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Losing Out on A Pulitzer Prize: Ignoring the Ongoing IRS Scandal

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The latest revelations in the never-ending IRS Scandal are pretty headline-worthy, but hardly a pip is being heard from the MSM, again. First, Judicial Watch has revealed, and the Department of Justice has confirmed, that the missing emails of Lois Lerner do indeed exist; second, that the content of one of Lois Lerner’s Blackberrys was destroyed after the Congressional investigation began in 2012.

The entire scandal has continuously had the makings of headline news: targeting citizens, evidence disappearing, perjury, and more. Yet few of the leading “news” outlets are bothering to cover the scandal with any journalistic depth.

On the subject of Lerner’s emails, Judicial Watch stated that,

“Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The Obama administration attorneys said that this back-up system would be too onerous to search. The DOJ attorneys also acknowledged that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is investigating this back-up system.”

This is in direct contradiction to what has been declared by Lerner and the current head of the IRS, among others, have stated about the emails and their recoverability, as well as possible perjury. “Current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the House Government Oversight Committee in June that the emails during the key period when the targeting occurred were “lost” due to a hard drive crash in 2011.”

With regard to Lerner’s Blackberry, apparently the IRS submitted sworn declarations late last Friday as a response to Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the case involving Judicial Watch v. IRS. In these sworn declarations, we find that Lois had two Blackberries. One was wiped clean after the Congressional inquiries began, without any attempt at data recovery. The second was issued in 2012, which the IRS still has. From the NY Observer:

“In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her “Outlook” and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began.

The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: “There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,” according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.”

Unfortunately, these bombshells only serve to re-emphasize two things we already knew. 1) the government is not above lying and cover-ups; 2) no one in the mainstream media has the fortitude to cover the story in-depth. With CNN, CBS, and ABC News having all have direct ties to the Obama Administration over the years, we certainly won’t see any Pulitzer Prize winning investigations on the IRS Scandal at all.