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IRS Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 06, 2014 14 Comments
Stay awake on Fridays if you want to follow the IRS targeting scandal. First, via The Hill, IRS: Five more staffers lost emails:
The IRS told lawmakers Friday that five staffers connected to the agency’s Tea Party controversy besides Lois Lerner probably lost emails due to computer problems. Those five staffers include officials key to the various investigations into the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups – including Judith Kindell, who was a senior adviser to Lerner, the former agency official at the center of the controversy.... Issa said Friday's letter showed once more that the IRS wasn't being straight with Congress, and pushed again for the Obama administration to appoint a special prosecutor. "The so-called 'most transparent administration in history' has given Congress inconsistent information since the beginning of the targeting scandal," Issa said. "The IRS's ever-changing story is practically impossible to follow at this point, as they modify it each time to accommodate new facts." Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration is currently investigating the missing emails, while conservative groups are suing the IRS in federal court over Lerner’s emails as well. As Lerner’s senior adviser, Kindell was a key figure in dealing with tax-exempt applications. In a February 2011 email, Lerner insisted that Kindell be looped in on Tea Party cases, calling them “very dangerous.”
Sharyl Attkisson reports that the IRS has not been straightforward as to missing emails, Missing emails: What is the IRS not telling Congress?:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 05, 2014 14 Comments
I don't know how I missed this yesterday. Actually, I do know. I was off the internets for most of the day, and the world kept turning without me. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals granted (Order embedded at bottom of post) en banc (full court) hearing in the Halbig case, in which an appeals court panel found that the IRS had no authority to grant people who signed up for Obamacare on the federal exchange tax subsidies which, under the statute, were only for those who signed up on state exchanges. The same day as the original Halbig decision was released, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reached a different conclusion. The split in Circuits convinced just about everyone that the case was on the fast track to the Supreme Court. But many speculated at the time that the D.C. Circuit, packed with Obama appointees, would take the case en banc, uphold the IRS regs, and avoid a Circuit split. I didn't think that would happen, but I was wrong. Via Prof. Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 27, 2014 20 Comments
I'm a day late to this, but better late than never. After admitting that Lois Lerner's supposedly missing emails were in the back-up system, the IRS has filed court documents in response to a Judge's Order indicating that after Lerner was summoned to testify before Congress, the IRS wiped clean Lerner's Blackberry. Via Fox News:
Lois Lerner’s BlackBerry was intentionally destroyed after Congress had begun its probe into IRS targeting of conservative groups, a senior IRS lawyer acknowledged in a sworn declaration. Thomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in the declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that the BlackBerry was "removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012." That date - June 2012 - is significant because by that time, ex-IRS official Lerner had already been summoned before congressional staffers who interviewed her about reports of the IRS' targeting of conservative groups. "We had already talked to her. Our personal staff and Oversight Committee staff had sat down with Ms. Lerner and confronted her about information we were getting from conservative groups in the state of Ohio and around the country," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News. "If you intentionally destroy evidence, that is a crime. If you make a statement in court saying the evidence is not available and it is, that is also a crime," said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice.

Posted by Amy Miller on August 25, 2014 62 Comments
Judicial Watch revealed today that Lois Lerner's fabled "missing e-mails" may still exist on a government backup system. Via Judicial Watch:
Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system. We obviously disagree that disclosing the emails as required would be onerous, and plan to raise this new development with Judge Sullivan. This is a jaw-dropping revelation. The Obama administration had been lying to the American people about Lois Lerner’s missing emails. There are no “missing” Lois Lerner emails – nor missing emails of any of the other top IRS or other government officials whose emails seem to be disappearing at increasingly alarming rate. All the focus on missing hard drives has been a diversion. The Obama administration has known all along where the email records could be – but dishonestly withheld this information. You can bet we are going to ask the court for immediate assistance in cutting through this massive obstruction of justice.
In an interview with Fox News, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton laid out his plan to make sure that the government is forced to reveal anything that is backed up via this system.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 14, 2014 44 Comments
Judicial Watch has sued over missing IRS emails in the federal district court in D.C., pursuant to its FOIA request for such documents. The IRS was ordered to provide explanations as to missing emails, particularly Lois Lerner. The IRS provided explanations, but those were not good enough for the Judge, who launched his own inquiry into the matter, as Judicial Watch explained in a statement posted on its website:
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement in response to today’s order from Judge Emmet G. Sullivan regarding the recently “lost” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. IRS (No. 1:13-cv-1559)):
In an extraordinary step, U. S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan has launched an independent inquiry into the issue of the missing emails associated with former IRS official Lois Lerner. Previously, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to produce sworn declarations about the IRS email issue by August 11. Today’s order confirms Judicial Watch’s read of this week’s IRS’ filings that treated as a joke Judge Sullivan’s order.
Judge Sullivan, in his earlier ruling, appointed Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola to manage and assist in discussions between Judicial Watch and the IRS about how to obtain any missing records from other sources. Magistrate Facciola is an expert in e-discovery, and authorized Judicial Watch to submit a request for limited discovery into the missing IRS records after September 10.
Here is the Judge's Order (emphasis added, hard paragraph breaks inserted for ease of reading):

Posted by Amy Miller on August 08, 2014 15 Comments
Voter advocacy organization True the Vote hit a roadblock Thursday when a federal judge denied its request to have an independent forensic expert search for Lois Lerner's "missing" e-mails. Judge Reggie Walton of the U.S. District Court in Washington ruled that True the Vote's attorneys failed to provide evidence showing that the IRS had either already intentionally destroyed e-mails, or would do so in the future. Judge Walton also cited privacy concerns, saying that taxpayer data, as well as the ongoing investigation by an inspector general, could be compromised. Judge Walton also denied True the Vote's request for an injunction forcing the IRS to preserve all documents related to the lawsuit. He said that True the Vote failed to show “irreparable harm” in its request, and that “the public interest weighs strongly against the type of injunctive relief the plaintiff seeks.” From the court memorandum:
Accordingly, despite the general distrust of the defendants expressed by the plaintiff, the Court has no factual basis to concur with that distrust, not only as to the defendants but seemingly every component of the Department of the Treasury (and presumably of every component of the Executive Branch of the federal government), and therefore concludes that the issuance of an injunction will not further aid in the recovery of the emails, if such recovery is possible, but will rather only duplicate and potentially interfere with ongoing investigative activities.
True the Vote attorney Cleta Mitchell has downplayed the ruling, saying that the judge merely denied their request for expedited assistance. True the Vote filed suit against the IRS last year after the agency denied True the Vote's application for tax-exempt status. True the Vote is seeking immediate recognition as a 501(c)(3), and more than $85,000 in damages; they claim that they IRS targeted their organization because of their openly conservative agenda:

Posted by Bruce Carroll on July 30, 2014 14 Comments
Shocking new emails released today by U.S. Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee shows Ms. Lerner's mistreatment of conservative groups was driven by her 'personal hostility toward conservatives.'
The November 9, 2012 email exchange with an unnamed colleague – the person's name was redacted in the copy Camp's staff released publicly – took place while Lerner was in the United Kingdom. 'Overheard some ladies talking about American[s] today,' Lerner wrote. 'According to them we've bankrupted ourselves and a[re] through. We'll never be able to pay off our debt and are going down the tubes.' Turning sarcastic, Lerner pounced on her British acquaintances. The conversation turned ugly when Lerner's writing companion let loose first on conservatives. 'Well, you should hear the whacko wing of the GOP,' the person replied. 'The US is through; too many foreigners sucking the teat; time to hunker down, buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end.' 'The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to.' 'Great,' Lerner wrote back. 'Maybe we are through if there are that many a**holes.' 'And I'm talking about the hosts of the shows,' came the reply. 'The callers are rabid.' In the final message of the exchange, Lerner wrote that 'we don't need to worry about [illegal] alien terrorists. It's our own crazies that will take us down.'
Camp says this latest information further warrants his call for Attorney General Eric Holder to name a special counsel to investigate the IRS targeting scandal.

Posted by Bruce Carroll on July 23, 2014 35 Comments
Lois Lerner has become the personification of the IRS targeting scandal. Which brings us to her infamous hard drive crash. Recall that the new IRS Commissioner first told Congress that all of Lerner's emails were recoverable and would be provided to investigating committees. Sharyl Attkisson has a nice rundown of this explanation.
Friday’s revelation that the IRS “lost” Lois Lerner’s emails in a computer crash came ten months after Congress first requested them and seven months after they were first subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. But what IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified about the emails at a hearing in March appears to be at odds with his agency’s newer reported claims that the emails are irretrievable. Under questioning by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on the House Oversight Committee, Koskinen said IRS emails “get taken off and stored in servers.” That was part of the reason, he said, it was so difficult to provide them in a timely fashion. As of March, the IRS had reportedly given Congress more than 400,000 pages of documents: just not the ones at issue.
Then last month came the confounding news -- delivered offhandedly by the IRS -- that Lerner's hard drive was crashed, destroyed and recycled... along with six other IRS officials at the center of the targeting scandal. In the wake of two Federal judges putting pressure on the IRS, the tune seems to have changed once again. Lo and behold, the Lerner hard drive may be recoverable after all!

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 28, 2014 31 Comments
The attorney for Lois Lerner is speaking out, saying that his client doesn't have any records of the emails that were lost in a hard drive crash in 2011. From Politico:
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.”

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 28, 2014 20 Comments
In all of this past week's flurry IRS news: Lois Lerner and other IRS' officials hard drives crashing, emails showing Lerner targeted Sen. Chuck Grassley, and the IRS Commissioner telling Congress they've done nothing wrong -- some news got lost in the shuffle. The IRS did do something very wrong, admitted it and paid a significant fine to resolve it.
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.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 28, 2014 10 Comments
Obama made a public appearance in Minnesota on Friday which Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has described as a pity party:
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:

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 27, 2014 24 Comments
IRS commissioner John Koskinen appeared on CNN Thursday with Wolf Blitzer, where he answered questions about the ongoing IRS scandal. From CNN:
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.”

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 25, 2014 22 Comments
FOX News' Chad Pergram tweeted some breaking developments late this afternoon regarding a new email dump from the ever-interesting Lois Lerner file.
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