Tag: IRS scandal

An illegally destroyed hard drive blocks an investigation into a collegue of Lois Lerner

10:30 pm

Obstruction of justice: The investigation of April Sands, a subordinate of Lois Lerner when both were at the Federal Election Commission, was stymied because the agency destroyed and recycled her computer illegally.

The FEC’s Office of Inspector General sought to conduct a criminal investigation into Sands’ activities but were stymied when they found that the agency had recycled her computer hard drive. “Therefore the OIG was unable to show that Ms. Sands’ solicitations and political activity were done from an FEC computer,” reads the letter. Because of this, the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia declined criminal prosecution. “The FEC’s failure to retain Ms. Sands’ hard drive prevented the FEC OIG from fully pursuing appropriate criminal sanctions for Ms. Sands’ admitted violation of federal law,” wrote Issa and Jordan.

Sands was under investigation for using her position in the government for partisan purposes. In other words, though she was being paid to work for the Federal Election Commission, she was actually working illegally for the Democratic Party instead.

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Second judge demands explanation from IRS

12:49 pm

A second judge has now ordered the IRS to explain under oath how it lost Lois Lerner’s emails central to the agency’s harassment of conservatives.

The article does not tell us if this second judge has put a deadline on his demands. I expect we will learn more by the end of the day.

Update: This article provides more information. It appears he wants his answers fast, but is also willing to defer to an IRS inspector general investigation into the lost emails that is ongoing.

At a hearing Friday, [U.S. District Judge Reggie] Walton warned government lawyers that he wanted a quick turnaround on that information, saying he would likely require it by the end of next week. Walton said he expected to officially make his order by the end of Friday, but also suggested that he was willing to defer at least somewhat to the inspector general’s investigation and to the multiple congressional inquiries into the IRS. “I am one of the judges that believes the judicial branch has a limited role” in these sorts of cases, Walton said.

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Federal judge gives the IRS 30 days to come clean

4:37 pm

A federal judge has given the IRS 30 days to testify under oath how the Lois Lerner emails were lost.

This testimony will be far different than congressional hearings, in that it will be wide-ranging and will not have Democratic legislators present to provide cover. It will also not be under the time constraints that limit congressional hearings.

In related news, Congressman Steve Stockman (R-Texas) has filed a resolution calling for the arrest of Lois Lerner for contempt of Congress.

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Lois Lerner intentionally sought to hide her emails from Congress

2:43 pm

A newly released 2013 email from Lois Lerner reveals that she made a conscience effort to hide what she was doing from Congressional investigators.

Realizing that her emails at that time were being saved in some manner (this is long after her computer crash that supposedly destroyed her correspondence from 2011), she writes “we need to be cautious about what we say in emails”.

Really? Is that what an honest government worker does? I don’t think so.

Update: This good analysis of these new revelations notes that her email comment above was made only about six weeks before she took the fifth in House hearings. How interesting.

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Another lawsuit presses the IRS

3:10 pm

A third lawsuit against the IRS, this one by True the Vote, will demand answers at a hearing on July 11 about those lost emails.

This lawsuit is in addition to the Z-Street and the Judicial Watch suits. Thus, we now have three different judges in three different courts pushing back at the IRS coverup, with hearings scheduled for July 10 and July 11.

As I said, things should get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration come mid-July.

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Another legal case that could blow the IRS open

12:44 am

The lawsuit of a pro-Israeli organization, filed in August 2010, makes the IRS extremely vulnerable to deep legal investigation.

[Y]esterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street a pro-Israel organization that was told its application for tax exempt status was being delayed because “…these cases are being sent to a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” …
Judge Jackson gave the IRS until June 26 to respond to Z-Street. That deadline has now passed, so the case enters discovery. This means that Z-Street can subpoena IRS officials, place them under oath, and ask them questions about how they acted, and cross examine them closely. They can also subpoena documents and require their production. This is much different than a House committee hearing in which members have only a few minutes to ask questions, and when friendly Democrats have their opportunity to apologize for the impertinence of daring to ask questions of our IRS masters. Depositions taken under oath can last many hours and involve detailed questions.

What makes the Z-Street case unique and potentially extremely damaging is that its lawsuit was filed in August 2010. That filing placed the IRS under legal obligation to preserve records.

As the article notes, as a legal proceeding it will be practically impossible for the IRS to stonewall, as it has done during Congressional hearings. Like the Judicial Watch case that will have a hearing on July 10, the IRS was required under the law to make sure evidence was not destroyed, and failed to do so. And like that case, the court will have the right to demand answers about that failure and get them.

I want to underline the basis of the Z-Street case: An IRS official admitted that this organization’s tax exempt status was being delayed merely because its “activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Think about that. The IRS believes it can decide your tax liability and status based on your political opinion.

Doesn’t that capture in a nutshell the entire scandal, in which the IRS was used as a weapon to harass opponents of the Democratic Party and specifically of Barack Obama.

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Things could get very interesting for the IRS on July 10.

11:46 pm

The judge with whom the IRS failed to notify about the lost emails and is holding a hearing on the matter on July 10 has in the past aggressively pursued corruption in the Department of Justice.

Judge Sullivan is the judge who held federal prosecutors in contempt, dismissed an unjust indictment against a United States Senator, and publicly excoriated the Department of Justice. He also had the moral conviction, courage and gumption to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Justice Department and the individual prosecutors. …

In the [Senator Ted] Stevens case, Judge Sullivan publicly upbraided the government lawyers before an overflow courtroom, “In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case. . . . When the government does not meet its obligations to turn over evidence, the system falters.”

Judge Sullivan was taking the extraordinary step of appointing a special prosecutor. He chose highly respected DC attorney Henry Schuelke III to investigate the prosecutors for possible criminal charges. The judge ordered the department to preserve all of its files, electronic correspondence—everything—and cooperate fully in the investigation, including providing Schuelke access to investigative files and all witnesses.

It is very possible Sullivan will get as incensed on July 10. Stay tuned. Things could get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration on that day.

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IRS also failed to tell court about lost emails

6:17 pm

Cover-up: Even though the IRS knew it had lost a significant chunk of Lois Lerner emails in February, it failed to notify the court even as it released in April emails demanded of them as part of a court case.

No mention was made in that production of the lost Lerner emails, even though the original Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit filed in May 2013 specifically sought them.

Judicial Watch further noted that “although IRS had knowledge of the missing Lois Lerner emails and of the other IRS officials, it materially omitted any mention of the missing records” in an April 30 status update on its document production. … The tax agency could also face court sanctions or even criminal proceedings if [the judge in the case] is not satisfied with the government’s explanation. [emphasis mine]

The IRS and the officials there should be punished criminally for this behavior, but I doubt it will happen.

And then there’s this: According to the law, the loss of the emails of Lerner and other IRS officials can be inferred as evidence that the emails were incriminating.

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Let citizens sue government workers directly for misconduct.

9:31 am

Let citizens sue government workers directly for misconduct.

The way to control this epidemic of government law-breaking is to allow citizen victims to sue, and legislate personally liability for bureaucrats guilty of willfully illegal conduct.

I agree. If a government bureaucrat breaks the law and no one in the government does anything about it, allowing them to get off without punishment, then the American citizen who was harmed by that illegal activity should have the right to sue that bureaucrat directly. This is how the law applies in every other venue of society. Why should government workers be exempt from the liability of their actions?

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$4.4 billion for 2,000 IRS hard drive crashes.

5:40 pm

After spending $4.4 billion on its computers during the Obama administration, the IRS still had over 2,000 hard drive crashes in 2014.

IRS commissioner John Koskinen used the 2,000 crashes as an argument that the crash of Lois Lerner’s hard drive was not that unusual, and that their aging equipment made backup difficult. To me, it suggests that the people at this agency are either gross incompetents, or even more corrupt than I thought.

Because you see, with that many crashes, the IRS made the one obvious decision anyone with any brains would immediately make in that situation: They canceled the contract with their email backup service.

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IRS admits it leaked confidential tax information

2:08 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has agreed to pay $50K to a political organization for leaking confidential tax information to its political enemies.

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. ,,,

In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.

HRC’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

The information had been fed from the IRS to a gay rights activist who to this day refuses to reveal who his contact at the IRS was.

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What are the odds of seven hard drives failing at the IRS?

1:50 pm

What are the odds of seven hard drives failing at the IRS? These are the odds: 78 billion to 1.

Of course, that number doesn’t include the fact that the seven failed hard drives just happened to belong to seven key figures in the IRS scandal and no one else, and that all seven failures apparently covered the key period of time when the harassment of conservative opponents to Obama and the Democrats was at its height.

But then, there’s “not a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS or in Obama’s White House. Obama says so, and obviously we must believe everything he says.

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“They did not follow the law.”

10:48 am

“They did not follow the law.”

Guess who. Its initials are I-R-S, and the person making the accusation is the head of the National Archives. said during House hearings Tuesday on the IRS scandal.

Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero, speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear that federal agencies are supposed to report whenever their records are destroyed or even accidentally deleted. But he said that after emails from embattled IRS official Lois Lerner vanished after a computer failure in 2011, nobody told the National Archives.

“They did not follow the law,” Ferriero said.

But hey, just try playing this game if the IRS calls you in for a tax audit.

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Tonight’s testimony and questioning of IRS commissioner John Koskinen concerning the destruction of Lois Lerner’s emails in connection with the IRS’s harassment of opponents of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party..

7:30 pm

Cover-up: Tonight’s testimony and questioning of IRS commissioner John Koskinen concerning the destruction of Lois Lerner’s emails in connection with the IRS’s harassment of opponents of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party..

An outraged Issa insisted that Americans should be able to know “they’re being honestly treated by your employees, especially somebody at such a high level. Isn’t that in fact a priority that should have allowed for full retention?”

“If we had the right resources, there would be a lot of priorities,” Koskinen shot back.

“So the American people should believe that if they don’t have the resources to pay their taxes, they shouldn’t pay their taxes,” Issa jabbed, “because if the IRS doesn’t have the resources, it won’t keep records? That’s pretty much what you’re telling us here tonight, is that resources are a question of whether or not you retain key documents.”

When Tennessee Republican Rep Scott DesJarlais asked Koskinen how much money it would take to replace the IRS’s computer systems in order to prevent another major data loss, he answered that it would cost between $10 and $30 million. In a tense moment, DesJarlais then reminded him that the IRS paid $89 million in bonuses last year, including $1 million to agency employees who owed back taxes.

Be sure the watch all the videos at the link. If you do and you still believe John Koskinen is telling the truth and is not a political thug who is doing the bidding of the White House to cover-up its use of the IRS to harass its political opponents, then you are probably so naive you believe Nigerian emails.

More information about tonight’s hearing here.

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The IRS cancelled its emailing archive service only weeks after Lois Lerner’s computer crashed.

10:02 am

Cover-up: The IRS cancelled its emailing archive service only weeks after Lois Lerner’s computer crashed.

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot.

IRS official and frequent White House visitor Nikole Flax allegedly suffered her own computer crash in December 2011, three months after the IRS ended its relationship with Sonasoft.

The timing is too perfect for anything but a cover-up. They were blatantly working for Obama’s campaign and the Democratic Party, and realized they needed to destroy the documents that proved that fact.

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To be fair, let’s watch a montage of the Democratic representatives and their statements during today’s House hearing of IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

6:20 pm

To be fair, let’s watch a montage of the Democratic representatives and their statements during today’s House hearing of IRS commissioner John Koskinen.

Watch it, please. For those who are old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, you will be strongly reminded of the Republicans then defending Nixon. It was pitiful when the Republicans did it then, and it is pitiful when the Democrats do it now.

The IRS has admitted it wrongly harassed conservatives. It is also clearly participating in a cover-up. To make-believe these things didn’t happen and that the victim here is the IRS is beyond shameful.

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Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed ten days after the chairman of the House Ways & Means committee sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency was engaged in targeting.

2:16 pm

Here’s another tidbit about Lois Lerner’s lost emails: Her hard drive crashed ten days after the chairman of the House Ways & Means committee sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency if it was engaged in targeting.

What a coincidence! She discovers that Congress is interested in what she has been doing and suddenly her hard drive crashes, destroying all the emails she has written about this very subject. Do you smell a rat?

In addition, Congress last week discovered through other subpoenaed emails that Lerner was having conversations at that time with Department of Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. The evidence thus continues to suggest strongly that the White House was intimately involved in the decision use the IRS to harass its conservative opponents.

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More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.

10:35 am

More revelations from today’s IRS hearings, this time indicating evidence of White House involvement.

The evidence remains circumstantial, but very damning nonetheless. The White House needs to explain exactly what happened in a meeting between the IRS chief counsel and President Obama exactly two days before that chief counsel changed IRS criteria for approving tax exempt status in a manner that increased the harassment of conservatives.

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More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen testimony today during House hearings.

10:21 am

More video from IRS commissioner John Koskinen’s testimony today during House hearings.

Koskinen is so full of crap I think I could fertilize half the farm fields in the state of Iowa with it. This response from Kevin Brady (R-Texas) sums it up quite cogently.

“The IRS denied for two years targeting of Americans based on their political beliefs. That wasn’t the truth. They said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. That wasn’t the truth. You said you were targeting liberal organizations. That wasn’t the truth. Then you assured us you would provide us all the emails in May and that wasn’t the truth. And today, you are telling us out of thousands of IRS computers, the one that lost the emails was a person of interest in an ongoing congressional investigation. And that is not the truth either. This is the most corrupt and deceitful IRS in history.”

» Read more

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“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”

9:15 am

“They just got rid of it. … It really looks bad and I’ve got to say it looks like a cover-up to me.”

The quote comes from a House hearing today where lawmakers blasted the head of the IRS for claiming it has lost two years worth of Lois Lerner’s emails.

Update: I think it worthwhile to include video of this exchange between Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The arrogance of Koskinen is, to use Ryan’s world, unbelievable.
» Read more

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In 2010 the IRS illegally provided the FBI with confidential tax information totaling 1.1 million pages.

10:43 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: In 2010 the IRS illegally provided the FBI with confidential tax information totaling 1.1 million pages.

[O]n June 4, DOJ told the committee that its prior assurance was inoperative: the disks actually include confidential taxpayer information that was give to the FBI in violation of federal law. This is a serious matter; violation of the applicable statute carries a penalty of five years in prison.

The obvious inference is that the IRS didn’t just send the FBI a bunch of publicly available Form 990s filed by non-profits. Rather, the IRS included Schedule B to those forms–the documents that name the organization’s donors, and provide their addresses and the amounts they contributed. Donor information contained in Schedule B is confidential. Illegally communicated, it would give the FBI a checklist of individuals who could be investigated and potentially criminally prosecuted, much as Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for a chickenfeed election offense a few years later.

But don’t worry, there’s not a “smidgen of corruption” according to Obama in this IRS scandal.

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The IRS now claims it has lost emails from six other key employees involved in the agency’s effort to harass conservatives.

9:35 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS now claims it has lost emails from six other key employees involved in the agency’s effort to harass conservatives.

The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

How convenient: These six employees just happened to have computer crashes destroying these key emails.

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The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

6:11 pm

The IRS time bomb ticks some more: The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

Read it all. The legalities here are not in favor of the Obama administration and the IRS. They are very exposed. The last few paragraphs of MItchell’s letter illustrate this quite starkly:

In addition to seeking responses to the questions in this letter, we also seek your consent to immediately allow a computer forensics expert selected by TTV to examine the computer(s) that is or are purportedly the source of Ms. Lerner’s “lost” emails, including cloning the hard drives, and to attempt to restore what was supposedly “lost,” and to seek to restore any and all “lost” evidence pertinent to this litigation.

We also seek access to all computers, both official and personal, used by any and all of the Defendants from and after July 1, 2010, in order to ensure preservation of the documents of all Defendants in this action.

We wish to resolve our concerns amicably but, absent your consent, we will file such motions as deemed necessary and appropriate asking the Court to require that you respond to the questions contained in this letter, and to permit such forensic examination described herein and for such other relief as may be appropriate for this egregious breach of legal authority and professional ethics.

Due to the time-sensitive and urgent nature of this request, please respond by noon on Wednesday, June 18, 2014.

These demands are entirely legal and routine in lawsuits with circumstances such as this. Even the most partisan Democratic judges in the courts are going to find it very difficult to protect the IRS and the Obama administration here.

As was said over and over and over again during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, it wasn’t the crime so much as the coverup that destroyed Richard Nixon. It looks like the same thing might be happening to Barack Obama.

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The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

9:34 am

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

It’s one thing to get a political hack to lie under oath or to take a fall to keep himself viable in that world, it’s quite another to get the non political people who have no real skin in the game to be willing to perjure themselves before congress in an attempt to claim incompetence.

These guys simply aren’t going to take the fall for a bunch of political hacks.

The clock is ticking, as soon as the IT guys are under oath the IRS scandal is going to explode and that blast is going to take a lot of people with them.

The only way this bomb will go off, however, is if the Republicans in Congress light the fuse. They have to push the issue, forcing these lower level IT people to testify. Sadly, these Republicans too often act like they are afraid of their own shadow, thus letting the worst acts of corruption slip without so much as a peep.

Hopefully the results of the November election will give these guys some backbone.

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The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

4:24 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS claim that two years of Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed is simply not believeable.

More here. And here a Democrat demands a special prosecutor.

I have been traveling so I missed posting the original story about this absurd claim by the IRS. It is a downright lie and a coverup and should be answered with prosecutions and imprisonment.

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A citizen’s group is offering a one million dollar bounty to “anyone who can provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence” that implicates either the IRS leadership or members of the Obama administration as ordering the harassment of conservatives.

10:03 pm

Pushback: A citizen’s group is offering a one million dollar bounty to anyone who can provide ‘smoking gun’ evidence’ that implicates either the IRS leadership or members of the Obama administration as ordering the harassment of conservatives.

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The IRS appears to be stonewalling a Freedom of Information request for all documents relating to communications between that agency and thirteen Democratic elected officials from 2009 to 2013.

9:15 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS appears to be stonewalling a Freedom of Information request for all documents relating to communications between that agency and thirteen Democratic elected officials from 2009 to 2013.

Those officials include former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, former Commissioner Steven Miller, senior IRS official Joseph Grant and former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner. Members of Congress named in the request include Sen. Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Reid (D-NV), DSCC Chair Sen. Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Landrieu (D-LA), Sen. Pryor (D-AR), Sen. Hagan (D-NC), Sen. Begich (D-AK), Sen. Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), Sen. Franken (D-MN), Sen. Warner (D-VA), Rep. Braley and Rep. Peters (D-MI).

Since that request was received by the IRS nearly one year ago, IRS Tax Law Specialists Robert Thomas and Denise Higley have asked for more time to fulfill the request six times.

As has been said many times before, it ain’t the crime but the coverup that does the most damage. I suspect the requested documents will be very damaging to these Democrats, as the material will likely show that they colluded with the IRS to use the tax agency to harass conservatives. Delaying their release, however, only means that we will likely get to see these documents closer to the 2014 election.

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