Clinton Laughs At Joke About “Trumped Up Charges” Over Email Scandal (Video)

We will see who has the last laugh...

Interesting: Scandals forcing Hillary Clinton to delay announcement of 2016 campaign...

Do American voters, and Democrats, really want 4 years or more of nothing but scandals?

Via Washington Times

Many of the key figures cited in a scathing inspector general’s report this week are allies of Hillary Rodham Clinton, marking the latest in a series of stumbles for the former first lady and secretary of state that likely forced her to delay her planned presidential campaign announcement.
A Democratic strategist familiar with her team’s thinking said they are scrambling to limit the damage and readjust the campaign rollout schedule after the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general revealed an apparent cronyism scandal that ensnared Mrs. Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham, and two of her political confidants, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell.
The accusation that a top Obama administration official did favors for the three politically connected Democrats follows other damaging revelations swirling around Mrs. Clinton, including that the Clinton Foundation pocketed foreign donations while she was secretary of state and that she exclusively used a private email account that concealed official business while she was in office.
“She is being tarnished before the race starts. It’s kind of like if you’re a race horse having a leg broken on a regular basis and the wound never heals,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic campaign adviser who worked for President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.

IRS official Lois Lerner begged her supervisor not to visit the Cincinnati office in run-up to 2012 election...

What was she hiding?

Via Townhall:

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…

American voters really want Congress to keep investigating IRS targeting of Tea Party...

Kumbaya! Dem (60%) & GOP (78%) want Congress to keep investigating IRS targeting of #tea party #FoxNews #poll http://t.co/c7YEP0Wz28
— Fox News Poll (@foxnewspoll) December 11, 2014

Since September, Broadcast networks did 171 NFL scandal stories vs. 3 Obama scandal stories...

Priorities...

Via NewsBusters:

In the crucial weeks leading up to the midterm elections, the broadcast networks were obsessed with scandals, but not any of the Obama administration controversies that might influence how voters behave on Election Day. No, despite revelations in the Benghazi, IRS, Veterans Administration and Secret Service prostitution scandals it was the NFL domestic abuse scandals that captured the attention of the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) networks.
Since September 4 (the start of the NFL regular season) through October 15 the networks, on their evening and morning shows, devoted a total of 171 (NBC 71, CBS 55, ABC 45) stories or briefs to five NFL players (Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Jonathan Dwyer, Ray McDonald, Greg Hardy) embroiled in domestic abuse cases. Number of stories on Obama scandals over that same time period? Just three. And while no one would dispute the seriousness of the charges underlying the NFL cases, the question has to be asked doesn’t the state of the body politic deserve at least the same amount of coverage as the state of the NFL?
Keep on reading…

Fail: Senior aide to Attorney General Eric Holder calls Issa's office by mistake and asks them to leak IRS scandal documents

Team Obama specializes in dirty dealings, but this time they got busted. 



Via Breitbart:

A senior communications aide to Attorney General Eric Holder seemingly called House oversight committee chairman Darrell Issa’s staff by accident and asked for their help spinning new revelations about the IRS scandal, Issa said in a September 8 letter to Holder.
The aide, Brian Fallon, is a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a well-known personality on Capitol Hill. The letter describes Fallon as “audibly shaken” when he realizes his request to leak documents to help get ahead of news stories about them was mistakenly made to the very office he was seeking to undermine. Issa believes the call was intended to be made to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cumming’s staff, the ranking member on the oversight panel, the letter said.
Keep on reading…

Interestingly, liberals want us to trust Eric Holder's DOJ to do a fair investigation of the IRS scandal. Obviously, they are biased. This phone call should justify a special prosecutor by itself.

Someone needs to answer why Lois Lerner's Blackberry was wiped after the Tea Party scandal investigation started...

Anyone want to guess? I'll take the obvious answer.

Via The Washington Examiner: 

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."

Shocker: Obama only met with Shinseki once during VA scandal...

The headline says it is shocking, but it really isn't. The only people Obama hates more than our military and veterans are the Tea Party and conservatives.

Via FOX

President Obama touted the newly passed Veterans Affairs reform bill Thursday as he signed the measure into law and lamented the scandal that triggered it. But a review of records by Fox News shows the president – despite the urgency he placed publicly on the crisis – only met one-on-one with then-VA Secretary Eric Shinseki once during the scandal. The records, provided through a Freedom of Information Act request, showed they met on May 30, the day Shinseki resigned. VA records show Shinseki also attended Cabinet meetings on Jan. 14 and Jan. 22. The revelation comes as lawmakers, on the heels of passing the bill that Obama signed Thursday, press the president to commit his administration to fixing the department.

Video of the Day: Trey Gowdy vs Irs Commissioner John Koskinen 7/23/14 Irs Hearing

Go Gowdy!

Trey Gowdy vs Irs Commissioner John Koskinen 7/23/14 Irs Hearing

Obama admits it a lie he hears about scandals through the news media...

Obama knows about all the scandals his administration is involved in. he just isn't going to acknowledge them until the mainstream media takes an interest. 

BELLEVUE, Wash. — People don’t tend to vote on foreign policy. But reflecting on the crises in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and Iraq that followed him as he headed to the West Coast for a fundraising swing, President Barack Obama acknowledged that they’re adding to an anxiety that’s feeding cynicism that could hurt his party in the midterms. [...]
Some of that cynicism, Obama joked was because of the news, which he said he doesn’t tend to watch himself.
Confronted with scandals — from the NSA to Veterans Affairs on down — Obama often falls back on the defense of saying he was outraged when he learned about the problems from news reports. To the crowd in Seattle, though, he said about the news, “Whatever they’re reporting about, usually I know.”

Why Lois Lerner may have sh*t a brick today...

Ruh, Roh!

Via Politico:

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.

Guess what! Even more IRS employes involved in targeting conservatives had hard drive crashes...

I wonder how so many IRS employees involved in targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups had their hard drives fail.  They must have read this instruction. 

Via The Daily Caller:

IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere.

The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens

Flashback to 2006: Highly Rated Tech Forum Dude Explains How To Deliberately Crash Your Hard Drive...

Crashing a hard drive sounds pretty easy. Darrell Issa should subpena Lois Lerner and all the other IRS employes involved in the targeting of conservatives, who had crashed hard drives, internet search records...

Via Yahoo:

Newly released Lerner emails reveal she wanted to hide her communications from Congress...

Lois Lerner sent this email prior to her announcement that the IRS had inappropriately targeted Tea Party and conservative groups.

 Here is more from Lerner. (Emphasis is mine)

Via the Wall Street Journal:

“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails—so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” Ms. Lerner wrote. “Someone asked if [instant messaging] conversations were also searchable—I don’t know, but told them I would get back to them. Do you know?”
“[Instant] messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software,” the technician wrote back. “My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.”
“Perfect,” Ms. Lerner replied.

Here is why Lois Lerner hasn't received immunity for her testimony...

Lois Lerner hasn't taken the steps necessary to secure immunity. If Lerner really wanted immunity, she would give Issa a proffer. This is a letter that let's Issa know what he will get in return for granting immunity. If Lerner has nothing interesting that she is willing to say, why should she get immunity for her alleged crimes? She'll take the blame and at no cost to her due to her immunity.  She could claim she was responsible for everything as far as she could remember and walk free unless perjury could be proven later. Perjury is very difficult to prove. Think Bill Clinton lying under oath about sex for a reference. I doubt Lerner will ever roll over on her bosses in the IRS and White House unless a special prosecutor is closing in on her and jail time is a real possibility. That isn't a likely scenario as long as Eric Holder is Attorney General and Lois Lerner knows that fact.

Obama claims Benghazi, IRS targeting Tea Party and VA problems are "Phony Scandals."

People died in Benghazi and because of the VA cooking their books. Lois Lerner took the 5th and more revelations come out every day on the IRS targeting of conservative groups. There is nothing phony about any of this. 

Via The Hill:

President Obama charged that his Republican opponents had “nothing to offer except cynicism and fear and frustration” during a fundraiser Thursday in Minnesota.
The fundraiser capped off a day Obama spent with Rebekah Erler, a working mother who wrote the president to detail her financial struggle.
“It moved me,” Obama said of the letter, adding that he only went into politics to help people like her.
Obama said he remembered what it felt like to be struggling to figure out “how you lead a good life and raise your kids, not looking to get wildly wealthy… trying to make ends meet.”
That’s what we should be talking about every day in Washington,” he said. “We talk about everything else. .. We talk about phony scandals. We talk about Benghazi. and we talk about polls and we talk about the tea party and we talk about the latest controversy... We don’t talk about her.”

Here is why all of Lois Learner's email in the 1st half of 2011 should be available...

The IRS claims they can recover Lois Lerner's email from 2011 and earlier because Lerner's hard drive crashed and they only backed up for 6 months and then reused the data tapes. That seems to be a stupid explanation, but for the sake of this discussion, let's stretch credibility and assume the IRS and Lerner are completely truthful.

The IRS claims they only have 6 months of email back up at anytime. 

Prior to the eruption of the IRS controversy last spring, the IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Outlook) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012. 

Here is the IRS story about what happened to Lerner's email:

The IRS has described the missing e-mails as dating from 2009 to mid-2011. At that point, the agency says its computer system had a strict limit for the e-mail capacity of each employee’s account. If a worker went above that capacity, they had to either move e-mails to their hard drive or delete them. When Lois Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, the agency states, her saved e-mails were lost from her account and computer.
The IRS provided e-mails from 2011 in which Lerner asked IT support staff for help with her broken hard drive and missing e-mails. The agency says it has recovered 24,000 of those e-mails by searching the accounts of 83 other IRS employees who corresponded with Lerner.

According to these emails, Lerner and the IRS took almost heroic efforts to recover Lerner's files.

  Email exchange about Lerner hard drive

Here is where the explanation falls apart for losing the 1st six months of Lerner's email. At the time of the Lerner hard drive crash in what appears to be early July of 2011, her email files for the 1st six months of 2011 would be backed up on data tape by the IRS own admission. There may have been other files on Lerner's computer that weren't backed up and were unrecoverable. Actually, since they didn't reuse the tapes for six months, the oldest back up tape likely had several months of email from the end of 2010 too. If Lerner asked them to restore those files, they should be on her new computer. If she didn't ask to have copies of them sent to her, why not? Didn't she want her email anymore? I would think those would be the files someone would most want back. If the IRS can't produce them, they are lying or Lenner didn't want her email back. I will leave the speculation as too why that might be to the reader.

IRS canceled contract with email backup company after Congress started investigating targeting of conservatives...

Wow. The timing was also shortly after Lois Lerner's computer allegedly crashed. I believe this rises to the "smidgen of corruption" level.

Via The Daily Caller:

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.
But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Here is why Lois Lerner losing 2 years worth of email smells fishy!

We have been told Lois Lerner lost 2 years worth of emails due to a crash of her hard drive. We were told the disc had bad sectors and the data could not be recovered. 

According to documents provided by the IRS, Lerner was archiving her e-mails on her local hard drive, which developed fatal problems (bad sectors) in the middle of June 2011. The data proved unrecoverable despite heroic efforts on the part of the IT staff. 

Let's delve into this a little deeper. Exactly what is a hard disc sector?

In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard drives and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs. Newer hard drives use 4096-byte (4 KB) sectors, known as the Advanced Format.

A sector is about 4 kilobytes.  I checked my email and small text only emails were 2 to 5  kilobytes. large emails or ones with attachments ran into the megabytes. So, if learner lost 1 sector, it would be about 1 small email. This is assuming Lerner had a very modern computer. If it was older, it would take more, about 8 sectors, to store an email.  How many emails did Lerner lose?

We don't know exactly how many are missing because a) they are missing and b) the IRS has managed to retrieve 24,000 of the lost emails by searching through the accounts of dozens of other IRS employees who could have been included in those emails.
Overall, the IRS has turned over 750,000 pages of documents in the investigation, including 67,000 emails.

It would appear that Lois Lerner was a prolific email user. If they lost as many as they recovered (24,000), then Lerner's hard drive would have had to have had as many as 48,000 bad sectors to store the lost emails (both lost and recovered) and this is assuming they are small emails without any attachments and all the bad sectors would have to be in the locations her emails were stored. If they were larger file sizes, the number of bad sectors needed to destroy that many emails rises dramatically. Of course all hard drives, even new ones,  likely have some bad sectors. Windows stops writing to them after they are identified. 

When your computer notices a bad sector, it marks that sector as bad and ignores it in the future. The sector will be reallocated, so reads and writes to that sector will go elsewhere. This will show up as “Reallocated Sectors” inhard drive S.M.A.R.T. analysis tools like CrystalDiskInfo. If you had important data in that sector, however, it may be lost — possibly corrupting one or more files.

In order for Lerner to have lost two years of email, there would have had to be severe sudden damage to a large section of Lerner's hard drive because files are not stored in a linear manner on disc. 

Each partition is either swap space (used to implement virtual memory) or a file system used to hold files. Swap-space partitions are just treated as a linear sequence of blocks. File systems, on the other hand, need a way to map file names to sequences of disk blocks. Because files grow, shrink, and change over time, a file's data blocks will not be a linear sequence but may be scattered all over its partition (from wherever the operating system can find a free block when it needs one). This scattering effect is called fragmentation.

If the IRS claimed they lost a few of Lerner's emails due to disc errors, we might believe that, but two years worth doesn't seem very credible.  I smell fish.

Amusing: GOP Rep. introduces bill allowing taxpayers to give flimsy excuses to IRS...

Sounds good to me...

Via Breitbart:

"Taxpayers should be allowed to offer the same flimsy, obviously made-up excuses the Obama Administration uses," Stockman declared, offering legislation that would require the IRS to accept any of the following reasons when we can't meet their demands for documentation:
1.         The dog ate my tax receipts
2.         Convenient, unexplained, miscellaneous computer malfunction
3.         Traded documents for five terrorists
4.         Burned for warmth while lost in the Yukon
5.         Left on table in Hillary’s Book Room
6.         Received water damage in the trunk of Ted Kennedy’s car
7.         Forgot in gun case sold to Mexican drug lords
8.         Forced to recycle by municipal Green Czar
9.         Was short on toilet paper while camping
10.       At this point, what difference does it make?