Sept. 5, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:59
2788 The Truth About the IRS Scandal
The Internal Revenue Service has been the center of a massive controversy over the alleged targeting of conservative organizations dating back to before the last presidential election feature Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Mysteriously disappearing emails and hard drive crashes only add fuel to the speculation that Lois Lerner and other IRS employees were politically motivated in their actions. From April 2010 to April 2012, the IRS approved only four applications from conservative groups with names like “Tea Party,” “Patriots,” or “9/12” while green-lighting applications from several dozen organizations whose names included the likely left-leaning terms “Progressive,” “Progress,” “Liberal,” or “Equality.” Of the groups that the IRS selected for audits, 100% were conservative… but what is the truth about the IRS Scandal?
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is the truth about one of the most relevant and important domestic scandals in U.S. political history.
This is the truth about the IRS scandal.
So let's look at some of the background.
In May 2013, it was learned that from April 2010 to April 2012, the Internal Revenue Service, or the IRS, This was,
of course, all in the lead-up to the 2012 election.
During the same period, the IRS approved only four applications from conservative groups, while greenlighting applications from several dozen organizations whose names included the most likely left-leaning terms progressive, progress, liberal, or equality.
In February 2014, it was further learned that of the already existing non-profits that were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of the group's activities, websites, and any other publicly available information, 83% of the non-profits that were flagged for surveillance were conservatives.
Of the groups that the IRS selected for audits, 100% were conservative.
Well, why is this important?
One of the major game-changers in recent US political history has been the rise of the Tea Party, which is the taxed enough already a relatively old-school, you could say classical liberal or somewhat conservative-slash-libertarian movement that aims to reduce or at least slow the growth of the power of the government, particularly the federal government.
And we can, and I'll provide the proof in this presentation, we can surmise that the Tea Party was presumably targeted in order to influence the 2012 presidential election.
So there are two mammoth House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reports that were recently released, which contained hundreds of emails, of Lois Lerner and her comrades basically plotting the takedown of the Tea Party, which was a force that had almost single-handedly regained the House of Representatives for Republicans in 2010.
And it basically looks like that is exactly...
What happened?
So it's a massive campaign of voter suppression and political activist suppression, completely unbalanced between the left and the right, with the goal of diminishing or paralyzing the growing power of the Tea Party movement.
The 2010 elections, which is where the Tea Party had its first major flexing of muscle, were arguably the biggest setbacks ever suffered by a U.S. president in modern times.
The Tea Party helped the Republicans, the GOP, win an amazing 63 House seats, 6 Senate seats, 6 governorships, and 680 seats in state legislatures.
Now, the mainstream media narrative is generally that only two years later, In 2012, the Tea Party, the energy, the passion, the commitment, the focus, the game-changing movements of the Tea Party were almost gone completely overnight.
And this strains credibility or credulity significantly.
So basically, instead of there being massive Tea Party rallies and record-setting fundraising for conservative candidates, the Tea Party groups were busy being distracted, hounded, harassed, and intimidated.
By the IRS. Not only that, but the IRS demanded lists of donors and then targeted those donors ten times more frequently than on average for IRS audits.
So how would you feel about contributing to a conservative group or a Tea Party group with the knowledge that it made you ten times more likely to be audited?
This is political muscle-making of the darkest order.
So, these groups were being asked about the names of their members, the names of their speakers, the contents of their Facebook posts, and even the contents of their prayers, which, as far as I remember, is not exactly under the jurisdiction of the IRS. Twenty-four conservative groups were asked for donor lists.
Republican Dave Camp, a Michigan representative and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS to review the names on those lists to see whether they had been audited.
The IRS reported back that 10% were audited, substantially higher than the average rate of 1% of average Americans who are audited each year.
So this is political strong-arming of the highest order.
So, there is credible reasons to believe that the IRS targeting of conservative political groups, of Tea Party groups, stifled and stymied their ability to raise money, to register votes, to get the message out, to run campaigns, and that this had a decisive effect.
On the election, the 2012 election.
In other words, the IRS targeting of conservative groups can strongly be argued to be decisive in returning Barack Obama to the White House and keeping Mitt Romney out.
So Mitt Romney won 206 electoral votes and Virginia, Florida, Ohio and Colorado were worth 69 electoral votes for the 2012 election.
These four states, and of course in addition to many others, are states where the Tea Party movement is exceedingly active.
Now, three Tea Party groups were shut down in Pennsylvania as a result of IRS harassment and delaying or denying their applications for tax-exempt status.
Of course, it's harder to raise money if you cannot issue tax receipts.
More active Tea Party groups across Pennsylvania could well have accounted for an additional 350,000 to 400,000 more votes for Romney.
Tea Party groups organized in Tampa Bay, and Florida was a very close election state in 2012, as it generally is.
Tea Party groups organized in Tampa Bay were specifically targeted by the IRS. The Tampa chapter of the 912 group affiliated with Glenn Beck was singled out for IRS harassment over their application for tax-exempt status.
Additionally, First Coast Tea Party In Jacksonville and a Tea Party group in Orlando were also targeted.
Activists reported several Tea Party groups being suppressed or intimidated from filing for tax-exempt status because of the IRS harassment.
I mean, how many groups did not pursue this particular goal, knowing how futile it was in the face of endless IRS harassment?
So Barack Obama won 50.01% of Florida's 8.4 million votes, by a tiny margin of just over 74,000 voters statewide.
Or a margin of.88% statewide.
Now increased Tea Party activism in Florida could easily have added a few hundred thousand votes to Romney's total and won him Florida's 29 electoral votes.
Two groups in Colorado were targeted as well.
The Western Slope Conservative Alliance and the Colorado Tea Party Patriots applied for tax-exempt status and were targeted by the IRS. The Colorado Tea Party Patriots had their application forfeited by the IRS 22 months after they applied.
President Obama won the state of Colorado by just fewer than 138,000 votes, or 5.36%, out of just over 1.5 million votes statewide.
Now, clearly, the level of Tea Party activity suppressed in Colorado could have translated into many more votes than the mere 138,000 votes by which Romney lost the state.
Adding Colorado's nine votes to Romney's total would bring him up to 264 electoral votes.
In Western Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley Tea Party Patriots were targeted by the IRS. The Manassas Tea Party was another group harassed and targeted by the IRS. The Manassas Tea Party, along with 26 other Tea Party groups, did receive their tax-exempt status in January of 2013, of course, months after the 2012 election.
The Richmond Tea Party was also targeted and the Virginia Tea Party Patriots, which represents 46 groups in the state, says several groups in Virginia were affected by the IRS targeting.
Virginia was won by Obama by under 4%, 3.88%, or 149,298 votes out of 3.8 almost million votes cast statewide.
So given that several Tea Party groups were harassed in Virginia, it is easy to suggest or imagine that more than 200,000 additional votes could easily have been turned out in Virginia, allowing Mitt Romney to win the state.
Adding Virginia's 13 electoral votes would have raised Romney's total to 279 electoral votes.
So it's very close, and the harassment, it can easily be argued, though of course it cannot be proven, had a substantial if not decisive effect on turning the tide of the election in 2012 from Romney to Obama.
So let's have a look at the timeline of what occurred.
March 31st to April 1st, 2010.
Colleen Kelly, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, the 150,000-member union that represents employees of the IRS and 30 other government agencies, visits President Obama at the White House.
NTEU's Political Action Committee endorsed Obama in both 2008 and 2012 and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.
Of course, Obama is a Democrat, and the Democrat Party is largely fueled by three things.
One is they are the Lawyers Party.
Lawyers overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
Number two is immigration from non-Western countries.
And number three, of course, is the millions and millions of dollars funneled into the Democratic Party from mostly public sector unions.
Public sector unions represent the vast bulk of unionized activity in America.
So this is not little old ladies with passion in their hearts writing checks to their favorite candidates.
It is generally political muscle money and lawyer muscle money that is sent to the Democrats.
One day after Colleen Kelly's White House visit, IRS employees begin applying extra scrutiny to tax-exempt status applications from conservative organizations whose names contain the words Tea Party, Patriot, 912, Take Back the Country, or, ironically enough, We the People.
One day after, the head of the IRS... Union, head of the IRS Employees Union, one day after she visits Obama, this all begins.
Coinkydink?
Well, I'll let you be the judge of that.
July 6, 2010, IRS official Holly Paz writes an email to Washington-based IRS lawyer Stephen Grotnitsky to, quote, to let Cindy and Sharon know how we've been handling Tea Party applications in the last few months.
Grotnitsky replies to the email confirming that the Washington-based Exempt Organization Technical Unit is designing the targeting in the nation's capital.
Later, the story will be spun that it is a few rogue employees in Cincinnati and nothing to do with any hierarchy.
This does not appear to hold up to even the barest scrutiny.
August 2010, the IRS issues its first BOLO, be on the lookout, alert for, quote, various local organizations in the Tea Party movement that are seeking tax-exempt status as 501c3 and 501c4 groups.
The IRS is also flagging applications by organizations that A. address such issues as government spending, government debt, and taxes.
Ooh, horrifying!
Or B. promote the use of education, advocacy, and lobbying to, quote, make America a better place to live.
Or C. criticize how the country is being run by the Obama administration.
So what gets you on the IRS watch list?
Being concerned about government spending, being concerned about government debt or taxes, promoting the use of education advocacy to make America a better place to live, or criticizing how the country is being run by the Obama administration.
Now, we'll get to this later.
Richard Nixon was forced to resign facing impeachment because he used the IRS to target specific political enemies, which had nothing to do with altering an entire election.
How things have changed.
October 2010, in a meeting arranged at the direction of Jack Smith, Chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, the DOJ asks IRS official Lois Lerner to help the department build criminal cases against conservative nonprofit groups that have been conducting political activity.
Only conservative nonprofit groups.
Winter 2010-2011, Judith Kindle, Senior Advisor to IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner, tells IRS Attorney Carter Hull, who oversaw the review of some tax exemption applications by conservative Tea Party groups, that the IRS Chief Counsel's Office, headed by Obama appointee William Wilkins, will henceforth need to review all applications from conservative groups whose names contain the aforementioned Trigger words.
We the people, and so on.
Astounding.
According to Hull, this is the first time in his 48-year career at the IRS that he has been instructed to forward any tax exemption applications to another office.
February 2011.
In an email, IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner advises his staff, including then Exempt Organizations Technical Manager Michael Cito, and then Rulings and Agreements Director Harley Paz, that a Tea Party matter is, quote, very dangerous, and that this is something, quote, Council and Lerner Advisor Judy Kindle need to be in on.
Lerner adds that Tea Party Group's tax exemption applications could end up being the vehicle to go to court to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.
Thus, at this point, Lerner, contrary to false statements that she will subsequently make, is well aware of the fact that groups with Tea Party, Patriot, or 912 Project in their names are being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny by the IRS. February 2011 In an email to Lois Lerner, a Federal Election Commission, or FEC, investigator inquires about the status of the tax exemption application of the American Future Fund, a conservative group.
The FEC and IRS have no authority to share this information under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, by the way.
Soon after this FEC inquiry, the American Future Fund receives a questionnaire from the IRS. June 3, 2011, David Kemp, Republican Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, sends a letter to then IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman, inquiring about a report that the IRS has been conducting an unusually large number of audits of conservative 501c4 groups and taxpayers who have donated money to them.
Lawmakers will subsequently send at least seven more letters asking the IRS to address complaints that conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status are being subjected to burdensome screening.
Oh! more.
Just a terrible shame.
Ten days after this request, Lois Lerner's computer allegedly crashes, causing all emails that Lerner sent and received between January 2009 and April 2011 to be lost.
July 1, 2011, the IRS responds to David Camp's June 3rd letter by stating that its, quote, actions in this area were in no way influenced by political considerations, according to the agency-exempt organizations division director Lois Lerner, has ordered, The criteria for flagging tax-exempt applications for extra scrutiny to be changed so as to apply more broadly to, quote, organizations involved with political lobbying or advocacy for exemption under 501c3 or 501c4.
September 2011 to June 2012.
As the IRS cancels its relationship with Sonosoft, A Obama-connected computer company which claims to be able to store important information permanently or semi-permanently.
As it cancels its relationship with Sonosoft, the agency is also in the midst of, quote, retiring and throwing away numerous sophisticated data storage devices in the IRS's national IT offices in Maryland, even though the IRS is still paying maintenance fees of almost $7,000 a month on the devices.
January 2012, the IRS begins sending follow-up letters requesting that conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status provide voluminous and sensitive information such as the names of all donors and the amounts of all their donations, a list of all issues important to the groups, an explanation of where the groups stand on those issues, and all emails sent to members.
See, it's really important for the IRS that you retain your emails and provide them to the IRS. April 23rd, 2012, IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkins, who was appointed by President Obama in 2009, meets with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
April 24, 2012, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, William Wilkins' boss, and two other IRS officials, Shulman's Chief of Staff and Political Aid Jonathan Davis, and IRS spokesman Frank Keith, meet for eight and one-half hours with the top White House official, Office of Management and Budget Director Jeffrey Zients, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building located at the White House complex.
April 25th, the next day, the IRS Chief Counsel's Office, led by William Wilkins, sends Washington-based IRS officials new guidelines on how to scrutinize Tea Party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
April 26, 2012, Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner, responding to the March 27 letter from Chairman Issa and Jordan, writes that the IRS letters to targeted conservative organizations were, quote, in the ordinary course of the application process to obtain the information as the IRS deems necessary to make a determination whether the organization meets the legal requirements for tax-exempt status, which is one of the first times a legal defense called putting people to sleep has been used.
May 3, 2012, the IRS, having completed its own internal review of the targeting scandal, concludes that there has been a substantial, inappropriate bias against conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
IRS Deputy Director Stephen Miller is informed of this finding.
May 15, 2012, IRS Acting Commissioner Stephen Miller identifies two, quote, rogue employees in the agency's Cincinnati office as being mainly responsible for the overly aggressive handling of requests by conservative groups for tax-exempt status.
Miller says the staffers have already been disciplined, so no worries there.
May 2012, IRS officials determined that there were seven types of information asked of conservative applicants, including donor information, that were inappropriate.
It's a chilling effect.
The moment that it gets out that if you donate money to a conservative group, your name, the amount of your donation, and the conservative group's particular political leanings will be disclosed to the IRS, including the contents of any prayers that have been said, that is a chilling effect.
People want to take a step back from that.
It chokes off the lifeblood of modern politics, which is money, right at the source.
November 9th, 2012, in an email exchange that Lois Lerner conducts via her official IRS email account with an unnamed colleague at the agency, the colleague writes, Well, you should hear the wacko wing of the GOP. The U.S. is through.
Too many foreigners sucking the teat.
Time to hunker down, buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end.
The right-wing radio shows are scary to listen to, and I'm talking about the hosts of the show, the callers are rabid.
Lerner replies, great!
Maybe we are through if there are that many assholes, she adds, so we don't need to worry about terrorists.
It's our own crazies that will take us down.
So that sounds both professional and objective.
April 9, 2013.
In an email exchange with fellow IRS employees, Lois Lerner writes, quote, 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.
Lerner then goes on to ask a tech staffer whether instant message communications are stored automatically.
When that staffer tells her that such messages are not stored anywhere, unless one of the parties makes copies of them, Lerner replies, May 10, 2013, blaming low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati, Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner says that no high-level officials were aware of the IRS targeting of conservative groups until she began seeing information in the press that raised questions for us.
She apologized on behalf of the IRS for the inappropriate targeting.
This same day, White House counsel receives the Inspector General's report and President Barack Obama is said to have heard of the matter for the very first time.
May 14, 2013, a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report reveals that the IRS has singled out groups with conservative-sounding terms such as Patriot and Tea Party in their titles when applying for tax-exempt status.
The TIGTA probe determined that early in calendar year 2010, the IRS began using inappropriate criteria to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status, e.g.
lists of past and future donors.
The illegal IRS reviews continued for more than 18 months, And, quote, delayed processing of targeted group applications preparing for the 2012 presidential election.
You will hear words from the Democrat side, you know, inappropriate, inexcusable, and so on.
The illegal aspect is sort of underplayed.
May 16, 2013, President Obama calls the IRS's targeting of conservative groups outrageous and unacceptable.
He also reiterates that he was unaware of the targeting until news reports began coming out six days earlier.
May 17th, the New York Times reports that the White House actually learned of the IRS targeting on June 4th, 2012, five months prior to the 2012 elections.
But it's okay, because the left-leaning prostitutes in the media corps will be sure, and were sure, to keep things like Benghazi and IRS targeting of conservative groups out of the press, because they wanted their boy to win, right?
May 22nd, 2013, at a congressional hearing into the targeting scandal, Lois Lerner gives a self-serving opening statement and then immediately pleads the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer any questions.
Whether that's actually allowed or not is still an open question.
You plead the Fifth or you make a statement.
You generally don't do both.
The very next day, Lois Lerner is placed on administrative leave from the IRS. Did something illegal?
Hey, have a holiday.
I think that's how it works in the private sector, too.
Isn't Sarbanes-Oxley?
Yeah, that's the way it works, too.
All right, so let's look.
So seven IRS officials have been asked to turn over their emails relating to this, or emails in particular time periods.
The IRS claims that all seven of these hard drives have crashed mysteriously and tragically, and that the data is absolutely unrecoverable, and basically they shot them into space in order to make sure that no tech heads could get a hold of the disk platters in an attempt to recover anything from anywhere in any way, shape, or form.
So, what are the odds of this?
You know, statistically, these seven hard drives.
Specific to congressional requests, these seven hard drives failing all within the same month.
So, the odds of winning the Florida Lottery, almost 21 in 23 million.
Odds of winning mega millions is...
One in 258 million and change.
So the odds of a disk failing in any given month, about one in 36.
Remember to do your backups, people.
Unless you're in the IRS. The odds of two different drives failing about the same month, one in 36 squared, about one in 1300.
The odds of three drives failing in the same month is 36 cubed, or one in almost 50,000.
The odds of seven, count them, seven different drives failing in the same month, like what happened at the IRS when they received a letter asking about emails targeting conservative and, by the way, pro-Israeli groups, is 37 to the seventh power, or one in over 78 billion.
Those are the odds of these seven different drives failing in the same month.
Them failing in the same month right after you get a congressional request for information and emails about the contents of these drives, well, I don't believe that...
There is a number big enough to calculate the tiny odds of that.
So in other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342 times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.
This is how children lie when they have their face full of cookies and they say, I haven't seen the cookies.
It literally is that absurd.
June 2013, the Treasury Department's Inspector General reveals...
That only six liberal or left groups were targeted by the IRS as compared to almost 300 conservative groups.
June 5th, 2013.
It is reported that Sarah Hall Ingram, who headed the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division in 2010, when the scandal-ridden agency began improperly targeting the tax-exempt non-profit status of conservative groups, has logged 165 recorded visits to the White House since 2011.
Hmm, yeah, I betcha it's just those two rogue employees in Cincinnati.
So...
I'm not saying that there's no proof that there's any White House connection because the proof has systematically been destroyed or disproved.
But it's not necessary.
The fact that the IRS is run by public sector unions and the Tea Party is interested in reducing taxes and reducing government spending.
One of the biggest costs of government spending is public sector unions and pensions and benefits.
So if you're in the IRS, you are no friend economically of the Tea Party or of Republicans or conservatives as a whole.
So nothing needs to be coordinated.
It's not like all the salmon swimming upstream just say, hey, wow, let's all go this way.
I mean, they're all in the same stream.
They all have the same goals.
They all swim the same way.
Those feeding off the taxpaying Public, those feeding off the body politic, will have the same incentive.
There doesn't need to be anything coordinated.
It could be that there was, and proof may come out that there was, but it's absolutely not necessary.
Let's look at some of the bias that's going on here.
June 11th, 2013.
Pepperdine University Law School professor Paul Caron reveals the astonishing extent to which IRS attorneys supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential campaign.
Of the IRS lawyers who made contributions in the 2012 election, 95% contributed to Obama rather than to Romney, which is why I said earlier that the Democrats is the party of immigrants and public sector unions and lawyers.
So among IRS lawyers, the ratio of Obama contributors to Romney contributors was not merely 4 to 1 as previously reported, but more like 20 to 1.
The ratio of funds to Obama was even more lopsided, with about 32 times as much money going to Obama as to Romney from IRS lawyers.
The data show, however, that the partisanship of the lawyers in the IRS is not unusual or even particularly extreme among federal agencies.
In fact, the lawyers in every single federal government agency from the Department of Education, 100% to the Department of Defense, 68% contributed overwhelmingly to Obama compared to Romney.
Government employees like big government.
Wish I could say I was shocked, but...
August 2013, Congress issues its first subpoena for all emails sent or received by Lois Lerner from January 1, 2009 to August 2, 2013.
September 23, 2013, Lois Lerner, the woman at the center of the IRST party targeting scandal, retires from the agency after an internal investigation finds that she was guilty of neglect of duties and prepares to call for her dismissal.
October 9, 2013, it is discovered that top IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram in 2012 discussed confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials, including Lois Lerner, then head of the IRS tax-exempt organization's division, as evidenced by a series of 2012 emails obtained by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
At that time, Ingram headed the IRS office responsible for overseeing tax-exempt non-profit groups.
Specifically, Ingram sought to counsel the White House on how to handle a lawsuit filed by religious organizations opposing Obamacare's mandate for contraception coverage.
As the Daily Caller reports, quote, This was a violation of Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code,
which forbids on pain of up to five years in prison a federal employee from, quote, disclosing any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service, such as an officer or an employee.
I'm sure those prosecutions are just on the horizon.
February 2, 2014, IRS officials first claimed to learn that many of Lois Lerner's emails are missing.
March 26, 2014, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen makes no mention of Lois Lerner's computer hard drive crash.
Under questioning by Representative Jason Chavitz, a Republican from Utah, Koskinen says that IRS emails get taken off and stored in servers.
He also acknowledges that seven months after Congress first asked the IRS to supply Learner's emails requests the agency has not yet begun serious work to find them and turn them over.
But he assures, we can find, and we in fact are searching, we can find Lois Learner's emails.
May 26, 2014, the House of Representatives, in a 231 to 187 vote, decides to hold Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the scandal in which the IRS targeted at conservative groups, despite a subpoena that demanded her testimony.
Six Democrats side with the Republicans in the vote.
June 13, 2014, IRS tells Congress that due to a computer crash, it has lost many of former employee Lois Lerner's emails from 2009 to 2011, specifically those she transmitted to other federal agencies, including the White House, the Justice Department, the federal election, Commission, the Treasury Department, and Democratic members of Congress.
June 17, 2014, the IRS reports that due to computer crashes, it cannot produce emails from six more employees, in addition to Lois Lerner, who were involved in the targeting of conservative groups.
Among the last emails were those sent by Nicole Flax, Chief of Staff to former IRS Commissioner Stephen Miller.
Just tragic.
June 18, 2014.
When IT experts say they are confident they will be able to retrieve the last emails from Lois Lerner's crashed computer hard drive, the IRS announces that the hard drive was in fact thrown away.
And no attempt pretty much was made to recover the information.
Paul Ryan says...
You are the Internal Revenue Service.
You can reach into the lives of hard-working taxpayers, and with a phone call, an email, or a letter, you can turn their lives upside down.
You ask taxpayers to hang on to seven years of their personal tax information in case they are ever audited, and you can't keep six months' worth of employee emails?
And now that we are seeing this investigation, you don't have the emails, hard drives crashed, you learned about this months ago, you just told us, and we had to ask you on Monday.
July 14, 2014, reports emerged that the Federal Election Commission has recycled the computer hard drive of April Sands, an African-American woman and former co-worker of Lois Lerner's, hindering an investigation into Sands' partisan political activities.
July 22, 2014, it is learned that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner's computer hard drive was only scratched in February 2014 when Lerner's computer crashed.
At that time, the IRS's in-house IT experts stated that the lost data was still recoverable, and they advised the agency to outsource the recovery project.
But instead, the IRS simply destroyed the hard drive.
You know, like when the IRS wants your documents and you set fire to them, they have no problem with that, right?
Aaron Signor, an IRS technician that looked at Lerner's hard drive in June 2011, said in IRS court filings that he saw no damage to the drive before sending it off to another IRS technician.
Newly released emails seem to show that in addition to allegedly targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny, it now appears as if Lois Lerner was at the same time ignoring and brushing off complaints filed against some labor unions.
In 2006, the year leading up to Lerner's email, the national headquarters for the AFL-CIO reported no direct or indirect political expenditures with the IRS on their 990 form, leaving that line 81A blank.
So, AFL-CIO says...
To the IRS, we did no direct or indirect political expenditures.
That same year, they reported over $29.5 million in political activities with the Department of Labor.
But hey, what's almost $30 million between friends?
So what could have happened to this data?
So this is from an IT expert.
So he says, I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers.
Microsoft Exchange has built-in mail database redundancy.
So unless they did not follow Microsoft's recommendations, they are telling a falsehood when they say they can't get a hold of the data.
In Exchange, backing up of data is turned on by default.
Two, every IT organization that I know of has hot-swappable disk drives.
Every server built since 2000 has them.
If a single disk goes bad, it's easy to replicate.
Sorry, to replace.
All servers use some form of RAID technology.
That's a redundant array of inexpensive disks.
The only way the data can be totally lost, meaning difficult to bring back, is if more than a single disk goes before the first bad disk is replaced.
So you have all these disks, and the servers are writing data to all the disks simultaneously.
One fails, you pull out, pop another one in, it all gets replicated.
It is about as fail-safe as things can be.
Four, if the server crashed, there was a hardware failure other than disks, then the disks that contain the data for the exchange database is still available because the server hardware and disks are exchangeable, meaning that if I have another server with the same hardware and I can put the disks in and everything should boot right up.
So let's say that the CPU just completely fried.
Well, you put the disks into another server with the same hardware and everything boots up lickety-split.
All email servers in a professional organization use tape backups, meaning if all the above fails, you can restore the server using the tape backups.
And if they're talking about Lois Lerner's local PC, it's a simple matter of going to the service which have the email and getting them from the service.
If the service have removed the data, you can still get them by using the backups of the service to recover the emails.
The IRS requires accounting firms to keep tax documents for seven years.
Also, since the IRS says that they cannot provide any of the emails that Lois Lerner sent outside the organization, are they in fact saying that over the years that she was there, she never CC'd any external emails to colleagues?
That would make no sense, statistically, CC'ing in and out of organizations that are pretty constant practice.
Days after IRS officials said in a sworn statement that former top agency employee Lerner's computer memory had been wiped clean, the agency put out word to contractors that it needs help to destroy at least another 3,200 hard drives.
Now, Lois Lerner also had a BlackBerry which had copies of all of her emails on it.
The IRS destroyed Lois Lerner's BlackBerry after it knew her computer had crashed and after the congressional inquiry was well underway.
So after they knew there were problems with her existing computer and after the congressional inquiry was well underway, the IRS destroyed Lois Lerner's BlackBerry.
And made no attempt to get any data from it.
An IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury the destroyed BlackBerry would have contained the same emails both sent and received as Lois Lerner's hard drive.
The hard drive crash in 2011 was destroyed by the IRS. The emails of up to 20 other related IRS officials were missing in remarkably similar crashes and some are speculating that Lois Lerner's BlackBerry perhaps held the key.
A year after the infamous hard drive crash, the IRS destroyed a mislearners BlackBerry and without making any effort to retain the emails from it.
IRS admits that this BlackBerry quote was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.
This is a year after the hard drive crash and months after the congressional inquiry began.
The IRS did not even attempt to recover that data.
It cavalierly recites, quote, So what could happen?
Well, federal judges could be used to compel corrupt bosses in the IRS to force the Obama administration to tell the truth about the, quote, lost emails or face the consequences of lying to federal judges.
This is what Democrats did 40 years ago to Nixon.
The case filed against Nixon in the U.S. District Court was decided on May 31, 1974.
The case was argued before the Supreme Court on July 8, 1974.
The unanimous decision, Justice Rehnquist recused himself, was decided barely two weeks later, on July 24, 1974.
Very rapid resolution to that case.
One of the articles of impeachment against Nixon, Purposes not authorized by law and to cause in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
That's what brought down a president 40 years ago.
The political impact of that decision was immediate and frankly seismic.
Fifteen days after the decision, Nixon became the first president to resign from office.
Three months later, Republicans suffered enormous losses, which included not only Congress, but also state legislative races, where Republicans saw the number of state legislatures they controlled drop from 16 to 5, or almost complete political non-existence.
Either judge, if a lawyer or witness lies to the court, could disbar the offending witness.
President Clinton, while in office, was disbarred for life by a federal judge for exactly this type of behavior.
Lois Lerner is not only an active member of the bar, but a past president, ironically enough, of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, which is specifically committed to areas like integrity by lawyers in government.
Thorough compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests and other things Lerner is clearly ignoring at the moment.
This organization, ironically enough, was founded in December 1974 at the Watergate Hotel, specifically to prevent the sorts of abuses that Lerner might soon find herself through.
A judge to have committed.
I mean, just picture.
If a conservative was in charge of the IRS and was denying tax-exempt status to environmentalists or gay rights groups or women's rights groups or any other stereotypically left organization and got caught in emails calling them stupid, happy tree-huggers or butch dykes or any other number of expletives, what would happen?
The press would have gone completely And this is what drives Republicans, I think, justly nuts about the media, is the degree to which there is a pro-leftist bias and the degree to which there is a cover-up of leftist politicians' problems and leftist officials' problems.
There is a direct conflict of interest for government public sector unions with the Democrat Party.
The Democrats, by never really focusing on strict deficit reduction and controls, are fueling the fire that is currently burning up Pretty much the entire United States, which is the deferred obligations, the unfunded liabilities of public sector unions and pensions.
This is all extremely tragic and is not going to turn around until people really research these issues and take a strong stand.
At some point, we do have to say enough is enough with this corruption and feather bedding and backwards payoffs from Groups not aligned with the general good running their agenda through the Democratic Party.