A look at the seven IRS officials whose computers crashed.
The bottom line is that every single one of them was involved with IRS division that planned and instigated the harassment of the political opponents of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
Working for the Democratic Party: Email evidence now shows that Lois Lerner attempted to instigate an audit of a Republican senator, without any evidence of wrong-doing.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One more post on today’s IRS House hearing: The IRS Commissioner John Koskinen smirked as he insisted that “no apology is owed” by the agency for its actions.
Watch the video. As I said earlier, the arrogance of the man is disgusting.
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.
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.”
“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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
