IRS
June 16, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
No objective lawyer who has been involved in “eDiscovery” — the discovery during litigation of emails and other electronic documents — will credit the Obama administration’s claim that, by accident, years of Lois Lerner’s emails were irretrievably lost. John explained why here. Moreover, as Bryan Preston at PJ Media reports, a former IRS IT specialist is equally skeptical. The individual in question worked on the IRS’s contract with Computer Sciences
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June 16, 2014 — John Hinderaker
Michael Ramirez portrays two infamous scandals and today’s Democratic Party, and asks, what’s missing? Here is a clue: don’t hold your breath waiting for any Democrat in Congress to ask, What did the president know, and when did he know it? Click to enlarge file size:
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June 16, 2014 — John Hinderaker
The Internal Revenue Service claims, as of last Friday, that two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s external emails are gone forever. You can read the letter in which the IRS told Senators Hatch and Wyden that Lerner’s external emails from 2009 to 2011, the critical time period for the IRS’s effort to suppress conservative nonprofits, have been lost, here. The letter is signed by Leonard Oursler, National Director for Legislative
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June 16, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Washington superlawyer Cleta Mitchell represents True the Vote, one of the groups illegally targeted by the IRS in the scandals that have exposed the agency as a partisan operation. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht has been harassed by federal law enforcement authorities representing three different federal agencies. They represent the price of politics in the Age of Obama. Cleta has just served the letter below on the attorneys at the
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June 15, 2014 — John Hinderaker
I will be on the Dennis Prager radio show tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Central, 2:00 Eastern, to talk about the IRS’s illegal transfer of 1.1 million pages of taxpayer data to the FBI, to assist in the harassment of conservatives. If you don’t know where Dennis is on your radio dial, you can listen online here.
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June 14, 2014 — John Hinderaker
The Obama administration’s claim that the IRS has “lost” two years of Lois Lerner’s emails is implausible to anyone who understands how email systems work. This is what the administration said: The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. This statement, on its face, is silly. Emails are collected on email servers. Each user (e.g.,
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June 14, 2014 — Scott Johnson
A reader writes from inside the Department of Justice to comment on the two-year gap in Lois Lerner’s intra-government email messages: I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So
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June 13, 2014 — Scott Johnson
The IRS has informed the House Ways and Means Committee that it has lost Lois Lerner email messages from January 2009–April 2011. Harking back to the allegedly accidental erasure of 18 1/2 minutes of critical Oval Office recordings that contributed to Richard Nixon’s resignation from office, the IRS attributes the loss of Lerner email to a computer crash. Some email survives: the agency retains Lerner email to and from other
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June 12, 2014 — Scott Johnson
William Henck has worked inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel as an attorney for over 26 years. We posted his personal account, including his testimony to a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him, this past February in “Inside the IRS” and followed up with Inside the IRS, part 2″ in May. When we posted the second of Bill’s two items in May, I called and wrote
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June 10, 2014 — John Hinderaker
It is just about impossible to keep up with all of the Obama administration scandals, but the corruption of the Internal Revenue Service ranks near the top. Unfortunately, it has gone hand in hand with Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s corruption of the Department of Justice. The perversion of law enforcement agencies for political ends is starkly revealed by the fact that in 2010, as part of its effort to
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June 1, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
A federal judge ruled last week that discovery in a lawsuit challenging the IRS’s scrutiny of the pro-Israel group Z Street may proceed. The judge in question is Ketanji Brown Jackson, an Obama appointee. Judge Brown Jackson is, from all I can tell, a down-the-line liberal. But she rejected in no uncertain terms the government’s attempts to short-circuit this lawsuit against the IRS. Z Street alleges that the IRS gave
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May 14, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
New documents obtained by Judicial Watch demonstrate conclusively that the IRS policy of targeting tea party and conservative groups came directly from Washington D.C., not a rogue office in Cincinnati. They also show that Sen. Carl Levin was working with the IRS to make sure tea party and conservative groups were targeted for harassment. As to the first point, a July 2012 email [correction: July 2010] from IRS Attorney Steven
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May 13, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Paul Caron holds down the fort at the TaxProf Blog. On his site he has provided daily compilations of news stories and editorial commentary bearing on the IRS scandal over the past year. He has not otherwise made his point of view on the scandal apparent. USA Today now runs a useful column by Caron reviewing the scandal. Drawing on his daily compilations, Caron sets out a timeline of key
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May 10, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Charles Krauthammer has been saying for months that the House should “immunize” Lois Lerner so she will answer questions about the IRS scandal. Now, Andy McCarthy presents a detailed case for doing so. Lerner, as we all know, has refused to testify before Congress on the grounds that truthfully answering the questions of House investigators might incriminate her. If the House grants her immunity, i.e., promises that her statements will
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May 10, 2014 — Scott Johnson
Even though President Obama has declared the innocence of all involved, we have much to learn about the illegal targeting of conservative/Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status. Lois Lerner is supposedly under investigation by the Department of Justice for this activity that coincidentally benefited the administration and seemed to be conducted with the administration’s interests at heart. Now we can add a few more items to be determined: The
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May 8, 2014 — Steven Hayward
I consider Ken Starr’s finest achievement was getting so many Democrats on board to abolish the independent counsel, an unaccountable and therefore unconstitutional office that the Supreme Court mistakenly upheld way back in the 1980s in Morrison v. Olson. Starr’s genius was in revealing to Democrats that independent counsel investigations could target and harass Democratic presidents just as much as Republicans. And that was no fun. Likewise I’m enjoying the
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May 1, 2014 — Scott Johnson
William Henck has worked inside the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel as an attorney for over 26 years. We posted his personal account, including his testimony to a retaliatory audit conducted by the IRS against him, this past February in “Inside the IRS.” This post follows up on the matters discussed in that post. We submit it for the consideration of readers in the context of current controversies without
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