Posted on 06/16/2014 6:37:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill OReilly during an interview on Fox News that there was not even a smidgen of corruption in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his bosss nonchalance by insisting that there was no evidence that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal.
Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner the IRS official at the center of the scandal and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a computer crash. As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. After all, there isnt a smidgen of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise.
A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: I dont know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesnt have at least three ways of getting that mail back. Its either on the disks or its on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server. Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerners drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.
In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are stored in servers. The agencys own manual specifies that it provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption. The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of spoliation of evidence. That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.
Why is the loss of the Lerner e-mails particularly important? Last years report by the IRS inspector general set out a timeline of the IRSs targeting of conservative groups. A full 16 of the 26 non-redacted events in the inspector generals timeline took place during the period for which all of Lerners e-mails were lost, and these 16 instances refer to e-mail as the source for information on that event. As tax expert Alan Joel points out, much of the context about how the IRS scandal developed and who may have known about it is now lost in the black hole the Lerner e-mails are supposed to have been sucked into.
Since the IG report, we have learned that Lerner was engaged in highly suspect activity. As the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted on Saturday:
She shipped a database of 12,000 nonprofit tax returns to the FBI, the investigating agency for Justices Criminal Division. The IRS, in other words, was inviting Justice to engage in a fishing expedition, and inviting people not even licensed to fish in that pond. The Criminal Division (rather than the Tax Division) investigates and prosecutes under the Internal Revenue Code only when the crimes involve IRS personnel.
If there is an ongoing cover-up of the IRS scandal, its obvious why some folks would be desperate to continue it. Last year, Time magazines liberal columnist Joe Klein wrote that the IRS scandal placed President Obama on the same page as Richard Nixon. Article II of the Articles of Impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 included a charge that Nixon had caused, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner. The Judiciary Committee was also deeply disturbed by the Nixon administrations apparent efforts to conceal evidence. When investigators found a crucial 18-and-a-half-minute gap from a Watergate break-in conversation involving Nixon and his aides, the administration implausibly claimed that Rose Mary Woods, Nixons longtime secretary, had accidentally erased that portion of the tape. Later, Woods herself said she could have been responsible for no more than five minutes of the gap.
Now we have the IRS server ate the e-mails excuse. Barack Obama has brought us Jimmy Carters economy and Richard Nixons excuses, Steve Stockman (R., Texas) waggishly observed Friday. At a minimum, the House committees investigating the IRS scandal should demand that everyone involved in the search for the Lerner e-mails appear before them and testify under oath. I strongly suspect that if anything is amiss, one or more employees will not want to commit perjury to protect political higher-ups.
Normally, an independent prosecutor would be appointed to get to the bottom of all this. But dont expect such a move from Attorney General Eric Holder. When he was the No. 2 official at Justice during President Clintons second term, he was instrumental in blocking the appointment of any new special prosecutors for various Clinton scandals. Holder himself has mastered the art of withholding documents from Congress. In 2012, the House of Representatives (including 17 Democrats) voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt for ignoring a subpoena for documents in the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal.
As yet more evidence of this administrations seeming tendency toward black humor, the current Justice Department investigation of the IRS scandal is being headed by Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney who was a large donor to both of Barack Obamas presidential campaigns, with her first donation dating all the way back to the primary season in 2008. But, of course, Justice says theres no conflict of interest. Not even a smidgen.
John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO and co-author of the recently released Obamas Enforcer: Eric Holders Justice Department.
black humor?
That’s racist!!!
Impeach Obama and the Jackass he rode in om.
Obama is a POS.
The dog had a selective appetite, though, it seems.
Just the incriminating emails were eaten.
The man’s teflon tan prevents impeachment.
He’ll get away with this.
What does the NSA know and where do they have it stored?
This is just a stonewalling tactic to give Lerner and Obama time.
Hillary is already crying that the Benghazi slaughter is old news not worthy of her attention.
How long before the administration starts whining that the IRS scandal is old news?
I’ll have to remember this if I’m ever audited.
That privilege is unfortunately, only available for the powers that be.
For peasants like you and me, that excuse lands us in jail.
I wonder how Kurt Mix feels about this.
The dog ate my smidgens! - Barry Soetoro
I'm sure that many of the parties involved at IRS share the same benefical tan. As for Lerner, I wonder what her alias e-mail name is?
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