IRS: a Weapon in the Hands of the Left

Politico's exclusive report on its sympathetic interview of former IRS official Lois Lerner two days ago has been widely and justifiably criticized. The Washington Free Beacon dubbed it an "epic fail" in journalism. David Harsanyi, in "Sorry, Politico, But Lois Lerner is Not a Victim," pointed out, among other things, that Lois Lerner is already guilty of targeting conservative groups by her own admission and apology.

Lerner told Politico's interviewer:

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lerner said in her first press interview since the scandal broke 16 months ago. “I’m proud of my career and the job I did for this country.”

In an fair and unbiased world, this claim would be astounding, knowing what we now know of Lerner's acts and misdeeds.

But what if Lerner's world wasn't fair and unbiased?  What if the Internal Revenue Service where she worked for so long no longer treated all taxpayers equally, fairly or just?  What if Lerner is really saying, quite honestly, "I didn't do anything wrong" according to my coworkers in the heavily politicized left-leaning culture that now exists in the IRS?

Cleta Mitchell, who represents several conservative organizations targeted by the IRS, discusses why she believes that the IRS has become too corrupt to be saved and how it has become a bully of an agency and a weapon in the hands of the Democratic Party.


Ms. Mitchell's full remarks and rationale can be viewed here.

IRS's 'Secret Research Project'

"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly obtained donor lists from nonprofit groups as part of a 'secret research project' being run by Lois Lerner and other officials," reports the Daily Caller.

IRS official David Fish revealed the “secret research project” in a June 27, 2012 email to Lerner’s direct subordinate Holly Paz, according to emails released Thursday by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch, which obtained the emails in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Judge Demands Answers from IRS After Contradictory Testimony

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan (AP)

"U.S. District court Judge Emmet Sullivan Thursday ordered the Internal Revenue Service to come up with new answers after IRS employees contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lois Lerner's hard drive," reports the Daily Caller.

Sullivan ruled that “the IRS is hereby ORDERED to file a sworn Declaration, by an official with the authority to speak under oath for the Agency, by no later than August 22, 2014″ on four issues: the IRS’ attempted recovery of Lerner’s lost emails after her computer allegedly crashed, bar codes that could have been on the hard drive, IRS policies on hard drive destruction, and information about an outside vendor who worked on IRS hard drives.

Recent documents from nonprofit group Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS, which Sullivan is presiding over, showed that IRS technology officials contradicted sworn testimony about damage to Lerner’s hard drive.

Aaron Signor, an IRS technician that looked at Lerner’s hard drive in June 2011, said in IRS court filings that he saw no damage to the drive before sending it off to another IRS technician, leading some in the media to suggest that the lost emails scandal is basically over. But Signor’s statement, issued in response to the Judicial Watch lawsuit, does not jibe with sworn congressional testimony. ...

Sullivan's order seems to have been motivated by the obvious contradiction. 

See also Judge Orders IRS to Turn Over More Info on Lois Lerner Emails.

How Do Hard Drives Get 'Scratched'?

The latest news on ex-IRS official Lois Lerner's conveniently vanishing email records is that her computer hard drive was only scratched, reports Patrick Howley @ Daily Caller.

Ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer hard drive was “scratched” and the data on it was still recoverable. But the IRS did not try to recover the data from Lerner’s hard drive, despite recommendations from in-house IRS IT experts to outsource the recovery project.

The hard drive was then “shredded,” according to a court filing the IRS made to House Ways and Means Committee investigators.

CDs get scratched, but how do computer hard drives cocooned inside hard-cased CPUs and protected from human handling get scratched?

Apparently that question is being pondered by members of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which noted in its July 22 press release:

It is also unknown whether the scratch was accidental or deliberate ...

Lois Lerner's Vanishing Emails - A Crime in Progress?

That's the question editors at National Review Online are asking.

The matter at hand is a serious one. While IRS employees were openly campaigning for Barack Obama on agency time — a violation for which a handful were given largely symbolic reprimands — the very branch of that awesomely powerful law-enforcement agency charged with handling the affairs of nonprofit and tax-exempt groups was illegally targeting organizations based on their political affiliations while Democratic elected officials, Michigan senator Carl Levin among them, hectored the agency to do more.

This was not a lapse in judgment or a series of unfortunate events. This was an organized campaign to use IRS resources — including its ability to launch criminal prosecutions — for political purposes. We know from other Lerner e-mails that have been released that the IRS was, at the suggestion of Rhode Island Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse, looking for a way to “piece together” a criminal case against the groups it was targeting. Lerner and lawyers at the Justice Department discussed coordinating with the Federal Election Commission in this crusade. It is worth noting that the “crime” with which Lerner et al. wanted to charge those conservative nonprofits was failing to adequately disclose what political activities they would be engaged in — even though under the law they are explicitly permitted to engage in political activity.

We have no doubt that Lois Lerner’s hard drive has in fact been compromised. We’d be shocked if it hadn’t been. Goodness knows what else is being done with evidence while Congress proceeds at its customary majestic pace. The question here is not only the crime that has been committed but whether there is a crime in progress.

Lois Lerner's IRS E-Mails - the Saga Continues

"The Internal Revenue Service told Congress Friday it has lost a trove of emails to and from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the agency's Tea Party controversy, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year," reports Fox News.  "The IRS said it cannot locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year."

Scott Johnson @ powerlineblog.com posted two comments related to this news story. The first is an anonymous email he received from a Department of Justice lawyer:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Keep up the good work.

PS.

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

The second draws a historical connection between Lerner's missing emails and President Richard Nixon's missing 18 1/2 minutes of Oval Office tape recordings:

The charge that Richard Nixon “endeavored” to misuse the IRS made its way into the second of the three articles of impeachment voted against him by the House Judiciary Committee. Nixon’s efforts to misuse the IRS were futile. They went nowhere. Nixon and his henchmen desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents, but their efforts were a pathetic failure.

Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” As we have come to see, Caulfield was on to something... 

Internal Revenge Service

IRS Poster Girl Lois Lerner

The news emerging about the Internal Revenue Service is of a government agency converted into an Internal Revenge Service under the Obama Administration. (That it is also slated to be a major player in every American's access to health insurance is beyond terrifying at this point.)

There is no greater evidence of the need for Congress to completely overhaul the U.S. tax code system and purge the IRS of its opportunity to abuse power than this week's revelations and headlines:

• Ethics Watchdog: IRS Customer Representative Urged Vote for Obama (Politico)
• Displays of Obama, Democratic Support Common At Some IRS Offices (Washington Times)
• IRS Under Fire: Vote for Obama Stickers, Campaign Cheerleading Commonplace (Washington Times)
• Lerner Mentioned Working for Pro-Obama Group Amid Scandal (Washington Post)
• Lerner Mentioned Organizing for Action Job (The Hill)
• IRS Agents: No Liberal Groups Were Targeted (PJMedia.com)
• IRS Agents' Testimony: NO Progressive Groups Were Targeted by IRS (Daily Caller)
• Breaking: Emails Show Lois Lerner Fed True the Vote Tax Information to Democrat Elijah Cummings (Townhall.com)
• Bombshell: Emails Show Democrat on Oversight Committee Was Working with Lois Lerner to Target True the Vote (PJMedia.com)
• Darrell Issa Says Emails Suggest Elijah Cummings Prompted IRS Targeting of True the Vote (Washington Examiner)
• House Committee Votes to Request Criminal Prosecution of ex-IRS Official Lois Lerner (Washington Post)

Attorney Jay Sekulow argues that "the Ways and Means report raises the possibility that Lerner (and perhaps others) violated a number of federal statutes. It's clear — regardess of criminality — that they also violated the Constitution."

The House Ways and Means Committee released a letter Wednesday detailing what it believes to be criminal misconduct by Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the ongoing IRS Tea Party targeting scandal. For those who want to understand how partisan bureaucrats can manipulate a powerful federal agency, the letter is a must-read.

The list of newly-disclosed acts of political bias and manipulation are astounding:

—After meeting with an outside group (Democracy 21) that claimed both conservative and liberal groups were violating IRS rules, Lerner chose to focus like a laser only on the conservative groups, with particular emphasis on one of the largest, Crossroads GPS.

—In fact, her focus on Crossroads GPS included demanding to know why Crossroads had not yet been audited combined with plans to deny Crossroads’ application for tax exempt status. She showed no such similar interest in liberal groups.

—She showed astounding sensitivity to reporting from ProPublica, a George Soros-funded media nonprofit, at one point forwarding a ProPublica article mentioning conservative groups and demanding a meeting on the status of those groups’ tax exemption applications.

Read the rest at The Lois Lerner Files: A Partisan Bureaucrat at Work (Fox News).

Will: IRS's Behavior Taxes Credulity

George Will takes on the IRS, the Obama Administration, and Lois Lerner—the face of the IRS's abuse of conservative organizations:

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior. ...

There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.