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IRS Tag

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.

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 23, 2014 33 Comments
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is set to hear testimony tonight from IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, in an evening hearing on the subject of Lois Lerner’s missing emails. [This hearing has concluded. Full video will be posted when available]. Some clips from the hearing can also be viewed below. Remainder of the original post follows clips.

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 22, 2014 9 Comments
Friday night, Ben Shapiro of Truth Revolt appeared on Megyn Kelly's FOX News program to discuss Lois Lerner's missing emails. Trey Sanchez writes at Truth Revolt:
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:

Posted by Mandy Nagy on June 20, 2014 47 Comments
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is expected to testify in a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday morning at 9:00am EST. According to a statement from the committee, the hearing will focus on the IRS’s recent statement about the production of emails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. You should be able to view the livestream of the hearing at the committee’s UStream channel. [Hearing in Recess -- here are some videos]

Posted by Bruce Carroll on June 19, 2014 29 Comments
The plot seems to thicken every day now on the infamous "missing emails" from IRS manager Lois Lerner. So only did Lerner's emails disappear in an alleged "computer crash," but so did six other IRS officials at the center of the IRS targeting scandal. Now comes news that the IRS actually disposed of Lerner's hard drive making any data retrieval that more difficult.
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:
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