Lerner Escapes Indictment. What Does This Say About Justice In America?

Huckabee on Lerner: One Set of Rules for Those in Power, Rest of Us Get Screwed

Newsmax TV's "The Steve Malzberg Show"

Friday, 23 Oct 2015 04:17 PM

Short URL|

Email Article|

Comment|

Contact|

Print|

    A   A

• 0
  inShare

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who this week called the IRS a "criminal enterprise," says the announcement Friday that former agency official Lois Lerner will not be charged for allegedly spearheading the targeting of conservative groups is not unexpected.

"I don't think any of us are that surprised. The Justice Department is very selective in how they pursue criminal charges. What they are good at, what the IRS is good at, is harassing Americans who are innocent," Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said on "The Steve Malzberg Show" onNewsmax TV.

"By the time they get through the harassment, Americans wish they were guilty just to get it over with because they have unlimited resources of the government. They put a lot of people out of business."

Latest News Update

Get Newsmax TV At Home »

On Friday, the Justice Department told Congress it is ending its two-year probe into whether the IRS targeted conservative, tea party and religious groups. It said Lerner, who oversaw screening applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status, will not be charged. Nor will her former staff.

During the investigation, the IRS claimed to have lost many of the emails to and from Lerner, somewhat thwarting the probe.

"It's stunning to me that this very IRS that demands I keep every receipt so if they audit me, I have to prove that I really did pay what I said I paid," Huckabee said.

"But they can lose an entire hard drive's worth of emails and correspondence and that somehow is perfectly OK, even though it violated every federal protocol there was about record keeping and having proper backups. I just don't buy it.

"There are two sets of rules in this country, one for those in power and one for all the rest of America who are getting screwed, screwed over by their government whether it's in their taxes, whether it's in the criminal justice system, and Americans are fed up with it."

This week, Huckabee told CBN's "The Brody File" that the IRS is a "criminal enterprise" that should be "put to death."

"They use the extraordinary, almost unlimited power of government that they have and they use it to attack political enemies. They use it to attack conservatives, pro-Israel groups. They hide the records, they destroy the records," Huckabee said.

Huckabee is the author of "God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy," published by St. Martin’s Press.

Related Stories:

• Huckabee: Washington 'Is Like a Strip Club'
• Huckabee Rips Frito-Lay for 'Doritos Rainbows' Promotion

 

© 2015 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Golly Be, IRS Finds Lois Lerner's Emails!

Inspector General Recovers Thousands of Lerner's Emails at IRS

Wednesday, 29 Apr 2015 11:17 AM

By Melanie Batley

  A  

• 
  

An inspector general at the Treasury has recovered thousands of emails from Lois Lerner when she was at the IRS that were previously believed to have been lost after a computer crash, The Hill reported. 

Congressional committees involved in the investigation into the improper targeting of tea party groups said the Treasury's inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) turned over roughly 6,400 new emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004 and 2013.

Of the new emails the inspector general found, around 650 were from 2010 and 2011, while most were from 2012, The Hill said. In total, 35,000 emails have been recovered from recycled back-up tapes.

In a statement, the IRS said it was glad to hear that the inspector general found the Lerner emails, calling it "an encouraging development that will help resolve remaining questions and dispel uncertainty surrounding the emails."

The IRS also said it took the inspector general around 10 months to recover the emails affected by Lerner's computer crash.

Latest News Update

Get Newsmax TV At Home »

Lerner had been the focus of a congressional investigation into the targeting. Lerner was placed on leave in May 2013 and retired four months later. She denied any wrongdoing but refused to testify before Congress.

Her attorney, William Taylor, recently said he and his client were "gratified but not surprised" by a decision by the U.S. Attorney's Office not to pursue contempt of court charges against her, Fox News reported. 

A spokesman for Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch said the committee hoped the new emails would bring the panel closer to releasing the findings of its IRS investigation.

"These emails will be carefully examined as part of the Committee's bipartisan IRS investigation," a spokesman said, according to The Hill. "After TIGTA produces their report regarding the missing data later this year, the Committee hopes to follow suit and move forward with the release of its bipartisan report on this issue."

Related Stories:

• IRS Tea Party-Targeting Scandal Continues
• Chris Farrell: Lois Lerner Knew IRS Targeting Would Be Scrutinized

© 2015 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

\

Will Congress Get To The Bottom Of Lois Lerner's Illegal Activities Or Are They Grandstanding? We Would Hope The Prior But Expect The Latter.

Stonewalling IRS Says It’s Lost Two Years’ Worth Of Lois Lerner’s Emails

June 13, 2014 by Ben Bullard

 33 12

 1 117

Those Lois Lerner emails must really contain things that somebody with access doesn’t want Congress to see. After famously stonewalling the House Oversight Committee’s request to review the former IRS official’s communications, the IRS is now saying that two years’ worth of Lerner’s on-the-job electronic data has been lost to a computer glitch.

The agency informed the House Ways and Means Committee this week that it had forever lost Lerner’s emails from the period spanning January 2009 to April 2011 – a timeframe which overlaps the IRS’ political discrimination against conservative nonprofits leading up to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

The Ways and Means Committee issued a statement today in response to the IRS’ admission, with Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) making his skepticism known:

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to Congressional inquiries. There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.

“Just a short time ago, Commissioner [John] Koskinen promised to produce all Lerner documents. It appears now that was an empty promise. Frankly, these are the critical years of the targeting of conservative groups that could explain who knew what when, and what, if any, coordination there was between agencies. Instead, because of this loss of documents, we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone. This failure of the IRS requires the White House, which promised to get to the bottom of this, to do an Administration-wide search and production of any emails to or from Lois Lerner. The Administration has repeatedly referred us back to the IRS for production of materials. It is clear that is wholly insufficient when it comes to determining the full scope of the violation of taxpayer rights.”

At the end of the day, it’s all good, argued Texas Congressman Steve Stockman: just have the NSA hand over her metadata instead. After all, don’t they surveil government employees the way they surveil everybody else?

“I have asked NSA Director [Mike] Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records,” said Stockman today. “The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

The House of Representatives found Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress on May 7 on a 231-187 vote for refusing to continue her testimony in earlier hearings in which she argued she’d done nothing wrong, before invoking her Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The House is continuing its investigation.

IRS Has NO Backup Of Lerner Emails. Yea, Right And The Tooth Fairy Also Exists! This Is A Cover-up Of Gigantic Consequence!

IRS Knew Lerner Emails Were ‘Missing’ From Computers, So Where Are The Paper Copies?

June 18, 2014 by Ben Bullard

 20 9

 1 68

THINKSTOCK

So what if Lois Lerner’s emails (and, it turns out, those of six more Internal Revenue Service employees) went “missing” from computers? Shouldn’t there be a paper trail for everything? After all, that’s what Federal law requires.

So far, there is no paper trail, and Congressional investigators into the IRS political discrimination scandal say they’re having a hard time believing a simple computer snafu can account for the perfectly timed unavailability of communications records from the alleged key players — at least the ones we know of so far — involved in the government-sanctioned targeting of conservative groups.

Even as new IRS director John Koskinen was telling the House Oversight Committee that the agency would provide Lerner’s emails after months of stonewalling, he and others within the IRS knew the emails had vanished, according to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.).

“The White House promised full cooperation, the Commissioner promised full access to Lois Lerner emails and now the Agency claims it cannot produce those materials and they’ve known for months they couldn’t do this,” Camp said in a statement last week.

On top of that, Lerner’s communications aren’t the only ones within the IRS that have vanished since the Oversight Committee began investigating.

“It’s not just Lois Lerner’s emails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce emails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal,” National Review reported Tuesday.

“The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany (R-La.) that computer crashes resulted in additional lost emails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.”

Computer experts who understand the role information technology plays in government data have since weighed in on the IRS’s admission, with one expert describing the alleged loss as “mind-boggling.”

“It is very well known in both legal and IT circles that as soon as litigation and/or criminal investigation is likely — not actually initiated, but merely likely — it is imperative to preserve any relevant electronic documents, even it if means suspending existing practices of, say, email deletion or purging of backup files,” IT consultant Bruce Webster told FOX News on Tuesday.

Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who left the network in frustration over its alleged rejection of her investigative reporting on scandals emanating from the Administration of President Barack Obama, told a Philadelphia talk show host there is virtually no way the IRS has irretrievably lost any of its communications data.

“One [IRS] official wrote me… to say this is entirely implausible, and he said there are criminal penalties for destroying Federal records, which makes sense, including liability for negligence for not taking the necessary steps to protect files, including a federal requirement to backup data,” said Attkisson. “This doesn’t happen. He said… all email servers are backed up with something called ‘RAID’ (Redundant Array Of Independent Disks), and it’s nearly impossible for something to delete the files, and that even if that were to happen they would not be gone forever.”

Regardless of the legitimacy of the IRS’s claim, the agency has so far offered no excuse for failing to offer access to paper copies of all of the allegedly missing data. Under the Federal Records Act, the IRS has been breaking the law if it hasn’t been archiving hard copies of everything.

“The IRS’s own definition of the Federal Records Act makes clear that emails must be saved and documented, according to an instructional page for employees on the IRS website,” The Daily Caller reported Tuesday.

Indeed, the provided link to the IRS website squares with that report:

The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media. Emails are records when they are:

• Created or received in the transaction of agency business
• Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities
• Valuable because of the information they contain.

If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records.

“If it’s true that the emails are lost,” quipped Attkisson, “that’s quite a story in itself.”