Justice Department Probing Missing Emails But Won't Tell Legislators Results! Do I Smell Whitewash?

Justice Department Expands Probe To Include Missing IRS Emails

July 17, 2014 by McClatchy-Tribune 

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WASHINGTON (MCT) — The Justice Department has widened its investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of political groups to include the disappearance of two years of emails from a top official involved in the controversy.

The widening of the investigation was announced as Deputy Attorney General James Cole was about to testify Thursday before a House Oversight and Governmental Reform subcommittee. The Republican-led committee has been aggressively pursuing the issue amid allegations of political influence within the IRS.

This spring the IRS said that two years’ worth of emails by Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS unit in charge of the controversial audits, had disappeared because of a hard-drive crash. Republicans were skeptical.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether any laws were broken as the IRS singled out organizations with “Tea Party” and other politically charged words in their names to see whether they were violating restrictions on political activities by charitable organizations.

On Thursday, Cole said for the first time that that would include an inquiry into the missing emails, though Justice Department officials cautioned that did not necessarily mean a full-scale criminal probe at this point.

In his prepared statement Cole apologizes to the subcommittee for not being able to say more about the investigation.

“While I understand that you are interested in learning about the results of the investigation, in order to protect the integrity and independence of this investigation, we cannot disclose nonpublic information about the investigation while it remains pending,” Cole’s statement says. “I can, however, tell you that the investigation includes investigating the circumstances of the lost emails from Ms. Lerner’s computer.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce defended the investigation against Republican criticism.

“The IRS investigation was launched by the department without hesitation and immediately after Ms. Lerner publicly acknowledged the potential misconduct. It has been conducted with the utmost integrity ever since, and department officials have regularly characterized the investigation as a top priority.”

–Timothy M. Phelps
Tribune Washington Bureau

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

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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.

Lerner Email-Gate Keeps Getting More Ridiculous To The Point That If It Were A Movie, No One Would Believe It!

Washington Bureau

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Jun 17, 2014, 12:44pm EDT

IRS missing emails not only for Lois Lerner, but also six other officials

Enlarge Photo

Pete Marovich

The IRS contends a computer crash erased archived emails for Lois Lerner, the central figure in the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny.

Kent Hoover

Washington Bureau Chief

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Computer crash or coverup? The plot thickens over missing emails at the Internal Revenue Service, with news that the agency is missing emails not only for Lois Lerner, but also six other IRS officials possibly involved in the targeting of conservative groups.

The IRS contends a 2011 computer crash deleted the archived emails of Lerner, who headed the agency division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. Lerner ignited a firestorm when she disclosed that the agency had given extra scrutiny to applications for tax-exempt status from groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names.

This led to a series of congressional investigations and Lerner refusing to testify, pleading her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lerner is long gone from the IRS, but House committees are still trying to get at the bottom of what happened. On Friday, the IRS informed the House Ways and Means Committee of Lerner’s missing emails. On Tuesday the committee announced that the IRS can’t produce requested records for six other agency officials either, including the chief of staff for the agency’s deputy commissioner. That’s important because the missing emails for this official, Nikole Flax, include the period when IRS headquarters was communicating with its Cincinnati field office about its “abusive questionnaires” to conservative groups, the committee contends.

Plus, committee investigators discovered the IRS knew about these missing emails as early as February, but didn’t disclose that fact to the committee then.

“It looks like the American people were lied to and the IRS tried to cover up the fact it conveniently lost key documents in this investigation,” said committee leaders Rep. Dave Camp, R-Michigan, and Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., in a joint statement. “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.”

Flax was a frequent visitor to the White House, the two Republicans note.

“Who was she visiting at the White House and what were they talking about?” they ask. “Was she updating the White House on the targeting or was she getting orders? These are answers we don’t yet have, because — surprise, surprise — a few computers crashed. Plot lines in Hollywood are more believable than what we are getting from this White House and the IRS.”

No One Believes IRS On Email "Loss". This Is An Indication That There Really Is Fire In All This Smoke!

Rep. Issa: IRS Flouts Constitution on Congressional Oversight

Monday, 16 Jun 2014 07:08 PM

By Cathy Burke

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A computer crash obliterated two years' worth of email files kept by retired IRS official Lois Lerner, the scandal-scarred agency says.

The disappearing emails – first disclosed Friday by the agency – are crucial to congressional investigations of the Internal Revenue Service's targeted scrutiny of tax-exempt applications from tea party groups and whether Lerner was getting orders from someone else in the Obama administration, because Lerner has refused to testify.


About 67,000 emails have so far been offered to Congress, including those found by searching other employees' email systems, The Washington Post reported, but those from 2009 to 2011 are apparently lost.

The Post reported the IRS gave a fuller explanation in a letter to Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.  According to The Post, the agency keeps a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, and when the congressional committee asked for them, the records went back only to late 2012.

The Post also reported that two other policies complicated matters: first, a limit on how big employees' in-boxes could be, and second, poorly defined criteria for what emails were important enough to be considered "official record" and be committed to a hard copy.

The Post noted the letter sent to the senators suggests that it was up to the user to determine what emails met those standards, and that it's not clear if Lerner had any hard copies of important emails.

By searching Lerner's computer and those of other employees, the agency was able to compile thousands of emails sent from and to Lerner from 2011 to 2013. But in 2011, Lerner's computer crashed.

The Post reported that she asked the IRS' information technology division to try to recover the data from her hard drive, but it couldn't do so, and it appeared individual machines like hers weren't backed up.

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, who has subpoenaed the information,  was skeptical of the crash excuse, telling "CBS This Morning" on Monday that it was "just not believable."

"We have enough evidence of her wrongdoing that we want to review every email that she has sent or received. That's reasonable to do when you have someone who takes the Fifth," he said.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will testify before two congressional committees this week to explain why Lerner's email can't be produced and why Congress is just now learning about Lerner's computer crash.

In a letter written to Koskinen, Issa said, "I will not tolerate your continued obstruction and game-playing in response to the committee's investigation of the IRS targeting."

"Despite your empty promises and broken commitments to cooperation, the IRS still insists on flouting constitutional congressional oversight.

"This is not about what you turn over. It is all about what you don't turn over."

White House press secretary Josh Earnest disagreed.

"I think it's entirely reasonable, and it's fact," he told reporters aboard Air Force One,CNN reported. "You've never heard of a computer crashing before?"

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