Looking at definitely impeachable offenses now.
It's my third article as the charges list gets longer.
"E-mails sought in IRS probe lost, agency says" by Stephen Ohlemacher | Associated Press June 14, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service said Friday it has lost a trove of e-mails to and from a central figure in the agency’s Tea Party movement controversy, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year.
The IRS told Congress on Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s e-mails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year.
Weak!
Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party and other conservative groups.
‘‘The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,’’ said Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. ‘‘There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.’’
Remember that name, even if the IRS did not have credibility to begin with.
The Ways and Means Committee is one of three congressional committees investigating the IRS over its handling of Tea Party applications from 2010 to 2012. The Justice Department and the IRS inspector general are also investigating.
Congressional investigators have shown that IRS officials in Washington were closely involved in the handling of Tea Party applications, many of which languished for more than a year without action. But so far, they have not publicly produced evidence that anyone outside the agency directed the targeting or even knew about it.
It's out there, though.
If anyone outside the agency was involved, investigators were hoping for clues in Lerner’s e-mails.
And now?
The IRS said technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011.
Sure they did, and if you believe that one Iraq had WMD.
In e-mails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit, but to no avail.
Then give the NSA a call. I'm sure it is in one of their storage facilities.
The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner e-mails from the 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together the e-mails from the computers of 82 other IRS employees.
But an untold number are gone. Camp’s office said the missing e-mails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, ‘‘such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.’’
The IRS said in a statement that more than 250 IRS employees have been working to assist congressional investigations, spending nearly $10 million to produce more than 750,000 documents.
Overall, the IRS said it is producing a total of 67,000 e-mails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013. ‘‘The IRS is committed to working with Congress,’’ the IRS said in a statement. ‘‘The IRS has remained focused on being thorough and responding as quickly as possible to the wide-ranging requests from Congress while taking steps to protect underlying taxpayer information.’’
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, called Friday’s disclosure ‘‘an outrageous impediment’’ to the committee’s investigation.
‘‘Even more egregious is the fact we are learning about this a full year after our initial request to provide the committee with any and all documents relating to our investigation,’’ Hatch said.
Lerner has emerged as a key figure in the Tea Party probe. In May 2013, she was the first IRS official to publicly acknowledge that agents had improperly scrutinized applications.
In an attempt to divert attention from Libya if I remember correctly.
About two weeks later, Lerner was subpoenaed to testify at a congressional hearing. But after making a brief statement in which she said she had done nothing wrong, Lerner refused to answer questions, invoking her constitutional right against self-incrimination.
The IRS placed Lerner on administrative leave shortly after the congressional hearing. She retired last fall.
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"IRS official under fire for e-mails; Tempers flare on Capitol Hill over missing data" y David S. Joachim | New York Times June 21, 2014
WASHINGTON — A congressional hearing examining how the IRS lost thousands of e-mails sought by investigators turned into a shouting match Friday, with Republicans on the panel accusing the IRS commissioner of lying.
“Sitting here listening to this testimony, I don’t believe it,” Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, told the commissioner, John Koskinen, at a hearing of the Ways and Means Committee. “That’s your problem. No one believes you.”
“You ask taxpayers to hang on to seven years of their personal tax information in case they’re ever audited, and you can’t keep six months’ worth of employee e-mails?” Ryan added, referring to the agency’s practice of overwriting backup tapes.
Democrats on the committee repeatedly objected to Republicans who interrupted Koskinen before he could answer or used their time to confront Koskinen without asking a question.
Great show, huh?
“For him to take the oath and then have people suggest to him, ‘We don’t believe you,’ that is not the way this committee has functioned in the past, and it ought not to be the way we function going forward,” said Representative Richard E. Neal, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
Koskinen, in his testimony, pointed to a report by an inspector general of the Treasury Department, the parent agency of the IRS, which concluded that while agency employees had acted improperly, there was no evidence of political motivation or outside influence.
He also said a delay in the disclosure of the lost e-mails was not indicative of a cover-up.
The fact that he even has to say it means there is!
He submitted as evidence an e-mail exchange from 2011 between the agency’s technology staff and Lois Lerner, then an IRS official, in which she sought to have her messages restored.
They retrieved that one, huh? Pfft!
He said a computer crash and an effort to retrieve the lost messages had occurred before the agency was notified that Congress was receiving complaints from conservative political groups that they were being unfairly scrutinized.
That does not mean there was no incriminating evidence.
Several of the Democrats called the panel’s inquiry a “witch hunt” meant to create the appearance of a conspiracy during an election year. Some of them, instead of asking their own questions, gave their time to Koskinen to respond to the Republicans’ accusations.
Where there is a crashed hard drive....
The Democrats also said the committee’s inquiry was missing a larger point: that political groups of all kinds were effectively getting subsidies from taxpayers as “social welfare groups,” even though they actually conducted political activities.
Thanks for enlightening us.
During the past week, the IRS has said thousands of e-mails of interest to investigators looking into suspected mistreatment of political groups by the agency had been destroyed because of computer crashes affecting seven employees. Those employees included Lerner, who has been accused of orchestrating a politically motivated effort to hold up applications for tax exemption from Tea Party groups before the 2012 election.
Oh, it is up to SEVEN EMPLOYEES INTRICATELY INVOLVED in the SCANDAL, huh?
Oh, STINK!
Republican lawmakers responded to the disclosure with incredulity, questioning whether the e-mails were truly unrecoverable and accusing the agency of a Nixonian cover-up. They have also suggested that the disappearance of the e-mails violated federal record-keeping laws.
He was just a sore loser from what I read.
Several Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee said that the IRS had lost credibility because of repeated denials that they claimed turned out to be wrong.
“Over three years ago, this committee started asking the IRS: Was it targeting conservatives for their beliefs, was it asking groups inappropriate questions, was it harassing conservative donors,” said Representative Dave Camp, the committee’s chairman. “The IRS assured this committee, and even testified before Congress, time and time again, that no targeting was occurring.”
He said that the IRS’ denials had since been proved untrue.
“The IRS lied to Congress and the American people,” Camp said. “In fact, this committee has found that there’s ample evidence to suggest the IRS violated the constitutional rights of taxpayers.”
He then chastised the agency for withholding information about the missing e-mails until last week, even though it had shared that information with officials at the Treasury Department weeks before then.
Camp said that?
--more--"
Before we pack up the tent:
"THE SONASOFT SAGA - THE IRS HAS A CONTRACT WITH A COMPANY THAT BACKS UP ALL OF THEIR EMAILS!
Our story begins on Friday June 20th, 2014, when the Commissioner of
the Internal Revenue Service John Koskinen testified before the House
Ways & Means Committee in the nearly year-long scandal in which the
IRS had been targeting the political enemies of President Barack Obama
for excessive audits, blocking of tax-exempt status, and other forms of
harassment. Use of the IRS in such ways is illegal and was one of the
articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.
Attention had early on focused on Lois Lerner, the IRS official in
charge of the tax exempt organizations unit who had dropped the blame
for the abuse on lower-level IRS employees operating out of the
Cincinnati office. However evidence began to surface of over
150 meetings between IRS officials and the White House, and emails that
included illegal sharing of IRS information on Obama's political
enemies. During the government shut down, the White House erased the
visitor logs for that time period from their website, and succeeded in
getting a judge to allow the logs to be kept secret. At the same time,
the IRS was illegally sharing private information on taxpayers with the FBI, seeking ways to prosecute and destroy Obama's enemies.
Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
requested copies of all of Lois Lerner's emails, and was told that the
IRS had the legally mandated copies of emails from before the IRS
scandal and afterwards, but the critical emails between 2009 and 2011
had been lost due to a hard drive crash! Not only that, the IRS claimed,
there were no backups as their tape archive system recycled all tapes
after just six months, and the actual physical hard drive had been melted down and destroyed! Then it emerged that email for six other IRS employees at the heart of the scandal had also been lost!
John Koskinen's testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee
basically came down to "The Dog Ate My Emails", infuriating when you
consider that the IRS demands all Americans keep all financial records
for up to 7 years for possible review by the IRS, while the IRS was free
to dispose of embarrassing and criminal evidence at their discretion.
Worse, apparently emboldened by Attorney
General Eric Holser's steadfast refusal to allow the Department of
Justice to open a criminal investigation into the IRS' actions (possibly
to to the DOJ's own complicity in siccing the FBI on Obama's enemies), Koskinen refused to even apologize for the lost emails, barely able to keep the smirk off of his face!
Then, Friday afternoon, Peter
Suderman posted an article at Reason.com that proved the IRS had an
ongoing contract with a private company to back up the IRS servers,
including the Microsoft Exchange system used to handle the IRS emails! This article was an instant sensation and was quickly reported by the Independent Media on the internet.
Shortly afterwards the original article at Reason.com was taken down,
and the URL produced a 404 "file not found" error. But by then it was
too late as the original article was already duplicated at my web site and other locations.
The copies spreading across the net made it very clear that the report
would not be silenced, and realizing that the act of trying to erase the
original was propelling the story, the original post was restored to
Reason.com later that same day.
More online evidence began to surface of an ongoing contract between the IRS and a company called "Sonasoft",
whose slogan is "Email archiving done right." The company specializes
in archiving emails from Microsoft Exchange Server, confirming that the
IRS mail system does not in fact simply store emails on the hard drives
of the desktop computers! A solicitation at the General Service Administration's own website (and also archived HERE)
shows the IRS contracting with Sonasoft in 2008, before the period of
the emails sought by Ryan and Issa. Note that the products specified
relate to backing up Microsoft Exchange, the IRS' email server!
SmartProcure.us showed the IRS as being Sonasoft's top government customer in 2010, right in the middle of the period Koskinen says the dog ate Lois Lerner's (and six other IRS officials') emails! And Sonasoft's list of customers (also archived HERE) shows the IRS is still a customer to this very day!
Mr. Koskinen, your pants are on fire!
At this point, the story gets really strange!
**************
So, here we are. The IRS is lying when it says Lois Lerner (and six
other IRS officials at the heart of the IRS targeting of Obama's
political opponents)'s emails are lost forever and there are no backups.
The IRS has an ongoing contract with Sonasoft to back up the IRS
Exchange servers that covers the time period of the missing emails.
Now Darrell Issa's office knows the IRS is lying.
And now so do you....
--MORE--"
I'm not a disciple of the guy, and often disagree with him; however, he has put the time and energy into this issue.
Related(?):
"House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed in insider trading case" New York Times June 20, 2014
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors and financial regulators have subpoenaed Congress in an investigation that could test the limits of federal insider trading laws.
The investigation focuses on a Washington research company, Height Securities. Last year, it correctly predicted a change in government health care policy, prompting a surge in the stock prices of health insurance companies.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Justice Department have been investigating the matter since the Wall Street Journal first reported on it last year. Authorities want to know if someone in the government improperly revealed the forthcoming policy change.
Even if that happened, though, it is not clear whether a crime was committed, officials said. Insider trading laws were written to prevent people from trading on information that is not available to the public, such as one company’s plan to merge with another.
In government, however, politicians and staff members regularly share information with outsiders. Lobbyists who learn of a coming policy change will, depending on their views, take credit for it or scramble to kill it. Outside experts will look for potential flaws. Political surrogates will get their talking points ready for the television cameras.
The issue for investigators is that if all of that is legal, is it illegal to buy a stock based on the information?
SEC investigators have subpoenaed Representative David Camp, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, for records. The Justice Department has also subpoenaed one of Camp’s committee aides, Brian Sutter, to testify before a federal grand jury.
Can the political muscle and pressure be any more obvious?
Those NSA records sure do come in handy at times!
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Just a reminder of who has the NSA spying power, right?
Also see:
77,000 foreign banks to share tax info with IRS
IRS to waive penalties for some overseas accounts
Leaves one feeling melancholy at the end of the day.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
Just want to make the point that WHAT WE HAVE HERE is not only using the IRS to target on ones POLITICAL ENEMIES, but we now have an OBSTRUCTION of JUSTICE!
I know it is not going anywhere, and I'm not even up for the distraction of an impeachment even if required by law. What does that do, give us Biden to possibly short-circuit Hillary's coronation?
It's the $y$tem itself that has become the problem. Corporate governance doesn't work.
"No plot in lost IRS e-mails, head says" by Stephen Ohlemacher | Associated Press June 24, 2014
WASHINGTON — The head of the IRS brushed aside accusations Monday that the agency has obstructed investigations into the targeting of Tea Party and other political groups, even as Republican lawmakers questioned his credibility.
Commissioner John Koskinen appeared at a rare evening hearing on Capitol Hill to answer questions about lost e-mails by a key figure in the probe.
And SEVEN OTHERS! Don't forget them!
Koskinen said congressional investigators were informed months ago that Lerner had computer problems in 2011. Koskinen said e-mails provided to the committee last fall showed Lerner’s computer had crashed. The e-mails indicate that Lerner had lost data, though they do not explicitly say Lerner’s e-mails were lost, ‘‘So it should be clear that no one has been keeping this information from Congress,’’ Koskinen said.
On Tuesday, the committee will hear from a White House official, Jennifer O'Connor, who once worked at the IRS.
What I can't forget is at this point the article is a rewrite, and I'm tired of those damn games.
‘‘I know tonight will be difficult, and it deserves to be difficult for both sides,’’ said Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee.
Issa accused Koskinen of misleading the Oversight Committee in the spring, when he promised to turn over Lois Lerner’s e-mails. Since then, the IRS has disclosed that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, losing an unknown number of those e-mails.
‘‘We have a problem with you, and you have a problem with maintaining your credibility,’’ Issa said.
It's government-wide at this point, and I include the propaganda pre$$.
Koskinen said he learned there was a problem with Lerner’s computer in February but did not learn that e-mails were lost until April. The IRS notified Congress June 13.
Lerner is the former head of the division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. The Oversight Committee is investigating the handling of applications from Tea Party and other political groups.
‘‘I subpoenaed you here tonight because, frankly, I’m sick and tired of your game-playing in response to congressional oversight,’’ Issa told Koskinen. ‘‘You, commissioner, are the president’s hand-picked man to restore trust and accountability at the IRS. You testified under oath in March that you would produce all of Lois Lerner’s e-mails subpoenaed by this committee.’’
‘‘Mr. Commissioner, at a minimum you didn’t tell the whole truth that you knew on that day,’’ Issa added.
Koskinen replied, ‘‘All the e-mails we have will be provided. I did not say I would provide you e-mails that disappeared. If you have a magical way for me to do that I’d be happy to know about it.’’
He added, ‘‘I never said I would provide you e-mails we didn’t have.’’
What ARROGANCE!
In 2011, the IRS had a policy of backing up e-mails on computer tapes, but the tapes were recycled every six months, Koskinen said. Lerner’s hard drive was recycled and presumably destroyed, he said.
The IRS inspector general is investigating the lost e-mails, Koskinen said.
‘‘It is not unusual for computers anywhere to fail, especially at the IRS in light of the aged equipment IRS employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years,’’ Koskinen said. ‘‘Since Jan. 1 of this year, for example, over 2,000 employees have suffered hard-drive crashes.’’
Those last two paragraphs are included in my print story, but that's about it.
Look at the sphincter begging for cash and crying overly, too!!
The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner e-mails from 2009 to 2011 because she had copied in other IRS employees.
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