Posted on 07/01/2014 2:31:43 PM PDT by smoothsailing
IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency.
They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn't be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.
Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.
The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.
But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.
“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.
“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.
"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other PDAs.”
IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA request for the Lerner emails.
The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True the Vote for exempt status.
“If the IRS’s public statements about ‘recycling’ Ms. Lerner’s hard drive are true, that alone establishes spoliation of evidence that violates federal statutes and regulations, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and professional ethics and responsibility.
“These statements, coupled with the refusal of Defendants’ counsel, to provide any assurances about what has been and will be done to preserve evidence underscore the need for the relief that True the Vote seeks."
An IRS spokesman has been asked for comment on True the Vote's motion and the July 11 court date.
They're there....
Bet Obama has his thugs all over the IRS offices. What Obama doesn't know...Hackers beat them everytime.
The pressure is building, at some point it’s gotta blow.
Maybe Boehner is on the right track with this suit. Obama is definitely out of control.
This is sweet.
I wonder what Elijah Cummings thinks about this judge responding positively to the motion by True the Vote.
I would guess that Catherine Engelbrecht is truly delighted. lol
I’d like Valerie’s emails.
“The pressure is building, at some point it’s gotta blow.”
It’s not a scandal until the MSM says it’s a scandal. Otherwise Fast and Furious would already have put Eric Holder and Barak Obama in prison.
It reminds me of a cartoon. The president is surrounded three deep by menacing men in suits. Somebody says, “Boy the Secret Service sure does protect him.” The other guy says, “That’s not the Secret Service, that’s the media.”
The KA-BOOM we hear next weekend may not be fireworks but heads exploding !
.
Judge Walton is the judge who slapped the DOJ over politicizing the `New Black Panthers’ and their stonewalling over release of documents.
This could get interesting.
Here’s the key quote from Judge Walton’s ruling:
“The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision. Surely the public has an interest in documents that cast doubt on the accuracy of government officials’ representations regarding the possible politicization of agency decision-making.”
Maybe I’ve been too cynical. Looks like the judge recognizes an administration modus operandi.
I’ll bet those hard drives have been smashed to pieces and parts of it melted down.
If I had the time that they have had, it’s what I would of done if I was hiding something
I’d say within the next week or two, Lerner will have a lot of company under that 5th Amendment blanket.
they should establish this response as valid for anyone when dealing with the IRS... if they stick with it
they’d change their tune very fast
Hopefully they are too stupid to accomplish that and completely cover their tracks.
The way they are claiming email packages work is ridiculous and backup/storage would never be set up this way even (especially?) in government. Even the at the smaller businesses I have done email admin for we kept backups for at least a year both offline and physically located in another city so that this has no way of happening!
Why isn't someone on our side running commercials that say, "That's not how it works! That's not how any of this works!”
That is exactly what happens when malignant narcissists don’t get their way- sort of like spoiled petulant teenagers.
“In 1991, after considerable debate, the unified German parliament (Bundestag) passed the Stasi Records Law, which granted to Germans and foreigners the right to view their Stasi files.”
And then we can tell the 0 admin—”We unfriend you!”
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