Walter Scott — 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.'
Lois Lerner had yet another personal email account used to conduct some IRS
business, the tax agency confirmed in a new court filing late Monday
that further complicates the administration’s efforts to be transparent
about Ms. Lerner’s actions during the tea party targeting scandal.
The admission came in an open-records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that has sued to get a look at emails Ms. Lerner sent during the targeting. IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency.
“In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.
It is unclear who Toby Miles is, but Mr. Klimas said the IRS has concluded that was “a personal email account used by Lerner.”
A trove of IRS emails show top official Lois Lerner had a deep commitment to the Democratic Party and a significant dislike for the new conservative grassroots groups that formed under the Tea Party banner and sought tax-exempt status from the agency.
"Crazies" and "a--holes," were the blunt terms Lerner used to describe conservatives, who, with a Supreme Court decision striking down the campaign finance reform law, were bringing about "an end to America," she wrote. The emails are included in a bipartisan report issued Wednesday by the Senate Finance Committee, which cited "gross mismanagement" and also "personal politics" as the root cause of the IRS mishandling of tax-exempt applications from Tea Party organizations.
WASHINGTON –
The lead government watchdog for the IRS revealed Thursday that
computer evidence was erased during the investigation into the agency’s
targeting scandal, months after the IRS was told to preserve documents.
J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax
administration, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee that IRS employees erased computer backup tapes shortly after
officials discovered thousands of emails related to the tax agency’s Tea
Party scandal had been lost.
As many as 24,000 emails were lost because 422 backup tapes were “magnetically erased” around March 4, 2014. Keep reading…
An inspector general investigating the IRS’s improper
scrutiny of Tea Party groups has found thousands of IRS, the agency official at the center of that controversy, according
to committees involved in the probe.
Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it
found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner from between 2004
and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the
congressional committees said. The committees have yet to examine the
emails, aides on Capitol Hill said.
The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011,
leaving it unable to reproduce an untold number of her emails over the
prior two years.
Of the emails the inspector general found, around 650 were from 2010
and 2011, while most were from 2012. The inspector general found about
35,000 emails in all as it sought to recover emails from recycled
back-up tapes. Keep reading…
Government documents obtained by a top "Inside the Beltway" watchdog group and released on Thursday reveal thatInternal Revenue Service's Lois Lerner
was strongly urged by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John
McCain, R-Arizona, her assistance in attacking certain non-profit
political groups. The organizations they selected for targeting by
Lerner were part of the Tea Party and conservative movements.
Courtesy of US Senate Photo Gallery
The group that investigates and exposes government corruption, Judicial Watch,
released newly acquired IRS documents, including an email from Ms.
Lerner in February 2012 requesting she “put together some training
points to help them [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls of
revealing too much information to Congress."
One of the released documents is a Lerner email from 2013 that she
was willing to 'take a bullet" for Obama and his White House for the IRS
scandal and that she understood why the targeting of Tea Party
organizations and other conservative groups may raise questions
regarding what did President Obama know and when did he know it. Obama
had told the press that he first read about the IRS targeting of
conservatives in the newspaper.
According to a Judicial Watch officials,
"A May 1, 2013, email exchange between Lois Lerner and other top IRS
staffers revealed that 11 days prior to Lerner’s admission that the IRS
had “inappropriately” targeted conservative groups, she met with select
top staffers from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a
“marathon” meeting to discuss concerns raised by both Sen. Carl Levin
(D-MI) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that the IRS was not reining in political advocacy groups in response to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Senator McCain had been the chief sponsor of the McCain-Feingold Act and called the Citizens United decision, which overturned portions of the Act, one of the 'worst decisions I have ever seen.'" Read it all here...
The Justice Department will not seek criminal contempt charges
against former IRS official Lois Lerner, the central figure in a scandal
that erupted over whether the tax agency improperly targeted
conservative political groups.
Ronald Machen, the
former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told House Speaker
John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a seven-page letter this week that he would not
bring a criminal case to a grand jury over Lerner’s refusal to testify
before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in March
2014. The House approved a criminal contempt resolution against Lerner
in May 2014, and Machen’s office has been reviewing the issue since
then.
Now that the Inspector General's office has recovered 30,000 additional Lerner emails, why isn't IRS Commissioner Koskinen being held in contempt of Congress?
The IRS initially told lawmakers that emails from Lerner, the former
official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal, were lost. But
many Lerner emails were found despite claims from officials that they
were not backed up. "There is potential criminal activity,"
Timothy Camus, the deputy inspector general for investigations, told the
House Oversight Committee at a late Thursday hearing, according to
reports.Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell
George and Camus, his deputy, told the Oversight panel they were also
working with recovered hard drives from IRS email servers that could
contain additional emails. But it is unclear whether that data can be
recovered.
The investigators learned earlier this month that there
were over 400 additional back tapes that may contain Lerner's emails
from a crucial period in 2011. According to reports, the IG's office was
not notified about those backups, which took them only two weeks to
find.
The officials learned about the back-up tapes after
demanding additional documents that IRS had not initially shared. One of
those documents made clear that there were hundreds of other tapes.
“We
were following up on our initial interviews, we realized we were
missing a document. When we obtained that document and reviewed it, we
realized that there were an additional population of tapes that had been
unaccounted for,” Camus told lawmakers.
New emails obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom
of Information Act Lawsuit show former IRS official Lois Lerner begged
her supervisor not to visit the Cincinnati office or ask specific
questions related to Congressional inquiries into whether the agency was
improperly targeting conservative groups just ahead of the 2012
presidential election. As a reminder, it wasn’t until May 2013 when
Lerner admitted inappropriate targeting had occurred and plead the Fifth
in front of the House Oversight Committee.
“Please don’t ask them about closures, pipelines, wait time for full
development cases, or the c4 application letter … can we put this off
please?” Lerner sent on April 4, 2012 to her then supervisor Tax Exempt
and Government Entities Division Deputy Director Joseph H. Grant shortly
after he announced a planned visit to the Cincinnati office. Keep on reading…
Up to 30,000 missing emails sent by former Internal
Revenue Service official Lois Lerner have been recovered by the IRS
inspector general, five months after they were deemed lost forever.
The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)
informed congressional staffers from several committees on Friday that
the emails were found among hundreds of “disaster recovery tapes” that
were used to back up the IRS email system.
“They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort
to get these emails off these tapes,” a congressional aide told the
Washington Examiner.
Committees in the House and Senate are seeking the emails, which they
believe could show Lerner was working in concert with Obama
administration officials to target conservative and Tea Party groups
seeking tax-exempt status before the 2012 presidential election.
Want to bet they are heavily redacted when we finally see them?
As lawmakers return to Washington to continue the search for thousands of missing subpoenaed emails related to the Internal Revenue Service's alleged targeting of conservative groups, questions abound.
Among the most pressing is the fact that a Blackberry belonging to Lois Lerner,
a former official at the center of the scandal, was wiped clean shortly
after investigators started asking questions about her alleged role in
the targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
Despite the fact that this revelation first came to light in August, the IRS has yet explain why this was done.
Considering her former role as chief of
the IRS' tax exempt division, and its proximity to the targeting
scandal, the decision to wipe her phone after investigators started
asking questions is both suspicious and troubling.
The phone being cleaned out is in addition to Lerner invoking her *Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — prompting Congress to vote in May to hold her in contempt — and on top of the fact that thousands of subpoenaed emails have gone missing. On Friday, the Associated Press reported
that, "The IRS says it has lost emails from five more workers who are
part of congressional investigations into the treatment of conservative
groups that applied for tax exempt status."
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) improperly obtained
donor lists from nonprofit groups as part of a “secret research project”
being run by Lois Lerner and other officials.
IRS official David Fish revealed the “secret research project” in a
June 27, 2012 email to Lerner’s direct subordinate Holly Paz, according
to emails released Thursday by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch, which
obtained the emails in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“Joseph Urban [IRS Technical Advisor, Tax Exempt and Government
Entities] had actually started a secret research project on whether we
could, consistent with 6104, argue that [REDACTED],” Fish wrote. Keep on reading…
A Justice Department official admitted that former IRS
official Lois Lerner’s apparently missing emails actually exist on a
backup server, but the government doesn’t plan to retrieve them.
“A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on
Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer
records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a
catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch
president Tom Fitton told Fox News’ Shannon Bream.
“But it would be too hard to go get lois lerner’s emails from that
backup system,” Fitton continued, paraphrasing the DOJ official.
If this is true, it's time to start putting all the people who perjured themselves in court and before Congress in prison.Of course this is what GOP members of Congress and many others have been saying for a long time. Lerner's emails must be backed up somewhere.
I am pretty sure she was referring to the Tea Party and other conservatives...
WASHINGTON (WJLA/AP) - A former IRS official at the center of the
agency's Tea Party controversy referred to some right-wing Republicans
as "crazies" and "assholes" in emails released Wednesday. A key GOP
lawmaker says the remarks show that Lois Lerner was biased against
conservative groups and targeted them for extra scrutiny.
Lerner headed the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt
status. In a series of emails with an associate in November 2012, Lerner
made two disparaging remarks about some members of the GOP, including
one remark that was a profane characterization.
Rep. Dave Camp, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, released
the emails Wednesday as part of his committee's investigation. The
Michigan Republican says the emails show Lerner's "disgust with
conservatives."
In one email, Lerner called some conservatives crazies. In the other,
she called them "assholes." The committee redacted the wording to
"_holes" in the material it released publicly, but a committee
spokeswoman confirmed to the AP that the email said "assholes."
House Ways and Means Committee investigators are closing in on Lerner and her cronies. Her hard drive was "scratched." For how that could have happened, check this tech board post from 2006.
Washington, DC –
Despite early refusals to make available IT professionals who worked on
Lois Lerner’s computer, Ways and Means Committee investigators have now
learned from interviews that the hard drive of former IRS Exempt
Organizations Director Lois Lerner was “scratched,” but data was
recoverable. In fact, in-house professionals at the IRS recommended
the Agency seek outside assistance in recovering the data. That
information conflicts with a July 18, 2014 court filing by the Agency,
which stated the data on the hard drive was unrecoverable – including multiple years’ worth of missing emails.
“It is unbelievable that we cannot get a simple, straight answer from
the IRS about this hard drive,” said Ways and Means Committee Chairman
Dave Camp (R-MI). “The Committee was told no data was recoverable and
the physical drive was recycled and potentially shredded. To now learn
that the hard drive was only scratched, yet the IRS refused to utilize
outside experts to recover the data, raises more questions about
potential criminal wrong doing at the IRS.”
It is also unknown whether the scratch was accidental or deliberate, but
former federal law enforcement and Department of Defense forensic
experts consulted by the Committee say that most of the data on a
scratched drive, such as Lerner’s, should have been recoverable.
However, in a declaration filed last Friday by the IRS, the agency said
it tried but failed to recover the data, but is not sure what happened
to the hard drive afterwards other than saying they believe it was
recycled, which, according to the court filing means “shredded.”
Further complicating the situation, the Committee’s investigation has
revealed evidence that this declaration may not be accurate. A review
of internal IRS IT tracking system documents revealed that Lerner’s
computer was actually once described as “recovered.” In a transcribed
interview on July 18, IRS IT employees were unable to confirm the
accuracy of the documents or the meaning of the entry “recovered.”
Days after IRS officials said in a sworn statement that
former top agency employee Lois G. Lerner’s computer memory had been
wiped clean, the agency put out word to contractors Monday that it needs
help to destroy at least another 3,200 hard drives.
The Internal Revenue Service solicitation for “media destruction”
services reflects an otherwise routine job to protect sensitive taxpayer
information, but it was made while the agency’s record destruction
practices remain under a sharp congressional spotlight.
Congressional investigators of the IRS targeting of conservative
groups have been hampered by the unexplained destruction of emails and
other records of Ms. Lerner, the former head of the IRS tax-exempt
division and a central figure in the scandal.
The loss of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive also raised broader questions
about why the tax agency never reported the missing records to the
National Archives and Records Administration, as required by the Federal
Records Act.
The IRS had said no copies of Lerner’s correspondence were available
because the agency at the time backed up emails for only six months on
tapes — then recycled the tapes for reuse, essentially erasing the data.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen also testified to the matter before
lawmakers.
Kane suggested that might not be the case. “There is an issue as to whether or not there is a — that all of the
backup recovery tapes were destroyed on the six-month retention
schedule,” he said.
A second federal judge has now ordered the IRS to explain
under oath how the agency lost emails from former division director
Lois Lerner, the woman at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal.
U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton told Obama administration
lawyers on Friday he wants to see an affidavit explaining what happened
with Lerner’s hard drive. The IRS claims her computer suffered a crash
in 2011 that wiped her email records at the time clean.
But at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by conservative
group True the Vote, Walton said he wants to know what happened to
Lerner’s hard drive, which allegedly was recycled. He asked for an
affidavit from those involved in handling the crashed drive.
The order is another boost for those questioning the agency’s claims
that many Lerner emails from that time period are not recoverable.
A day earlier, in a separate case brought by conservative watchdog
group Judicial Watch, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax
agency 30 days to file a declaration by an “appropriate official” to
address the computer issues involving Lerner. Keep on reading…
