by | ARTICLES, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
As part of the IRS Scandal over the last 18 months, people have questions if, and how deeply, the ties exist between the IRS and White House. A group named “Cause of Action” sued to get access to any documents that show such communication.
Last week, the Justice Department apparently sent an email over the matter, asking for more time to finish the request made by Cause of Action, due to a potentially large number of documents that fit the request. Here is the available text of the email from the Justice Department’s tax office:
“My client wants to know if you would consent to a motion pushing back (in part) TIGTA’s response date by two weeks to December 15, 2014. The agency has located 2,500 potentially responsive documents and anticipates being able to finish processing 2,000 of these pages by the December 1 date. It needs the additional two weeks to deal with the last 500 pages to determine if they are responsive and make any necessary withholdings. We would therefore like to ask the court to permit the agency to issue a response (including production) on December 1 as to any documents it has completed processing by that date, and do the same as to the remaining documents by December 15. I note that the court’s remand was for a “determin[ation],” which the D.C. Circuit has recently explained can precede actual production by “days or a few weeks,” but we would prefer to simply agree on a date for turning over any of the remaining 500 documents that may be responsive.”
Here we have the admission that potentially 2500 documents exist which show taxpayer information being shared with the White House. This is a pretty large number; what information that is and in what context remains to be seen. So far, TIGTA has been a help, not a hindrance, in the IRS scandal. Will that continue with this latest revelation?
by | BLOG
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.
