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Back to the topic. Kim Strassel has been doing the yeoman's work of reporting on this scandal.
...A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt. We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic PartyPresident Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democratsran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups. We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.
What we don't know is the interaction between the two. The IRS's deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no "there" therezero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party. At the very worst, went the explanation, Ms. Lerner and her IRS pals were zealous bureaucrats, primed to crack down on campaign money, and therefore eager to interpret the Democratic campaign as an order to act.
But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard driveand the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRShas suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.
There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?
Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.
Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone. IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin's staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was "complaining bitterly" to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials?
We do know that email conversations were common. A new and comprehensive House Oversight Committee report this weekabout how politics drove the IRS affairreveals fascinating details about just how chummy Democratic staff was with the IRS.
Here we find a staffer for Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin in October 2010 emailing no less than the IRS chief of staff, Jonathan Davis (who he addresses in familiar terms), with a heads up about a Durbin letter to the IRS commissioner demanding an investigation of Crossroads GPS, a conservative group. "We're not the first to ask, of course," the staffer acknowledges in the email. A few months later, Ms. Lerner asked her staff why it hadn't taken action against Crossroads.
Here we also find staff from Sen. Chuck Schumer in March 2012 tipping off an IRS employee to a coming New York Times article about nonprofits, a tip that was passed to Ms. Lerner. This is the same Sen. Schumer who has been open in public speeches about the need for Democrats to use the IRS to crack down on the "extraordinary influence" of Tea Party groups (as he was quoted as saying in January 2014). When did he first start looking to use the IRS this way, and who did he talk to there?
We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS. We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings's campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. Ms. Lerner got involved in that onequerying her staff as to whether they'd helped Mr. Cummings. ...
Kim Strassel: About Those Missing Emails - WSJ
Back to the topic. Kim Strassel has been doing the yeoman's work of reporting on this scandal.
...A year into congressional investigations of IRS targeting, we know two things beyond a doubt. We know from the public record that starting in 2010 the most powerful leaders of the Democratic PartyPresident Obama, Senate chairmen, House Democratsran a ceaseless campaign pressuring the IRS to silence conservative groups. We also know from internal IRS emails that Ms. Lerner, the former head of exempt organizations, was at the epicenter of an agency effort to silence those very groups, in the precise same time frame.
What we don't know is the interaction between the two. The IRS's deliberate withholding for a year of Lerner emails allowed the press and liberals to crow that there was no "there" therezero evidence of Lerner collusion with anybody in the Democratic Party. At the very worst, went the explanation, Ms. Lerner and her IRS pals were zealous bureaucrats, primed to crack down on campaign money, and therefore eager to interpret the Democratic campaign as an order to act.
But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner's hard driveand the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRShas suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.
There's plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?
Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.
Sen. Carl Levin, the head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exchanged at least 12 letters (that we know about) with the IRS in 2012 alone. IRS officials, including Ms. Lerner, met with Sen. Levin's staff in 2013. And former IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller testified that the IRS acted in part because Sen. Levin was "complaining bitterly" to the agency. In what forums? Were email conversations also taking place, behind the scenes, between the Levin office and Ms. Lerner and other IRS officials?
We do know that email conversations were common. A new and comprehensive House Oversight Committee report this weekabout how politics drove the IRS affairreveals fascinating details about just how chummy Democratic staff was with the IRS.
Here we find a staffer for Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin in October 2010 emailing no less than the IRS chief of staff, Jonathan Davis (who he addresses in familiar terms), with a heads up about a Durbin letter to the IRS commissioner demanding an investigation of Crossroads GPS, a conservative group. "We're not the first to ask, of course," the staffer acknowledges in the email. A few months later, Ms. Lerner asked her staff why it hadn't taken action against Crossroads.
Here we also find staff from Sen. Chuck Schumer in March 2012 tipping off an IRS employee to a coming New York Times article about nonprofits, a tip that was passed to Ms. Lerner. This is the same Sen. Schumer who has been open in public speeches about the need for Democrats to use the IRS to crack down on the "extraordinary influence" of Tea Party groups (as he was quoted as saying in January 2014). When did he first start looking to use the IRS this way, and who did he talk to there?
We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS. We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings's campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. Ms. Lerner got involved in that onequerying her staff as to whether they'd helped Mr. Cummings. ...
Kim Strassel: About Those Missing Emails - WSJ
It appears to me that they already have enough evidence to send all these DemoRAT criminals to prison. They should have all their emails subpoenaed. They should all be charged with using the IRS to persecute their political opponents, which is a felony.
Lerner's E-mails Not Lost!
Republicans have NOTHING to offer the middle class.
Except 40 hour work week with corresponding pay
Of course wanting to eliminate minimum wage and over-time benefits.
Tax incentives to bring back money and jobs held overseas
Care to be specific.
Freedom from the abusive Obumacare rate increases
So Americans can pay the 360% increase caused by Reagan deregulating.
Freeing up fracking on Federal land that would drive the price of fuel down
How is that going to work, oil and gasoline are priced by the market?
Do away with punitive EPA regulations that will have put 800,000 middle class COAL WORKERS and the people that subsidize their existence out of work, while doing absolutely NOTHING to help the American environment
Coal jobs were lost due to the market making natural gas prices lower than coal. Remember, the US exported 120 million tons last year. So where did the jobs go?
need a few more....asshole?
I'm still waiting for the first.
Republicans have NOTHING to offer the middle class.
Of course wanting to eliminate minimum wage and over-time benefits.
Lerner's E-mails Not Lost!
Looks like the partisan right will need a new crazy conspiracy theory.
Republicans have NOTHING to offer the middle class.
Republicans have NOTHING to offer the middle class.
Except 40 hour work week with corresponding pay
Tax incentives to bring back money and jobs held overseas
Freedom from the abusive Obumacare rate increases
Freeing up fracking on Federal land that would drive the price of fuel down
Do away with punitive EPA regulations that will have put 800,000 middle class COAL WORKERS and the people that subsidize their existence out of work, while doing absolutely NOTHING to help the American environment
need a few more....asshole?
Lerner's E-mails Not Lost!
Looks like the partisan right will need a new crazy conspiracy theory.
Lerner's E-mails Not Lost!
Looks like the partisan right will need a new crazy conspiracy theory.
You know watergate was basically because of 18 minutes of missing tape, out of over 500,000 minutes of tape. Now we have 7 peoples emails just gone in obama's scandle, and you see nothing wrong. How does Obama's jizz taste?
As has been said in many a post by others and myself...the emails are not lost forever.This is really shocking. The IRS fired the email back up provider shortly after Lerner's alleged computer crash. This IRS scandal is making Watergate really look like a third rate burglary.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.
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.
Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011.
Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot....
IRS Fired Email-Archiving Firm After Lerner Crash | The Daily Caller
According to this, they are safely stored at the National Security Agency's facility in Utah. Surprised? The real question is; will the NSA release them to the Congressional committee? Read more @ Doug Ross @ Journal: We know the whereabouts of the "lost" IRS emails
