The IRS Scandal, Day 905

The Weekly Standard, A Good Start:

On October 27, the House of Representatives moved to impeach the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, John Koskinen. It may seem odd that Koskinen is being punished since he wasn’t commissioner when the IRS scandal broke two years ago. But make no mistake, Koskinen is a worthy candidate for impeachment.

To get to the bottom of the scandal—the deliberate slow-walking or outright denial of applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups—Congress subpoenaed all the emails of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit head, Lois Lerner. Koskinen, who was sworn in as commissioner on December 23, 2013, failed to act on this subpoena, and on March 4, 2014, the agency erased 422 backup tapes, destroying as many as 24,000 of Lerner’s emails, despite a congressional order mandating relevant IRS records be preserved.

Koskinen knowingly sat on the information that the emails had been destroyed for four months. When he finally offered an explanation of what had happened to the emails, it was buried on page seven of the third attachment to a letter sent to the Senate Finance Committee in a Friday news dump. Koskinen testified before Congress that he had personally confirmed that none of the IRS’s other email backup tapes was recoverable.

This was a lie. Employees from the inspector general’s office later drove to the IRS office in West Virginia, where the backup tapes were kept, and asked for whatever was there. They recovered 700 backup tapes, and with them 1,000 new emails from Lois Lerner. Finally, a Government Accountability Office report in July indicated that the agency had introduced no new safeguards to prevent the targeting of “organizations’ religious, educational, political, or other views” despite a clear mandate to do so. ...

The federal bureaucracy has always been bad at policing employees, but President Obama bears direct responsibility for the problem getting immeasurably worse. Last year, 47 of the 73 federal inspectors general signed a letter decrying the Obama administration for stonewalling their investigations and in some cases actively intimidating investigators. ...

To address the systemic problem, the GOP has to reclaim Congress’s oversight power and push for sweeping civil service reforms. Without them, no significant conservative policy overhaul will ever be implemented, and Americans will be increasingly subject to a complex web of unaccountable and unconstitutional administrative fiefdoms.

• Accounting Today, DOJ Closes Investigation of IRS Targeting Scandal Without Criminal Charges
• Herman Cain (Canada Free Press), Of Course: Justice Department Will File No Charges Against Lois Lerner
• Heavy.com, Lois Lerner: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
• The Libertarian Republic, No Political Motivation: The True IRS Scandal
• Mother Jones, IRS Turns Out to Be Big Bureaucracy, Not Terrorist Organization
• Newsmax, Cleta Mitchell: DOJ Probe of IRS Abuses Was a 'Sham'
• Red State, Lois Lerner Nightmares and the Future of Government
• Wall Street Journal, Lois Lerner Whitewash?
• Washington Post, The Republican Campaign to Impeach the IRS Commissioner: What Comes Next
• Washington Times, Tea Party Targeting Accusations, Legal Issues Persist for IRS After Justice Ends Probe

• The IRS Scandal, Day 904 (Oct. 30, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 903 (Oct. 29, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 902 (Oct. 28, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Day 901 (Oct. 27, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 801-900 (July 19, 2015 - Oct. 26, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 701-800 (April 10, 2015 - July 18, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 601-700 (Dec. 31, 2014 - April 9, 2015)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 501-600 (Sept. 22, 2014-Dec. 30, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 401-500 (June 14, 2014 - Sept. 21,2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 301-400 (Mar. 6, 2014 - June 13, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 201-300 (Nov. 26, 2013 - Mar. 5, 2014)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 101-200 (Aug. 18, 2013 - Nov. 25, 2013)
• The IRS Scandal, Days 1-100 (May 10, 2013 - Aug. 17, 2013)