Paul L. Caron
Dean





Monday, June 16, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 403

IRS Logo 2National Journal:  Did The IRS Really Lose Lois Lerner's Emails? Let a Special Prosecutor Find Them, by Ron Fournier:

A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn't blame a person for suspecting a cover-up -- the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea party controversy. And, because the public's trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act.

If the IRS can't find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can. ...

The White House is stonewalling the IRS investigation. The most benign  explanation is that Obama's team is politically expedient and arrogant, which makes them desperate to change the subject, and convinced of their institutional innocence. That's bad enough. But without a fiercely independent investigation, we shouldn't assume the explanation is benign.

Roger Kimball, 18 1/2 Minutes vs. 2 Years: Which Is Worse?:

WoodsWriting yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape somehow went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president.

What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day after day, week after week, month after month, the front pages and editorial pages of our former Paper of Record were full of stern admonitions about that egregious abuse of executive power. You could not look at the paper without a synesthetic shudder: Reading it, you could almost hear them licking their chops as their prey—the dastardly Richard Nixon—came ever closer to his doom.

So how does the New York Times handle this extraordinary loss of two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails? ... This will amaze you, I know, but it is true: the New York Times today devotes zero words to the story. Take a look at the front page here: Nothing. ... [A]bout the missing emails in one of the most disgusting political scandals in recent times, the deployment of the IRS with its virtually unlimited powers, against political opponents of the administration? Nothing. Nada. Rien.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/06/st.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

I am not a computer guy. But I don't understand how the crash of Lerner's laptop/desktop computer can result in the loss of emails that were distributed via the IRS' email server. Waddup?

Posted by: Publius Novus | Jun 16, 2014 7:55:38 AM