“The IRS is not targeting conservative groups.”
There is “not even a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS.
Two “rogue” employees in the Cincinnati office were principally responsible for the “overly aggressive” handling of requests by conservative groups for tax-exempt status.
The IRS is “apologetic” for the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by these lower-level workers.
“The inappropriate screening was both broader and longer-lasting than had previously been known.”
“I have been advised by my counsel to assert my Constitutional right not to testify or answer questions related to the subject matter of this hearing.”
“Will you provide all of Lois Lerner’s emails?”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed in mid-2011. Ms. Lerner’s email…would have been lost…and could not be recovered.”
We are being told lies. It’s not that hard to figure out why. And every American should care.
A short summary: it has been discovered that the IRS was targeting conservative groups that were applying for tax-exempt status for discriminatory scrutiny. The IRS originally blamed these actions on a few individuals in a regional office. The investigation has since risen to the top of the IRS. On June 3, 2011, the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee wrote the Commissioner on an issue related to tax-exempt organizations. That Commissioner has since resigned. The investigation eventually encircled Lois Lerner, Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Office. While claiming to have done nothing wrong, Ms. Lerner has taken the Fifth Amendment before Congress.
Since she would not testify, Congress subpoenaed her emails. The IRS provided 67,000 of them, but surprisingly few from January 2009 to April 2011. The new Commissioner was brought before Congress to ask why, and he promised to provide all the emails. Only after that, and we’re now in 2014, were we told that Lerner’s hard drive crashed, and her email from that time period had been lost. The date of the alleged crash? June 13, 2011, just 10 days after receiving the letter from House Ways and Means.
Any IT professional knows this is a bald-faced lie. Emails are not stored only on hard drives. They are stored on bigger computers called servers from which your email is sent to the servers of the people you are emailing. In fact, the recommendation when you use Microsoft Exchange, the most popular messaging system in the world, is that you utilize three servers, each with a redundant copy of your database, any of which could be used to restore the entire system in case any one of them crashes. Have we ever known the government to be less redundant than the rest of the world?
Then there is the issue of backups. All professional organizations back their servers up on tapes. If the server dies – that being if all three servers die – then you can restore the system to some previous state using a tape backup.
But the IRS claims it only has backups going back 6 months. That is ludicrous. This is the organization that requires every American to produce the tiniest tax-related document going back 3-7 years, but they only keep their records for 6 months?
Sarbanes-Oxley regulations require public corporations to retain their email data for 5 years, and the IRS’ own manual says email should be permanently backed up. Congress sent the new head of the IRS back to look for the missing emails, with instructions to search for them on the recipients’ computers. You know what they came back with? There were more computer crashes, pretty much everyone that Lois Lerner may have emailed, a number “less than 20.” I can just hear the suit who came up with that one. “This lie is working, so let’s go back and tell it again.” We are supposed to believe that not only did lightening strike twice, it struck 20 times.
There is no question we are being told lies. Ridiculously so. Like everybody knows we’re lying, but we’re going to keep on lying. So the question becomes, why carry on the charade?
I can promise you this: if it were really the work of two low-level staffers in Cincinnati, they’d have been hung out to dry long ago. If this were Lois Lerner’s doing, so what, sell her down the river, so sorry, goodbye, and this is over. But they haven’t done that. They look like fools. So whom are they protecting?
As it turns out, that’s not a very hard question to answer. The head of the IRS who resigned when this scandal broke visited the White House 157 times. The woman who ran the office that oversaw tax-exempt organizations visited 165 times. (Perhaps not coincidentally, she received $103,390 in bonuses and was promoted to run Obamacare.)
By comparison, Presidential right hand Eric Holder has visited the White House 62 times. And Mark Everson, who ran the IRS from 2003-2007, visited the Bush White House one single time.
The cover story is now that these people were at the White House to discuss Obamacare. But when the former Commissioner was asked before Congress why he visited so many times, he offered an Easter egg hunt, questions about tax policy, the departmental budget, and helping the Department of Education streamline applications for financial aid.
Ahem. No mention of Obamacare.
Rest assured, if this were the work of some White House staffer, they would be fired and blamed for everything. But no one has gone down for this. Why not?
The inescapable conclusion is that this goes all the way to the top.
Why should we care? Because this is the engine of government, a government that is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people, turned against the people. Perhaps you oppose conservative groups. But if the current administration can get away with this, the next administration could fashion government authority as a weapon against left-wing, pro-choice, and gay-rights groups. I staunchly disagree with each of those causes, but I will defend to my death their rights to exist, to assemble peaceably, and to speak freely.
In fact, our forefathers did just that, gave their lives to overthrow a regime that used the powers of government to oppress its citizens. It was called the British Empire, and it’s why we fought the American Revolution. Their First Amendment to our Constitution was the right to free speech, given to all, regardless of whether you agree with the majority or with the government. It is the suppression of that right by the people sworn to protect our rights that is why every American should care about what’s happening at the IRS.
Respectfully…
MPM