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Paul L. Caron
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Thursday, July 10, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 427

IRS Logo 2New York Times, Republicans Say Ex-I.R.S. Official May Have Circumvented Email:

Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service official at the center of an investigation into the agency’s treatment of conservative political groups, may have used an internal instant-messaging system instead of email so that her communications could not be retrieved by investigators, Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

The accusation against Ms. Lerner, the former head of the agency’s division on tax exemption, came nearly a week after the I.R.S. gave investigators thousands of her emails, including some that were destroyed when her hard drive crashed in 2011 but were recovered from the accounts of people with whom she had corresponded.

The Republican lawmakers said that in one of those email exchanges — which took place in the spring of 2013, just days after the Treasury Department’s inspector general concluded in a report that agency officials had treated conservative groups improperly — Ms. Lerner asked another official whether messages sent over the instant-messaging system were recorded. When she was told that they were not, she responded, “Perfect.”

Republican lawmakers interpreted that response as an expression of relief.

“Ms. Lerner says, ‘Wow, I know I’ve gotten rid of the emails when the computer crashed two years earlier, but I’d better double check on this intraoffice instant-messaging capability we have at the Internal Revenue Service,’ and she says ‘perfect’ when she learns that it’s not traceable, not trackable, not stored,” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio said during a hearing of a House oversight subcommittee.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/07/the-irs-scandal-2.html

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Comments

A purported $5K contribution of True the Vote, one of the target "TEA Party" organizations to a Republican fund is a hot talking point on the pushback by defenders of the IRS to the alleged e-mail irregularities.

I am new here -- have you discussed the True the Vote $5K donation in an earlier post? If True the Vote disqualified itself from 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 status by this donation, is this matter relevant to whether the IRS is hiding e-mails?

Is this matter relevant to the alleged coordination of the IRS with either the FBI or Congressman Cummings staff, that is, why True the Vote came in for particular scrutiny, or does the IRS coordination raise its own set of concerns of procedure and due process?

You may have answered these in earlier posts, so thanks in advance.

Posted by: Paul Milenkovic | Jul 10, 2014 11:29:56 AM