No One Believes Anything That Comes Out Of This Administration. How Could You, All They Do Is Lie!

Paul Ryan Hammers IRS Chief Koskinen On Missing Lerner Emails: ‘Nobody Believes You’

June 20, 2014 by Ben Bullard

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Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) led the Republican chorus of bitter criticism today against Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen, telling the IRS boss that it’s inconceivable the agency would hold itself to such a lax standard for recordkeeping while it expects American taxpayers to do better with their personal tax documents.

“I’m sitting here, listening to this testimony, I don’t believe it,” Ryan said this morning during Koskinen’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.

“That’s your problem: Nobody believes you. The Internal Revenue Service comes to us a couple years ago and misleads us and tells us no targeting is occurring. Then it said it was a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. Then it said it was also on progressives. All of those things have been proven untrue.

“You are the Internal Revenue Service. You can reach into the lives of hard-working taxpayers and with a phone call, an e-mail or a letter you can turn their lives upside down. You ask taxpayers to hang onto seven years of their personal tax information in case they are ever audited, and you can’t keep six months’ worth of employee e-mails? And now that we are seeing this investigation, you don’t have the e-mails; hard drives ‘crashed.’ You learned about this months ago. You just told us, and we had to ask you on Monday.”

Koskinen struggled to interject a few remarks while Ryan held the floor, but objected that he had had a long career and had never before been told by a colleague that his information couldn’t be trusted. He also told the Committee “I don’t think an apology is owed” for withholding from Congress the knowledge that emails subpoenaed in the House investigation had been lost – even though he shared that same information with the Obama Administration six weeks before sharing it with Congress.

Ryan said that’s not “forthcoming” behavior from an agency that has pledged its full cooperation with the House investigation.

“Here’s what being forthcoming is: If we are investigating criminal wrongdoing, targeting of people based on their political beliefs and the emails in question are lost because of a hard drive crash that is apparently unrecoverable, which a lot of IT professionals would question, and you don’t tell us about it until we ask you about it, that is not being forthcoming,” said Ryan.