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Tick, tick, tick. A day of reckoning for the IRS gets closer with a unanimous opinion from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Z Street case. Z Street explains: The pro-Israel organization Z STREET was today, once again, vindicated in a court of law in its now nearly five year effort to redress the violation of its Constitutional rights by the Internal Revenue Service. The judges in their Opinion were far more restrained than their reactions to the IRS arguments during the oral argument which took place on May 4, see http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-goes-to-court-1430953480, but their...

Stonewall... First they said that Lois Lerner’s e-mails were lost because her hard drive had crashed. No one who understands anything about information technology believed that one, since there are always system backups, and besides, e-mails are stored on a server, not on an individual machine. They claimed they had made a herculean effort to recover the e-mails, but to no avail. When no one believed that, they finally relented and allowed someone who knew what they were doing to go in and find the e-mails. That was easy. So we can see them now, right? No, sillies! That’s not...

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure division testified Wednesday that the tax agency set up a special team with hundreds of lawyers to handle the probe into whether Tea Party groups were targeted, but repeatedly said she had no idea how it operated. Mary Howard, who also works as the head Freedom of Information Act officer in the IRS, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that once the “special project team” was created and operational, she never saw requests for information. Asked who was on the team, she said: “My first hand knowledge of...

The IRS "believes" that a major cyber breach that allowed criminals to steal the tax returns of more than 100,000 people originated in Russia, two sources briefed on the data theft tell CNN. On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced that organized crime syndicates used personal data obtained elsewhere to access tax information, which they then used to file $50 million in fraudulent tax refunds.

Washington (CNN)—The IRS watchdog investigating the disappearance of Lois Lerner's emails told a Senate committee it has found roughly 6,400 messages that have never before been turned over to Congress. Lerner was the IRS official at the center of allegations that the agency targeted tea party groups applying for nonprofit status. Congress requested Lerner's emails from the IRS and agency officials told lawmakers an unknown number of emails had been lost when Lerner's computer crashed. READ: No contempt charges for Lois Lerner The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is in the process of turning the emails over to the...

An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of emails from Lois Lerner, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according to committees involved in the probe. Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, aides on Capitol Hill said. The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, leaving it...

Judicial Watch has just released a new batch of documents forced out of the IRS that show the Obama administration’s scandalous misuse of the IRS to target Tea Party and other conservatives goes far deeper than realized. Included in the new batch of documents is a February 2012 email from Lois Lerner, who was then head of the IRS’ Exempt Organizations Branch, asking that a special program be set up to “put together some training points to help [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of revealing too much information to Congress. Amid the hundreds of released pages, Judicial Watch also...

On March 31, Ronald Machen, the outgoing U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote House Speaker John Boehner to inform him that the Justice Department would not present Lois Lerner’s contempt citation to a federal grand jury. The letter explaining his decision is an exercise in misdirection—the kind of misdirection that magicians use to fool an audience. Why? Because at no point in his detailed, seven-page legal analysis does Machen mention the most important point demonstrating that Lerner did, in fact, waive her Fifth Amendment right.

They rehire people fired for snooping, they allow pretty much anyone into facilities and restricted areas where all our sensitive information is kept, and there’s no telling how many unauthorized current and former employees are able to steal identities as a result. And, you thought they just ruined people’s lives with audits. That’s novice stuff. This is the IRS. I have personal experience with this. I had a fraudulent tax return filed under my Social Security number in 2012. As a result, both my refunds from 2012 and 2013 were put under administrative hold or some such nonsense with no...

Politico scored a journalistic coup with its exclusive 2014 profile on Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the agency's targeting of conservative groups. But a former Illinois lawmaker who said Politico contacted him repeatedly that year with questions regarding claims he was targeted by Lerner in the mid-1990s has been left wondering why the news group chose to ignore his documented dealings with the former federal official. "I was shocked," Al Salvi told the Washington Examiner's media desk, describing what he characterizes as several "lengthy" interviews with Politico reporter Rachael Bade. Lerner went after his 1996...

The Department of Justice blocked an attempt to force the Internal Revenue Service to search for Lois Lerner’s missing emails at off-site storage facilities, according to a lawyer pushing to obtain the emails.The IRS never looked for Lerner’s backup email tapes at the West Virginia storage facility where they were being housed. Treasury deputy inspector general Timothy Camus told Congress that the IRS never asked IT professionals at the New Martinsville, W.V. storage site for the backup tapes. Camus only found the backup tape for Lerner’s missing 2011 emails about two weeks ago. But the Obama administration knew that emails...

The Obama administration’s Department of Justice shut down an attempt to force the Internal Revenue Service to search for Lois Lerner’s missing emails at off-site storage facilities. The IRS never looked for Lerner’s backup email tapes at the West Virginia storage facility where they were being housed. Treasury deputy inspector general Timothy Camus told Congress that the IRS never asked IT professionals at the New Martinsville, W.V. storage site for the backup tapes. Camus only found the backup tape for Lerner’s missing 2011 emails about two weeks ago. But the Obama administration knew that emails were stored at off-site facilities,...

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation. “There is potential criminal...

Last night Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration Russell George and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Timothy Camus updated the House Oversight Committee on the status of Lois Lerner's "missing" emails surrounding the IRS targeting of conservatives. In an exchange with Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Camus revealed there is "potential criminal activity" involved in the disappearance and hiding of emails belonging to IRS officials involved in the targeting of conservatives between 2010 and 2012. “There is potential criminal activity," Camus said. Not surprisingly, in order to stonewall the congressional investigation into the targeting of conservative groups, IRS officials never asked...

The IRS inspector general is conducting a criminal probe into how the agency handled former official Lois Lerner's emails. The IRS initially told lawmakers that emails from Lerner, the former official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal, were lost. But many Lerner emails were found despite claims from officials that they were not backed up. "There is potential criminal activity," Timothy Camus, the deputy inspector general for investigations, told the House Oversight Committee at a late Thursday hearing, according to reports. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George and Camus, his deputy, told the Oversight...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails related to a former IRS official at the heart of the agency's tea party scandal. But they don't know how many of them are new. The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011. At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But at a congressional hearing Thursday evening, IRS...

Thursday night Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and Deputy Inspector General for Investigations will update the House Oversight Committee on the status of former IRS official Lois Lerner's "missing" emails. As a reminder, last year IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said two years of Lerner's emails, between 2010 and 2012, had been "lost" in a hard drive crash. A few months later, some of those emails were recovered after Koskinen said under oath they had been lost forever. Since the announcement of the missing emails, Congress has asked Inspectors General from different departments to look into their recovery. The emails...

**SNIP** Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says authorities have now managed to recover roughly 16,000 Lerner emails. This has led Johnson to send Koskinen a letter in which the senator writes, “I respectfully request your assistance in better understanding the IRS’s document-retention and -production process.” We prefer the way the senator put it on Fox News: “I smell a rat. I smell a number of rats, and that’s what we are going to get to the bottom of.” We’re as curious as anyone about why the IRS told us the Lerner...

Docs: Ahead of 2012 Presidential Election Lois Lerner Begged Supervisor Not to Visit IRS Office Katie Pavlich | Jan 14, 2015 New emails obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit show former IRS official Lois Lerner begged her supervisor not to visit the Cincinnati office or ask specific questions related to Congressional inquiries into whether the agency was improperly targeting conservative groups just ahead of the 2012 presidential election. As a reminder, it wasn't until May 2013 when Lerner admitted inappropriate targeting had occurred and plead the Fifth in front of the House Oversight Committee. “Please don’t...

New emails show IRS' Lerner met with DOJ prosecutors before 2010 elections BY: Mark Tapscott December 9, 2014 Former IRS executive Lois Lerner met with officials from the Department of Justice election crimes staff as early as September 2010 to discuss prosecution of conservative and Tea Party nonprofit applicants, according to new emails obtained by a watchdog group. In a Sept. 29, 2010, email from an unnamed DOJ official, arrangements were made for a meeting the following month between attorneys from the election crimes unit of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section and the IRS to "discuss 501(c)(4) issues." The...