It\u2019s been a rough five days for the Internal Revenue Service.<\/p>\n
Last Friday attorneys at Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, said Department of Justice lawyers revealed a second back-up system<\/a> that stores all government emails.<\/p>\n Presumably, this includes the emails to and from former IRS manager Lois Lerner\u2019s account; emails that are sought by investigators on the House Oversight Committee because of Lerner\u2019s connection to the potentially illegal targeting of conservative advocacy groups.<\/p>\n If true \u2013 DOJ officials are disputing Judicial Watch\u2019s account of the conversation \u2013 this casts a serious shadow on the IRS\u2019s credibility, since Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress under oath that the emails had been lost<\/a> in a hard drive crash.<\/p>\n However many back-up systems there are \u2013 and whether Koskinen knew the number \u2013 the Commissioner has another integrity crisis brewing.<\/p>\n \u201cThomas Kane, Deputy Assistant Chief Counsel for the IRS, wrote in a declaration, part of a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS, that [Lois Lerner\u2019s] BlackBerry was \u2018removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012,\u201d reports Fox News<\/a>.<\/p>\n The date is significant because congressional staff members had already interviewed Lerner about her role in the targeting operation. Deleting messages from her government-owned smartphone after that meeting \u2013 but before preserving the contents\u2013 looks like a thinly veiled attempt to destroy evidence.<\/p>\n The House Oversight Committee will have its hands full when Congress returns from its August recess.<\/p>\n Expect to see some high-profile hearings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been a rough five days for the Internal Revenue Service. Last Friday attorneys at Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, said Department of Justice lawyers revealed a second back-up system that stores all government emails. Presumably, this includes the emails to and from former IRS manager Lois Lerner\u2019s account; emails that are sought by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,735,4576,4153,28],"class_list":["post-21399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-congress","tag-irs","tag-john-koskinen","tag-lois-lerner","tag-tea-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21399"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21403,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21399\/revisions\/21403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}