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Paul L. Caron
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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The IRS Scandal, Day 510

IRS Logo 2Daily Caller:  After Holder: Four Things The Next Attorney General Must Address, by Dan Epstein (Executive Director, Cause of Action):

Attorney General Eric Holder may be heading for the exit door at the Department of Justice (DOJ), but numerous gaps in the agency’s enforcement remain. Will the next attorney general address fraud, transparency, and oversight concerns? We recommend four issues the next attorney general can and should resolve. ...

IRS Political Targeting: Americans have known for over a year about the Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting of non-profit groups. Cause of Action first petitioned DOJ to look into this scandal in May 2013. While an investigation has begun, the DOJ assigned an attorney from the Civil Rights Division (CRD), which mostly prosecutes hate crimes cases and conspiracies to violate civil rights, to investigate the IRS. If criminal violations are uncovered in the investigation, the CRD may not have the authority to handle them, given its jurisdiction. That is why the next attorney general should appoint a special counsel to direct the investigation.

Lois Lerner’s Emails: Perhaps the most confounding part of the IRS scandal is the somehow “lost” emails of Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the heart of the scandal. Cause of Action’s investigation indicates that in losing this valuable information, multiple government officials violated the Federal Records Act, which instructs agencies to create their own regulations regarding document retention. IRS regulations, for instance, required Ms. Lerner to print and file her emails and her attachments. By failing to preserve Lerner’s records, the IRS may have violated its own regulations — and therefore the Federal Records Act.

To this day, the Department of Justice refuses to investigate this potential violation of law, so we urge the next attorney general to conduct an investigation to determine if there has been a violation of the Federal Records Act.

 

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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