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Paul L. Caron
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Monday, September 15, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 494

IRS Logo 2The Hill:  Rand Paul Jokes He's 'Really Worried' About Anthony Weiner:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) poked some fun at former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) over his sexting scandal on Thursday.

“How many people here have a cellphone?” Paul asked an audience in New Hampshire, according to Breitbart News. “How many people think it’s none of the government’s damn business what you have on your cellphone?”

“I’ve been thinking that’s true,” Paul continued. “But I’m really, really worried about Anthony Weiner. Because you know he likes to take his selfies, and he’s had trouble finding a place to put them where the government can’t find them. So I’m thinking maybe Anthony Weiner should put his selfie in Lois Lerner’s emails.”

New York Post:  5 Lies That Have Shaped the Obama Presidency:

3. “Not even a smidgen of corruption.”

Obama said this in response to Bill O’Reilly’s question about the IRS scandal: “You’re saying no corruption?”

If there were not even a “smidgen of corruption,” as Obama insisted, it is hard to understand what outraged him, or at least seemed to, when news of the IRS scandal first broke. “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it,” Obama said in May 2013. Obama routinely expressed anger when some new scandal erupted on his watch — IRS, the failed ObamaCare website, the VA scandal, Fast and Furious — but never before had he shoved a scandal down the memory hole so quickly.

And how could Obama know there wasn’t a smidgen of corruption before the investigation was even over? Perhaps because the administration knew that any proof of that was gone with deleted e-mails and destroyed hard drives?

The Wall Street Journal Report:

Paul Gigot: New developments in the ongoing investigation into the targeting of conservatives groups by the IRS, with the tax agency revealing last week that it lost the emails of five more employees, including a senior aide to Lois Lerner, the former official at the center of the scandal. That news comes amid fresh claims by House Oversight Committee chair, Darrell Issa, that Eric Holder's Justice Department is improperly collaborating with congressional Democrats in its own IRS probe. And this time, he says he has a phone call to prove it. ...

Kim Strassel: I think what you're seeing over the past week, and especially because of the latest revelation about the Justice Department--remember, the Justice Department is supposed to be investigating this IRS scandal. And instead, what we've got as an accumulation over the last few weeks is a bunch of evidence that suggests the IRS and Justice Department and other departments of the Obama administration instead appear to have been spending the past year doing everything they possibly can to impede congressional investigators in getting to the bottom of this affair.

So not just coordinating with Democrats. We now have news about Lois Lerner's BlackBerry being wiped. This happening after Congress had already starting investigating, after the Treasury inspector general had begun his investigation. You have the emails of other critical people in this scandal gone as well, at least five of them.

You have redactions in documents that are being sent so the investigators can't actually see the core conversations. And by the way, I should also note, the only reason we even know any of this is because of outside litigation, which has enlisted the help of the judicial branch, and judicial branch has been forcing the IRS and others to come clean with some stuff. That's why we're finding out they haven't been clean with congressional investigators.

 

The order from U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan was certainly clear enough. In a landmark victory for Judicial Watch, the federal judge ordered the IRS to submit sworn declarations detailing what happened to Lois Lerner’s “lost” emails and what steps were being taken to find them. What was provided was a garbled explanation from no less than five IRS officials with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. ...

These sworn declarations came from five IRS officials: Aaron G. Signor, John H. Minsek, Stephen L. Manning, Timothy P. Camus, and Thomas J. Kane.

We noted that the IRS and DOJ filings seem to treat as a joke Judge Sullivan’s order requiring the IRS to produce details about Lois Lerner’s “lost” emails and any efforts to retrieve and produce them to Judicial Watch as required under law.

This is the story we’re supposed to believe, according to these IRS officials: Lerner’s crashed drive was analyzed by two technicians who employed a variety of tech tactics to recover the data, to no avail. The drives – which, mind you, had no recoverable data according to these experts – were then “degaussed” (wiped clean) “to protect against any possible disclosure of… taxpayer information.” Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the IRS email scandal would have realized that these filings were a blatant continuation of the cover-up.

Well, if there’s one thing I know, it is that most federal courts don’t take kindly to being treated disrespectfully and expected to act like a somnolent member of Congress as administration officials mislead, omit, and play games.

Sure enough, in a stunning move, Judge Sullivan took the extraordinary step of launching an independent inquiry into the issue of Lerner’s missing emails. ...

Judicial Watch has filed hundreds of FOIA lawsuits. I have never seen this type of court action in all my 16 years at Judicial Watch.

Judge Sullivan has already authorized Judicial Watch to submit a request for limited discovery into the missing IRS records after September 10. So stay tuned for further details very soon.

Judge Sullivan took the additional step of appointing Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola to manage and assist in discussions between Judicial Watch and the IRS about how to obtain the missing records. Magistrate Facciola is an expert in e-discovery.

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