The IRS

didn’t follow the law after it “lost” Lerner’s emails.

Laws are for the serfs, not the enforcers:

Here’s the bottom line. The IRS has been accused of targeting the political opponents of the Obama administration. The response, in rough order of emission, has been:

  1. No they didn’t. It was all (quoth the president of the United States) a “phony scandal.”
  2. They targeted liberal groups too (except the IRS inspector general disagrees).
  3. It was all the fault of two “rogue agents” in Cincinnati (that was Jay Carney’s little piece of drollery)
  4. Then we had Barack Obama’s personal assurance that there was not even a “smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS. “Smidgeon, noun. Informal: a small amount of something.” There wasn’t even a small amount of corruption at the IRS—which is why, of course, a senior agency employee like Lois Lerner decided to take the Fith Amendment to avoid self-incrimination.

Mr. Koskinen’s testimony over the last several days has been greeted with what might politely be called skepticism, not to to say naked disbelief and contempt, by Congress. “You promised to produce documents,” Darrell Issa reminded Mr. Koskinen. “You did not. . . .

You worked to cover up the fact they were missing and only came forward to fess up on a Friday afternoon after you had been caught red-handed.”

Some might say that John Koskinen was guilty of obstruction of justice. Currently, the Wikipedia entry for “Obstruction of Justice” lists four “notable examples” of the crime. Leading the list is Richard Nixon’s efforts to silence people involved in the Watergate scandal. I wonder whether there will soon be a fifth notable example. If so, it is likely to include the names of John Koskinen, Lois Lerner, and who knows how many people at the White House.

Not if the media has anything to say about it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of the media, now Woodward and Bernstein are wondering where they are?

Apparently, being a Democrat operative with a byline trumps the chance for a Pulitzer.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Mark Levin goes ballistic after last night’s hearing:

Levin also pointed out that Democrats wouldn’t be obstructing so hard if it weren’t for White House involvement, which tells him that this IRS targeting scandal goes all the way to the top.

That would be the way to bet, yes.

28 thoughts on “The IRS”

  1. In the end the evidence doesn’t matter because Democrats will use emotion rather than rule of law to explain their actions. The end game argument is that, “They deserved what happened to them” Legality doesn’t matter when you are going after people Obama and the Democrats have scapegoated for all of out country’s and the world’s problems now and historically.

    America likes bad cops as long as they are bad to the right kind of people. It doesn’t matter that the accusations leveled against non-Democrats are not true as long as the stereotypes can be maintained in the media and through political narrative. Democrats are counting on the negative caricature they have created to provide cover for their persecution of political dissidents.

    1. I agree with your assessment. Unfortunately, from history, we know where such scapegoating typically leads. Is there any doubt that there are some on the left who would begin packing the train cars today if they could get away with it?

  2. The first link doesn’t work for me.

    the IRS, which requires individuals to keep records for 7 years, only keeps emails for 6 months

    If that were true they wouldn’t be able to hand over any emails that are more than six months old, and yet somehow they managed to turn over tens of thousands of Lerner’s emails, going back five years.

    The IRS only kept server backup tapes for six months. That’s different from only keeping emails for 6 months.

    According to Darrell Issa, their IT budget alone is $1.8 billion. If I did the math right, $30 million is 0.016 percent of the IRS’s IT budget. 0.016 percent.

    That’s off by a factor of 100. $30 million is 1.6% of $1.8 billion. I’m guessing that most of the IRS IT budget is spent managing tax data, not employee emails.

    1. “If that were true they wouldn’t be able to hand over any emails that are more than six months old, and yet somehow they managed to turn over tens of thousands of Lerner’s emails, going back five years.”

      By law they are supposed to keep all records (including emails) of IRS business in perpetuity.

      “The IRS only kept server backup tapes for six months. That’s different from only keeping emails for 6 months.”

      Nice try. Another strawman. So yes tape backup isn’t the only way they could have complied with the law. But the IRS choise to NOT comply with the law.

      1. By law they are supposed to keep all records (including emails) of IRS business in perpetuity.

        Not true. The IRS has never kept all emails in perpetuity.

        1. Non-responsive: Whether or not they have ever done it has no bearing on whether or not it is required by law. Want to try again?

          1. So you’re saying that the IRS has been fragrantly breaking the law for decades, under Republican presidents and Democrats, and that no one ever noticed or raised a finger. Such a strong claim demands strong evidence.

          2. Such a strong claim demands strong evidence.

            Existence of the law has been shown and you are aware of the IRS’s backup policy which allegedly was in effect at the time which would be in violation of that law. The “extraordinary” evidence has already been provided. Illegality is merely a consequence.

            Why are you still arguing? Demanding “extraordinary evidence” for things you’ve already acknowledged? Once again, you go beyond debate to demand absurd things that don’t even make sense.

          3. which would be in violation of that law

            Nobody has shown that all emails are official records for the purposes of the record keeping law. No administration of either party has considered all emails to be subject to the law. Nobody in any federal department has ever been prosecuted for failing to archive every email.

          4. “Nobody has shown that all emails are official records”

            Someone posted the relevant rules in the last thread. You can of course choose not to believe they exist but that doesn’t mean you are right.

        2. “Not true. The IRS has never kept all emails in perpetuity.”

          Just because the IRS didn’t comply with the law does not mean that they were not required to.

          They were certainly required to keep Lerner’s emails but they erased the back up sometime during the IG investigation.

          1. When do you think the IG investigation started? And when do you think the IRS recycled the last of the backup tapes containing lost Lerner emails?

          2. When do you think the IG investigation started? And when do you think the IRS recycled the last of the backup tapes containing lost Lerner emails?

            It’s worth noting that the data retention policy may have been tailored in the first place to destroy evidence of wrong doing. It’s not like the IRS would be babes in the woods when it comes to conducting criminal activities and destroying evidence.

            So the timing may be as you claim and still be very criminal.

          3. “And when do you think the IRS recycled the last of the backup tapes”

            The Obama administration’s head of the IRS testified that the back ups existed after Lerner’s HD crash and during the IG report. We don’t know the exact day the back ups were erased. That is some pretty basic information that the IRS should be forthcoming with and yet they continue to stonewall the investigation at the orders of Obama.

          4. From the IG report: “This review was performed at the EO function Headquarters office in Washington, D.C., and the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the period June 2012 through February 2013.”

            Lerner’s computer crashed June 13, 2011. The IRS has testified that it recycled backup tapes after six months. By the time the IG investigation started any tapes holding emails lost in the crash had been recycled twice.

            They did not “erase the back up sometime during the IG investigation”.

          5. Yes, Lerner destroyed her HD at the beginning of the IG investigation. At this time, there was a back up and the IRS says they never bothered to retrieve the emails. If we are to believe Obama’s IRS, there still would have been back ups for the last six months of emails. These were erased.

            We could nail down the timeline better but the administration has not been forthcoming with information because they are engaged in a cover up. Allowing the persecution to continue after the White House knew it was taking place and engaging in a cover up means that the Obama administration is culpable in what took place.

            It explains Obama’s bromance with Maduro.

          6. Lerner destroyed her HD at the beginning of the IG investigation.

            The IG investigation started in June, 2012 a year after the June, 2011 HD crash. I’m not sure why that’s so hard to understand.

    2. ” and yet somehow they managed to turn over tens of thousands of Lerner’s emails, going back five years.”

      With a two year gap of any communications with people outside the IRS.

  3. Tidbits from Koskinen’s testimony to the House Oversight committee last night:

    * The Sanasoft contract was for a disaster recovery system for the IRS Chief Counsel’s office, and its 3,000 employees. It was terminated when the Counsel’s office upgraded to a newer version of Outlook.

    * IRS employees have recorded over 2,000 hard drive crashes since January 1, 2014.

    * Lerner was informed of the use of inappropriate search terms in the Cincinnati office on June 26, 2011, a couple weeks after the hard disk crash.

    * Lerner hadn’t moved emails from April 11 – June 13, 2011 off the server, so those emails were not lost.

    1. Tidbit from the Constitution, 14th Amendment: “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”.

      If the IRS is exempted from keeping records, so is everyone else.

  4. So we have the IRS admitting to this:

    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.”

    We also have evidence they unlawfully released confidential IRS information on citizens to the DOJ.

      1. “I hope the IRS and DOJ find the leaker.”

        They already know but nothing was done to punish them. The only thing that will get a person fired in the Obama administration is criticizing Obama. Obama isn’t very tolerant of his critics as the actions of his administration show.

  5. Maybe if the tax code was simpler than the 74,000 page monstrosity we have now, there wouldn’t ever be a “smidgen of corruption.”

    Unfortunately, we know the true purpose of the tax code: to keep meddling busy-body progressives like Jim involved in the minutae of the common man’s life.

  6. I’m sure Jim and all Democratic Representatives on the House Oversight Committee will consider any and all gaps in the email files of high-ranking VA officials to simply be more instances of random hardware failures combined with poor email retention policies driven by a lack of resources. Or will they? If VA emails are missing, will the defenders of the current IRS Lois Lerner email storyline accept a similar storyline from VA officials suspected of cooking appointment wait-time books?

  7. Meanwhile, the economy is now trending towards a proper recession. Previously per capita GDP has somehow magically risen over the last several years even as job growth as a percentage of the workforce has declined.

    The fact that the Republicans are not guaranteed a crushing victory in the next election is an enormously telling indicator of just how shitty a party they are in general.

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