Last month, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R. Utah) wrote a letter regarding John Koskinen, the commissioner of the IRS, asking President Obama to remove him from his post. As the IRS is a part of the Department of the Treasury, it falls under the authority of Executive Branch.
Chaffetz rightly calls out Koskinen for “obstruction” with regard to the various congressional investigations, which have revealed bungled IRS responses to repeated inquiries. At the time of his letter in late July, it had recently been revealed that IRS workers destroyed Lerner’s backup tapes from 2010-2011, losing 24,000 emails in the processes.
Chaffetz has it right. Even now, a month after calling on Obama to dismiss Koskinen, there have been even more revelations of IRS misconduct. This include that fact that 10 groups have still yet to be approved for tax-exempt status — with some waiting as long as 5 years — due to a “backlog of cases”. Even more egregiously, the IRS only revealed last week during court proceedings that Lois Lerner used a second, private email account with the alias “Toby Miles” to conduct IRS business (on top of her IRS email and another private email account). The fact that after years into the investigations, only last week this information was disclosed to the public shows an unrepentant IRS.
If Obama is unwilling to actually dismiss Koskinen from his deplorable actions, it shows he lacks the fortitude to fix the critical problems at the IRS. In fact, it proves that he really is the root of the problem.