Free Republic

In response to a question about the IRS’s handling of Tea Party exemption applications, asked at the May 10 meeting of the Exempt Organizations Committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association, Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations office, made the following response:  “We get about 60,000 applications for tax exemption every year, most of them are 501(c)(3) organizations. But between 2010 and 2012 we started seeing a very big uptick in the number of 501(c)(4) applications we were receiving and many of these organizations applying more than doubled, about 1500 in 2010 and over 3400...

New emails show that the woman at the center of the IRS scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups' applications for tax-exempt status targeted tea party applications specifically and directed they be held up. While a possible "wag the dog" attack on Syria and other "phony" scandals like Benghazi have grabbed the headlines, Congress has continued its investigation into the Obama administration's targeting of tea party groups that sprang up in opposition to ObamaCare by the agency charged with enforcing it, the Internal Revenue Service. [snip] In the February 2011 email, Lerner advised her staff — including then-Exempt Organizations Technical...

Scandal: The IRS descends into criminal enterprise, with word of a 26-month gap of lost emails from the very period it was illegally targeting Tea Party groups. Computer crash? Try obstruction of justice. Just as the claim that President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, inadvertently hit the "erase" button instead of "pause" gave impetus to the drive to impeach Nixon, so too should the IRS announcement that it can't find two years of Lois Lerner's emails lead to a criminal investigation of this administration and creation of a select committee. In April we wrote, "Lois Lerner Should Go To Jail."...

Scandal: In testimony last March, the IRS chief told Congress that the now-allegedly irretrievable emails were not immediately available because they were safely stored offline. Maybe the NSA can help find them? Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen to testify June 23 about Lois Lerner's suddenly lost emails. One of the topics is expected to be his prior contradictory congressional testimony. Koskinen testified about the emails at an Oversight hearing in March and, as investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson notes, gave quite the opposite impression from the current storyline that has every computer nerd in...

Scandal: One of the seven people, including Lois Lerner who lost emails from the period of Tea Party targeting by the IRS, served as chief of staff to former IRS head Steven Miller. She also made 35 visits to the White House. The funny thing about emails is that they are never orphans. When you send one, there's always a recipient who has his or her own copy. The "lost" Lois Lerner emails had recipients. How about subpoenas to all of them during the Tea Party targeting period? That should help find what we need to know — or maybe...

The Internal Revenue Service commissioner said Friday THE AGENCY WILL NOT SHARE WITH CONGRESS ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT ITS LOST EMAILS related to the ongoing tea party investigation until its own review is finished because he said Republicans are releasing inaccurate, interim information.

WASHINGTON – Incredulous lawmakers tore into IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over the agency's claims that subpoenaed emails of ex-official Lois Lerner and other employees are gone forever because a hard drive was destroyed. “This is unbelievable," Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., angrily told Koskinen. That’s your problem. Nobody believes you.” Koskinen responded, “I have a long career. That’s the first time anyone’s said I don’t believe you.” "I don't believe you," Ryan shot back again. [...]

Republicans are still pressing the Obama administration to find missing emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and six other IRS personnel, but the White House insists they are not recoverable. "As the IRS said, I.T. professionals worked to restore Lerner's hard drive and were unable to do so," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

House Committee Requests Testimony from White House Official by Sharyl Attkisson on June 19, 2014 Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, (R-Calif.) requested that Jennifer O’Connor of the White House Counsel’s office testify next week.In a letter, Issa requested O’Connor’s appearance at a hearing on Tuesday at 9:30a, a day after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is scheduled to testify. The Tuesday hearing is entitled, “IRS Obstruction: Lois Lerner’s Missing E-Mails, Part II.”In a series of disclosures that began last Friday, the IRS notified Congress that it has “lost” two years worth of key emails to and...

When the news trickled out a year ago that the head of the IRS union, Colleen ("fat and ugly") Kelley, met with President Obama the day before the agency began targeting the Tea Party, I finally saw the link. The story was picked up by many news sources on the right but did not develop any further. It's my opinion that this is the connection that the "lost" emails are trying to hide. And it's a big connection -- the White House, the POTUS, the union boss, and the government agency all collaborating, and conspiring, to thwart the actions of...

Investigation of IRS Targeting Commissioner John Koskinen testified at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the investigation of the IRS' criteria to process applications of tax-exempt organizations.

And all of them, apparently, were lost in computer crashes. That’s novel. Normally, when an agency doesn’t want to comply with a document request, it simply lies by claiming that no such document exists.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest stonewalled reporters Monday, seeking an explanation for the administration’s Friday-night claim that a computer crash wiped out all the emails between IRS chief Lois Lerner and other agencies, including the White House. “You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?” Earnest told a reporter during a brief press gaggle while flying back to D.C. from President Barack Obama’s fundraising trip to California. “A good faith effort has been made” to find the missing emails, he said. Skepticism about the administration’s claim is “indicative of the kinds of conspiracy that are propagated around this story,” Earnest...

Republicans on Tuesday charged that the IRS has lost emails of a half dozen of its employees involved in the tea party targeting controversy, including a top aide to the now-fired acting IRS commissioner. In addition to losing two years’ worth of emails sent and received by Lois Lerner, the central figure in the scandal, the IRS “cannot produce records from six other IRS employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups,” Ways and Means Republicans said in a release. That includes Nikole Flax, who was the chief of staff for Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who was fired...

A House committee probing the IRS targeting scandal has subpoenaed Commissioner John Koskinen to testify over the agency’s claims it cannot locate a trove of emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the former agency official at the heart of the scandal. The IRS outraged congressional investigators Friday by saying it cannot find many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year. 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 Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch. The IRS recently claimed that it lost 24,000 of 67,000 emails that ex-official Lois Lerner sent between 2009 and 2011, due to a computer crash. The IRS, which agreed to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, specifically lost emails Lerner sent to other Obama administration agencies and the White House. Lerner is a major...

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service informed Congressional investigators that it could not recover two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt status department. Lerner has been at the center of the investigation into how and why the IRS applied additional scrutiny to the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations.

"Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy." That's the opening sentence of the Associated Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency's alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president. But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are outraged. Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn't be...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A House committee says that President Obama's "political rhetoric" was critical in the IRS' decision to target Tea Party, pro-family, and other groups that had politically conservative leanings. In a 77-page report released on Monday, the House Oversight Committee said, "President Obama's bully pulpit led to the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants." The report also places blame on "congressional Democrats," "Senior White House officials," "and other left-wing political figures and commentators."

Explanations provided by the Internal Revenue Service for how it lost two years of former employee Lois Lerner's emails are "entirely reasonable," the White House said on Monday. "You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?" White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with the president aboard Air Force One. Congressional Republicans have blasted the IRS's admission that it lost Lerner's emails from between 2009 and 2011 because of an apparent computer error. Lerner resigned from the agency amid controversy over charges her division unfairly targeted conservative political groups. In a statement Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa...