Paul L. Caron
Dean





Saturday, July 12, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 429

IRS Logo 2Wall Street Journal editorial:  Judging the IRS: A Pair of Court Orders Seek Answers About the Vanishing Emails:

Congress has been working for more than a year to get to the bottom of the IRS political targeting scandal, and the Obama Administration has resisted across the board. So hurrah to the judicial branch, which this week stepped into the fray with orders that could force the IRS to start coughing up some answers.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Thursday ordered the IRS to provide for him, within a month, a sworn declaration explaining how the agency came to lose two years' worth of email belonging to former Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner. Judge Sullivan also assigned a federal magistrate, John Facciola, to conduct his own query into whether Ms. Lerner's emails might be obtained by other means. The order suggested that Judge Sullivan was far from satisfied with the IRS's cursory explanations of crashed hard drives and irretrievable information.

On Friday a second federal judge, Reggie B. Walton, issued another order, demanding the IRS provide under oath an affidavit outlining what happened to Ms. Lerner's hard drive, the qualifications of anybody who attempted to retrieve her lost email, and the status of the IRS Inspector General's investigation into these issues. Judge Walton gave the IRS one week to respond.

Now we're getting somewhere. The IRS has slow-rolled document production for Congress and then it waited two months to tell its legislative overseers that Ms. Lerner's emails had vanished. The Justice Department and FBI, meanwhile, have leaked to the press that their probes have found nothing wrong.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/the-irs-sc.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

If that were to be the case, it would logically follow that there would be democrats who’d like to push this all along so it’s no longer an issue for the upcoming elections. Surely, Elijah Cummings is the sort of leader who could settle this type of showboating in time for the populus to cast their votes having forgotten about the "phony scandal"…right?

Good luck with that argument!

Posted by: anon | Jul 12, 2014 8:27:05 PM

WSJ says "Congress has been working for more than a year to get to the bottom of the IRS political targeting scandal." Not exactly Mr. Murdock. More like "Congress has been showboating for more than a year to keep the ;IRS political targeting scandal going at least until the 2014 elections." Yeah.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Jul 12, 2014 4:54:42 PM