The IRS Targeting Scandal Is a Constitutional Crisis of Major Proportions

Today, when Representative Paul Ryan told IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, "Nobody believes you," Koskinen responded, “I have a long career. That’s the first time anyone’s said I don’t believe you.” Ryan shot back, "I don't believe you." Koskinen was defiant during his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, telling lawmakers he felt no need for the agency to apologize about accusations of a cover-up in the targeting scandal of conservative groups. Republican lawmakers had demanded that emails between ex-IRS official Lois Lerner and other government officials - including some at the White House - be turned over to determine whether there was a coordinated effort to stonewall conservative groups. Earlier this week, Senator Orrin Hatch, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he's been told that Lerner's hard drive was simply destroyed -- "They just got rid of it," he told Fox News. "It really looks bad and I've got to say it looks like a cover-up to me." Hatch and Democrat Senator Ron Wyden are leading a bipartisan investigation in the Senate Finance Committee into the IRS targeting scandal, separate from the House Ways and Means probe. ~~~~~ Republicans were outraged at last week's IRS disclosure that it had lost several years of former administrator Lois Lerner's emails on the targeting of tea party groups. Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell, who is representing several of the groups in a federal lawsuit over the targeting in their applications for tax-exempt status, said : "Liars. They're such liars. Unbelievable....outrageous...This is like the 18-and-a-half minutes in Rose Mary Woods' tape." The Mitchell reference was to the gap in the audio tape of a June 20, 1972, conversation believed to have been held between Nixon and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman. Mitchell called it standard fare for the Obama White House : a late-Friday afternoon release of major negative news. "They do it over and over and over...There are so many questions : "Why are we just hearing this today, more than a year after the investigation started? What exactly are the FBI and NSA's forensics experts doing to retrieve this 'hard-drive crash'? Do we believe that the FBI has not been called in - and that they have not been able to retrieve these 'lost' emails? There are so many things." Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing 41 targeted groups in a federal lawsuit against the IRS, said "this is insanity. Hollywood couldn’t write a script with any more scandal and intrigue than what is unfolding in the IRS targeting scandal." His report is posted on the ACLJ website. Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, blamed the White House for being dishonest : "Isn’t it convenient for the Obama administration that the IRS now says it has suddenly realized it lost Lois Lerner’s emails requested by Congress and promised by Commissioner Koskinen? Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they're just now realizing the most critical time period is missing?" The IRS told Congress last Friday that it could not locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that summer. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The targeting generally involved unusual delays and detailed requests for information. The tactic started in 2010 and continued to just before the 2012 presidential election. Lerner retired last September because of the scandal and was found in contempt of Congress in May after refusing to testify before Issa's committee. When she first appeared before the committee not long after the scandal broke, Lerner denied wrongdoing but refused to answer questions, citing her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. She took the Fifth in a second hearing before the panel in March. The Oversight Committee has been investigating the IRS scandal for more than a year, along with the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee. The Justice Department and the IRS inspector general are also investigating. Emails have since been disclosed showing that Lerner discussed working with Justice to prosecute nonprofits that she felt had "lied" about their political activities. In February, Commissioner Koskinen, who took over the IRS in December, had pledged to work with Congress on the various investigations before seemingly reversing his strategy at today's Ways and Means Committee hearing. The IRS said in a statement last Friday that it was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had variously copied 83 other IRS employees. The agency said it pieced together these emails. But an undetermined number are gone, the agency said. Representative Dave Camp, the Ways and Means Committee chairman, noted that the missing emails primarily involve people from outside the IRS : "such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, [Federal Election Commission], 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," Camp said in a statement before today's hearing, adding, "There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general." In addition, the IRS said in its statement that it had gone to great lengths cooperating with congressional investigations, spending nearly $10 million to produce more than 750,000 documents, including 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013. "The IRS is committed to working with Congress," the agency said. "The IRS has remained focused on being thorough and responding as quickly as possible to the wide-ranging requests from Congress while taking steps to protect underlying taxpayer information." ~~~~~ The IRS's position has angered many Republicans. Senator Orrin Hatch, the top GOP member on the Finance Committee, called the disclosure "an outrageous impediment" to its investigation. "Even more egregious is the fact we are learning about this a full year after our initial request to provide the committee with any and all documents relating to our investigation. And while the IRS has agreed to turn over additional documentation, I am still greatly troubled that the administration failed to notify the committee of this when they first became aware of it." ~~~~~ The Washington Post reported that the IRS gave a fuller explanation in a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch. According to the Post, the agency kept email backups for six months on digital tape, so 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, there is a limit on how big employees' in-boxes can be, and second, there are poorly defined criteria for which emails are important enough to be considered an "official record" to be committed to a hard copy. The Post noted that 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. In 2011, when Lerner's computer crashed, the Post reported that she asked the IRS's 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, as well as Lerner's computer, 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. ~~~~~ Dear readers, this IRS scandal will not go away -- because it is not only an example of an agency supposed to be independent that was clearly being used for, or taking unauthorized action to, target American groups with one particular political persuasion - championing conservatism. The outrage is that the IRS scrapped the First Amendment - free speech and assembly and the right to petition the government were trashed by an executive agency run by the President. No court agreed. No congressional okay was asked for. No announcement of an IRS policy change was published. And now we learn that Lerner's computer has been destroyed and that six other relevant IRS computers "crashed." It is a constitutional crisis of major proportions. And if the President were fulfilling his duty to protect and defend the Constitution, he would be outraged with the rest of America. But Mr. Obama is silent - his silence speaks volumes.