Paul L. Caron
Dean





Friday, July 3, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 785

IRS Logo 2Politico, Double Trouble? IRS Lawyer Now Heads Clinton Email Production:

A year ago, Catherine Duval was embroiled in the scandal over former IRS official Lois Lerner’s lost emails.

Now the top government attorney is heading up another document project in the cross hairs of Congress: the State Department’s release of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Libya documents to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

And Republican GOP investigators are raising red flags, accusing her and the State Department of stonewalling Congress by narrowly interpreting document requests and failing to disclose important information.

“The person in charge of document production at two different places on two different scandals has not been completely straightforward with us,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a top IRS and Benghazi investigator, in an interview. “She was at the IRS when there was a preservation order and subpoena — and documents were destroyed. She is now at the State Department, where we were supposed to get [certain] information, and we know that some of the emails were not given.”

Duval, a former attorney for the powerhouse Washington law firm Williams & Connolly who left the IRS and joined the State Department last August, declined to comment for this story. But she told House Oversight investigators last year that she didn’t know such backup tapes of the lost Lerner emails — recently found destroyed — even existed. And while she was leading the document production effort, she also gave a preservation order to all employees. ...But now, with an IRS watchdog announcing last Thursday that tax agency employees under Duval’s watch had erased more than 400 backup tapes central to Congress’ IRS probe of the tea party targeting, Republicans are even more suspicious.

“Who is Kate Duval — because I think I’ve heard that name before,” Gowdy asked during last week’s IRS hearing on the news. “I know where she is now: She’s at the Department of State in charge of their email productions. Wow.” ...

Benghazi panel Democrats say the IRS problems were out of Duval’s control, noting that the Oversight Committee turned up nothing when it questioned her last year about her role. And they add that Duval was the one who raised the alarm about Lerner’s missing emails in the first place.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/07/the-irs-scandal-day-785.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

The obstruction of justice is now, just out in the open. The Obama administration is giving the middle finger to the American people and the Congress...and the MSM doesn't care...or doesn't dare report it. I well remember Watergate. It was a different media and a different country.

Posted by: VoteOutIncumbents | Jul 3, 2015 9:23:35 AM