you. This looks like judicial grandstanding. But who knows? Maybe they’ll dig up something by accident.
You are mistaken, I think.
Before a judge finds someone…or an agency…in contempt, there are predicates to be laid. They have to be given a chance to comply with the court’s rulings and orders, and those orders have to be subjected to objection and due process. A record has to be made.
And nobody would want it any other way.
The “hard drives” are a red herring.
What about the multiple, redundant Exchange Servers that the individual workstation Outlook progarms get their data from?
What about the backups of those systems?
What about the enterprise email backup service that we know the IRS subscribed to?
What about the paper copies she was legally obligated to print and file?
What about the copies resident in the email systems of all the people she communicated with? We know who we’re most interested in, why don’t we (Congress) subpoena those records?
And lastly, why not subpoena the NSA since we know they’ve got records of all of this?
The license for the email logging system was canceled right before the missing emails were written.
The IRS needs to explain why they weren’t using email servers which are SOP for all large IT organizations.
They also need to explain why they didn’t restore Lerner’s data, including emails, from backup tapes.