Laws are for the little people.


IRS Now Claims It Has ‘Lost’ Lois Lerner’s Emails

Isn’t this convenient?

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has “lost” two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn’t have a record of her emails from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a “computer crash” and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department and Department of Justice cannot be located.

We can add obstruction of justice to the long list of crimes and misdemeanors committed by this administration.

Government backs up everything. Everything. They’ve probably got back-ups of your emails. This is the IRS we’re talking about here. If you can’t produce whatever record they want, they can turn the screws to you. It’s practically an administration of anal accountants. Yet we’re to believe that it just lost two years’ of emails to and from the central figure in the agency’s worst scandal?

The way to bet on this is that the administration stalled on turning over those emails long enough to locate them all and all copies of them and destroy all of them. If that’s what happened, that’s destruction of evidence.

Like Benghazi, a select committee is going to be necessary to get to the bottom of this. The IRS has not cooperated. The Democrats in Congress, some of whom may have been in on the targeting, have stonewalled the Republicans in Congress. If there was a deletion of the evidence as there appears to have been, multiple people would have to have known about it.

America - Now with More Hope and Change - Banana Republic Edition.

You can trust the IRS with your medical information.

According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for "lying" about political activity.

"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.

And:

Just a few short days later on May 10, 2013, Lerner admitted and apologized for the inappropriate targeting of conservative tea party groups during an American Bar Association Conference after answering a planted question. Further according to Judicial Watch, "In an email to an aide responding to a request for information from a Washington Post reporter, Lerner admits that she “can’t confirm that there was anyone on the other side of the political spectrum” who had been targeted by the IRS. She then adds that “The one with the names used were only know [sic] because they have been very loud in the press.”

In other words, only conservative groups were being looked at for criminal prosecution.

Banana Republic

George Will writes:

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

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.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns. . . .

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriots and True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

Smoking Gun.

Lerner e-mail acknowledges political agenda of IRS.

The Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, quoted the report by the Republicans on Issa's committee, which said that Lerner "was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations." Who put this pressure on Lerner?

ISSA: That's one of our questions. She says things like they put pressure. So e-mails indicate that there was pressure. We don't know whether it was the president shaking his fingers at the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court over Citizens United or whether it was...

WALLACE: During the State of the Union Address?

ISSA: During the State of the Union, where she felt the pressure. Only she can tell us where she thought that pressure was.

WALLACE: The report also cites a newly discovered e-mail from September 16th, 2010, in which Lerner discusses how to check whether groups seeking tax exempt status are engaged in improper political activity. This is an e-mail to other people in the IRS. And she says, quote, "We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn't a per se political project." What do you think that e-mail shouts?

Shouts? Wallace leaned hard on that. And I put it in boldface. (That's me shouting.) I think it must mean that it was a political project and they were hard at work figuring out how to make it not look like what she knew it was. That's a smoking gun. Here's how Issa put it:

ISSA: It's a series of e-mails. And when you read them in context, what you realize is she's trying to walk back any kind of ability for someone to look at the record and say, aha, this was political targeting. And, yet, it clearly is political targeting.

Small points add up to big picture.

I thought it was ...odd...that all of the O'Donnell stuff happened to come out with her election campaign.

Apparently, I am not paranoid enough.

The IRS then wrongly attached an $11,744 tax lien to a property O’Donnell no longer owned, and political opponents speciously used the after-the-fact lien to damage O’Donnell’s standing and manufacture a tax scandal just as she launched her Senate campaign.

On top of the improper lien and the illegal access of her personal tax records, the IRS relentlessly audited and nit-picked O’Donnell’s personal finances. Three years later, the targeted fly-specking yielded … a whopping $1,100 for the federal treasury. That’s a return of $1 per audit-day. At that rate, the IRS would do far better to have its staffers panhandle in the street. Alternatively, the IRS could pursue bigger fish: The former Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, was off by approximately $48,000.