http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015...rgeting-probe/
Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails in backup tapes related to the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative organizations.
Though they don't know how many of them are new, they told a congressional oversight committee that IRS employees had not asked computer technicians for the tapes, as directed by a subpoena from House oversight and other investigating committees.
That admission was in direct contradiction to earlier testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.
“It looks like we’ve been lied to, or at least misled," said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. at a congressional hearing Thursday evening,
IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus, who testified alongside Inspector General J. Russell George, said his organization was investigating possible criminal activity. He did not elaborate, other than to suggest a key factor is whether do ents were intentionally withheld.
The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.
At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But Camus said investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency's email system, though he said he believed some tapes had been erased.
"We recovered quite a number of emails, but until we compare those to what's already been produced we don't know if they're new emails," Camus told the House Oversight Committee.
Neither Camus nor George would describe the contents of any of the emails at Thursday's hearing.
The IRS says it has already produced 78,000 Lerner emails, many of which have been made public by congressional investigators.
Camus said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner's emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner's emails on the tapes.
Several Oversight committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.
"We have been patient. We have asked, we have issued subpoenas, we have held hearings," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the Oversight Committee. "It's just shocking me that you start, two weeks later you're able to find the emails."
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., questioned the significance of the recovered emails in an exchange with Camus.
"So as I understand it from your testimony here today, you are unable to confirm whether there are any, to use your own words, new emails, right?" she asked Camus.
"That is correct," Camus replied.
Maloney: "So what's before us may be material you already have, right?"
Camus: "That is correct"
Maloney. "So may I ask, why are we here?"
The IRS issued a statement saying the agency "has been and remains committed to cooperating fully with the congressional oversight investigations. The IRS continues to work diligently with Congress as well as support the review by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration."
The IRS estimated it has spent $20 million responding to congressional inquiries, generating more than one million pages of do ents and providing agency officials to testify at 27 congressional hearings.
The inspector general set off a firestorm in May 2013 with an audit that said IRS agents improperly singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.
Several hundred groups had their applications delayed for a year or more. Some were asked inappropriate questions about donors and group activities, the inspector general's report said.
The week before George's report, Lerner publicly apologized on behalf of the agency. After the report, much of the agency's top leadership was forced to retire or resign, including Lerner. The Justice Department and several congressional committees launched investigations.
Lerner's lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, and a new investigation by the inspector general's office.
Lerner emerged as a central figure in the controversy after she refused to answer questions at two House Oversight hearings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself at both hearings. At the first hearing, Lerner made a statement saying she had done nothing wrong.
Last year, the House voted mostly along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at the hearings.
"IRS agents improperly singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections."
the right-wing PACs are obvious violators of IRS rules, so they should have been investigated, as were Dem PACs.
ya got nothin, TSchlong. Your Repug and tea bagger buddies are liars, cheats, IRS violators, and frauds, more harmful to USA than they LIED that ACA would be.
Why do I not have your idiotic ass on ignore, yet?
FIxed that problem now.
Because every kingdom needs a jester to laugh at from time to time.
Evidence has trashed, years ago, all y'alls totally FALSE OUTRAGE about the IRS "targeting" EXCLUSIVELY illegal right-wing PACs. They also audited Dem PACs.
True, but the keywords used were picking out way more conservative than liberal organizations to hold up, and I think only the conservative ones were actually held up.
the explosion of right-wing PACs, esp after the hated n!gg@ and C-U, was OBVIOUSLY for poilitica, NOT "social welfare". It's all fraud violating IRS regs, the Repugs/Fox knew it, and faked outrage to distract from the violations.
LOL...
Please...
Don't have a breakdown...
Pretty damning regardless of what the emails contain. Couple people going down for perjury.
Clapper flat-out llied to Congress, didn't go down. Why should anyone else?
The Repugs want IRS neutered, if not destroyed, and are doing it by defunding it by $100Ms at a time, the REAL IRS SCANDAL.
So I suppose they will screw this IRS person. As usual, Repug IRS bull deflects from actually governing, which the Repugs have PROVED they refuse to do.
Dunno if criminal sanctions apply here, but it would be nice to see some people go to jail over this kinda stuff once in a while. Doubt it happens though.
I agree.
Anyone who abuses a position of power, especially a government position, needs to be dealt with and made an example of.
Do you think they do not deserve it?
If Clapper isn't punished for LYING to Congress, then nobody should be.
Clapper has Obama's blessing, much like Lerner.
I'm all for both of them rotting in jail for a while.
It's up to Congress to punish liars to Congress, not the President.
Dat double standard dough
They lied? I'm shocked.
Oh but you are the Dee to his Dum.
Obama administration’s ‘continuous resistance’ in IRS targeting case slammed by federal appeals court
A federal appeals court Tuesday slammed the Internal Revenue Service for what it called three years of “continuous resistance” to turning over do ents in connection with a class-action suit brought by tea party groups singled out for months of delays, excessive paperwork and scrutiny as they sought tax-exempt status in 2010.
A unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found that the IRS, in its unresponsiveness to the charges, “has only compounded the conduct that gave rise” to them.
The case was brought by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, and other groups, in 2013, just after a Treasury inspector general that May found that the IRS had singled out tea party groups for months-long delays in considering their requests for tax-exempt status, a practice President Obama called “intolerable and inexcusable.”
The allegations against the IRS produced a series of high-level resignations at the agency and prompted congressional hearings and an FBI investigation, which found no criminal wrongdoing.
But the suit by the organizations is separate from all of that. They seek damages for what they allege are violations of the law by the IRS. But the case has never gotten down to the merits because, the appeals court panel said, “at every turn the IRS has resisted the plantiff’s requests for information” on the targeting practices, with the IRS contending both at the district court and in the appeals court that the records sought, specifically the “names and other identifying information” of organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, are protected by privacy laws.
That argument was flatly rejected by U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott, who is in charge of the case in the trial court. She accused the government of “just running around in circles and not answering the questions. … My impression,” she said during a hearing in the case, “is the government probably did something wrong in this case. … I question whether or not the Department of Justice is doing justice.”
The Justice Department lawyers representing the IRS then took the unusual step of seeking an order against Dlott — called a “writ of mandamus” — generally reserved for a “judicial usurpation of power or a clear abuse of discretion.”
It was that order that the appeals court denied Tuesday — angrily.
The opinion, written by Judge Raymond M. Kethledge, a George W. Bush appointee, and joined by Bush appointee Judge David W. McKeague and Jimmy Carter appointee Judge Damon J. Keith, ran through the whole history of NorCal’s struggle with the government beginning in April 2010, when the group applied for tax-exempt status routinely granted to such organizations.
In July 2010, according to the opinion, the IRS sent NorCal a letter requesting additional information to process its application, to which NorCal “promptly replied with 120 pages of responsive material.”
“Eighteen months passed without further word from the IRS,” the court wrote. “Then, in a letter dated January 27, 2012, the IRS demanded more information from NorCal” in the form of five single-spaced pages bearing 19 separate requests, many of which had six or more sub-requests. The court wrote:
[I]Among other things, the IRS requested a list of all NorCal events and activities since July 2010, with detailed information concerning the cir stances of each event and the content of any speeches or presentations made at those events; the names of NorCal’s donors and whether those donors had run for elected office in the past or intended to run for elected office in the future, along with the amounts and dates of every donation; and copies of all newsletters, emails, or advertising materials that the group had sent to its members or to the general public. The IRS’s letter also reminded NorCal that, “[i]f we approve your application for exemption, we will be required by law to make the . . . information you submit in response to this letter available for public inspection.” The IRS directed NorCal to respond by February 17, 2012—three weeks after the date of the letter—and told NorCal that, “f we don’t hear from you by the response due date . . . we will assume you no longer want us to consider your application for exemption and will close your case. As a result, the Internal Revenue Service will treat you as a taxable en y.” NorCal eventually provided approximately 3,000 pages of responsive material.The panel noted that while the IRS forced NorCal “to produce 3,000 pages of what the inspector general called ‘unnecessary information'” the agency then claimed it would be “unduly burdensome” for it to provide such information as the names of IRS employees who worked on the tea party groups’ applications.
“Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address,” the panel said, “are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen — Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian — should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own Inspector General for Tax Administration.
“Those findings,” the court wrote, “include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called ‘unnecessary information.’ Yet in this lawsuit the IRS has only compounded the conduct that gave rise to it.
“… The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and enforcing its laws — all of them, not just selective ones — in a manner worthy of the Department’s name. The conduct of the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that tradition.”
As of late Tuesday, the Justice Department had not commented on the appeals court decision.
The unusually severe tongue-lashing by the appellate judges followed a similar rebuke of the government in the unrelated but even more sensitive case involving a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, a conservative group, involving former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s personal email system.
Fed up with what he considered a drawn-out runaround by the State Department in the case, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia accused the government of engaging in “a constant drip” in complying with the FOIA request. “That’s what we’re having here,” he said “… and it needs to stop. … How on earth can the Court conclude that there’s not, at a minimum, a reasonable su ion of bad faith regarding the State Department’s response to this FOIA request?”
In response, Sullivan took the unusual step of allowing the questioning under oath of seven current and former top State Department officials and aides to Clinton about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
No date has been set for that questioning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...appeals-court/
the tea bagger "social welfare" orgs are all frauds, are 100% political orgs, and conduits for BigCorp/VWRC/1% dark money.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
