If only the IRS had contemporaneous documentation showing the emails were lost at the time. Oh wait, they do. And it just so happens that this coverup happened before there was a scandal. Prescient criminals, those IRS folks. You guys are reaching on this. And really, there were delays in processing because there were legit questions about political groups pretending to not be political groups. The fact that more rightie groups were subject to a delay than leftie groups is a result of there being more rightie groups trying to take advantage. In reality, the only group issued a denial was a progressive outfit. This is not targeting, like Nixon did when he sent John Dean to the IRS Commissioner's office with an enemies list of 200 people or when Nixon told the Attorney General John Mitchell to go after people using tax records or even when US Attorneys were being replaced because they wouldn't do the bidding of Rove and others in the W administration. This was a delay in processing to make sure the group application met the requirements of the category for which they were applying. There is no connection to the White House. There is no scandal. Some of the IRS people may be liberal. Some may have been tired and frustrated from dealing with all these groups clearing skating by on technicalities. They may have communicated that in emails. However, no bias shows in the results. Besides, the way the right is making this argument--that rightie political groups were targeted in an effort to prevent them from pretending to not be rightie political groups--gives a whole other level of cynicism and absurdity to this scandal.
Per the WSJ, hard drives were destroyed by Lerner ten days after an inquiry from Dave Camp about targetting. http://www.cato.org/blog/kim-strassel-wsj-lost-irs-emails Yep, it's just a total coincidence that Lerner pleaded the 5th, and her hard drive was destroyed along with six other IRS employees who were targets of the investigation. Nothing shady at all. Tough luck, stuff happens. The IRS knows no one can touch them, Holder won't do anything, Congress can't do anything. They can destroy evidence, ignore subpoenas, and laugh in our face about it. They can go after whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want. They can turn your life upside down. If they want to get you on something, they'll find it. They know they tax code is too complex to comply with perfectly. Campaign finance law works the same way, the average citizen needs a high priced attorney to run a campaign without breaking the law. It's not a coincidence Lois Lerner came from the FEC, she sees it as her job description to use her authority to go after political enemies.
[rquoter]How are Obama and the IRS getting away with a blatant coverup? To understand the latest outrage in the IRS scandal, mull over what might happen if regulators found significant evidence to implicate Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in an insider trading scheme. Let’s say Blankfein asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to answer any questions. Say Goldman was subpoenaed to provide all of Blankfein’s e-mails. Goldman replied that, instead of complying with the subpoena, it was itself reviewing the e-mails in question and was considering which ones to release. Now imagine that, nearly a year later, Goldman admitted that it had not, in fact, reviewed the e-mails in question, because they had been lost in a computer crash two months before it claimed to be reviewing them. Imagine Goldman also said copies of the e-mails were lost, because while under subpoena it had destroyed the “backup tapes” (whatever those are) that held them and that it had also thrown away Blankfein’s actual hard drive. The thing about dogs eating homework is, it could actually happen. This can’t. This is “the dog ate my hard drive, broke into another building, ate the backup of the hard drive, then broke into six other top officials’ offices and ate their hard drives also.” What we learned about the IRS this week is that there is an obvious criminal coverup that comes in addition to the possible underlying crimes. Prosecutions need to be brought against all of those involved. Why isn’t this happening already? Remember the O.J. Simpson trial, the one that consumed seemingly the entire mid-’90s? From crime to verdict, the whole thing took 16 months. The IRS scandal? It’s already been 13 months, and no one has even been charged. And no one will be charged. Congress has called the cops — the Justice Department — and the cops simply don’t care. It’s as if Goldman’s only regulator was an SEC that was being run by Blankfein’s poker buddies. Yes, the IRS scandal differs from Watergate. In Watergate, the president appointed an independent-minded special prosecutor to investigate. It was considered a scandal when the president fired that special counsel, Archibald Cox, even though Cox was succeeded within less than two weeks by an equally ferocious prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. President Obama? He hasn’t even appointed a special prosecutor in the first place. That’s far worse. In Watergate, we were outraged that Nixon ordered the IRS to go after political foes — even though the IRS refused to do his bidding. A Nixon ally was forced to whine that the IRS was controlled by Democrats. There was evidently little or no evidence that IRS power was abused, because the second Article of Impeachment against Nixon charged merely that he “endeavored” to sic the IRS on enemies. In the Obama administration, on the other hand, we know that the IRS went after political foes. We don’t know whether the president was involved, but if Nixon’s IRS had targeted liberals because it believed it had an implicit go-ahead from the boss, wouldn’t that be fairly disturbing also? Would a breezy dismissal from Nixon make you feel better? Obama’s assertion that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption” in the IRS’s attacks on right-wing groups does not reassure. Obama cannot have known there was no corruption given the mountain of evidence that has yet to be produced and now appears to have been destroyed. He could believe there was no corruption because he has faith in everyone who works under him, or he could know there was corruption and be lying about it, but he can’t know there was no corruption. It’s impossible. For all he knows there’s a Lois Lerner e-mail that says, “I want you to go after these Tea Party bastards with everything you got. Use every trick you can to keep them on the sidelines for this election cycle. Nuke those fascists.” Lerner wouldn’t have pleaded the Fifth unless she had reason to believe that there was potential illegality and it could be tied to her. A likely explanation for Obama’s bizarre “smidgeon” remark is that his well-known fondness for left-wing opinion writers led him to simply parrot their dismissal of the scandal: If it’s good enough for Jonathan Chait, our president thinks, it’s good enough for me! And here we come to a third major difference between the IRS’s apparent gross abuse of power and criminal coverup and Watergate: Watergate was a much bigger deal simply because the press was relentless about following up on every detail. Today the media’s reasoning is roughly as follows: The IRS went after some conservative groups and is engaged in an illegal coverup. We also don’t like these groups, also believe they deserve special scrutiny, and also think there’s something inherently shady about conservatives (but not liberals) who try to buy political influence. If White House staff says they weren’t involved we’ll take their word for it. Pardon us if we’d rather cover something more relevant to American lives today. Like the 82-year-old name of the football team that plays in DC.[/rquoter] http://nypost.com/2014/06/21/why-are-obama-and-the-irs-getting-away-with-a-blatant-coverup/
nothing to hide, total transparency <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>After the IRS told Congress it had lost Lois Lerner's emails, the Oversight Comm. requested that the IRS make Thomas Kane...</p>— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/480861965024509952" data-datetime="2014-06-22T23:56:41+00:00">June 22, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>the IRS Acting Deputy Chief Counsel for Procurement and Administration, available for a transcribed interview.</p>— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/480862044665970688" data-datetime="2014-06-22T23:57:00+00:00">June 22, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>The Committee says the IRS declined. <a href="http://t.co/uKYyTdDgsM" title="http://sharylattkisson.com">sharylattkisson.com</a></p>— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/480862110751404032" data-datetime="2014-06-22T23:57:15+00:00">June 22, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>The, the Committee requested a briefing “to discuss the IRS’s e-mail systems, data retention policies, and document production processes."</p>— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/480862186601201664" data-datetime="2014-06-22T23:57:33+00:00">June 22, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>But the Committee says the IRS declined. Read the whole story at <a href="http://t.co/uKYyTdDgsM" title="http://sharylattkisson.com">sharylattkisson.com</a></p>— Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) <a href="https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/480862248169377792" data-datetime="2014-06-22T23:57:48+00:00">June 22, 2014</a></blockquote> <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
No, I shouldn't. Juxtaposing them provides valuable context for your outrage. One doesn't require justification at all. Hard drive failures are common unless you are using SSD drives, which are too expensive for the government, as a rule. One of these situations is a hardware failure and the other is an active avoidance of executive oversight. Yet, despite these facts, you are up in arms about Lerner and I would be extremely surprised if you have even the tiniest bit of concern over the Bush email "scandal." I am, I have drawn on my strong IT experience along with Occam's Razor to conclude that the Lerner "scandal" is most likely a hardware failure as opposed to a coverup of anything.
u don't have IT experience. If you did you would know emails aren't stored on a computer's harddrive. Also SSD hardrives fail all the time.
Based on your strong IT experience, what is a data retention policy and how would it prevent loss of data from hardware failures?
No, I have only worked in IT for 20 years, no experience whatsoever there. The emails sought by the investigators were on her personal hard drive, many of us have these PST files (in Microsoft parlance) so that we can have a place to store email that we would like to keep, but don't want taking up quota space. SSD drives, particularly the ones from premium manufacturers, had failure rates around 1.5% to the 5% for traditional drives. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/30/are-ssds-reliable/ It certainly isn't unheard of for an SSD drive to crash, just less likely. However, as a result of their cost at present, it seems unlikely that Lerner's computer had one. Even if it did, a hard drive crash will happen eventually. The immutable law of IT is that hardware fails.
Policies, particularly those regarding data retention, are only as strong as the financing provided to fulfill them. Many organizations don't have the resources to back up personal computers, which is the reason that there are generally policies on where you can store what is defined as confidential, sensitive, or mission critical. The only emails which could possibly have been lost were ones stored on her personal computer, the others have already been delivered (the ones from backups of the email system). If Lerner is anything like me, these are things like recipes and other personal stuff that I would like to be able to take with me if I ever leave the organization. Occam's razor is a powerful concept, you should look into it.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>If you can believe it, here's an actual email sent by Lois Lerner: <a href="http://t.co/1VY09EYaCz">pic.twitter.com/1VY09EYaCz</a></p>— GOP Oversight (@GOPoversight) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight/status/571136842046840832">February 27, 2015</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It's time to 1) pass a simple graduated flat tax that can be printed on one page in easy to understand English; 2) indict every IRS official who had anything to do with political targeting of individuals and/or groups; and 3) eviscerate the IRS while moving the department from administration supervision to congressional supervision.
I would be OK with this as long as the tax applied equally to people, corporations, dividends, capital gains, and all other forms of income. In addition, to make it this simple, we would have to eliminate every single deduction and exemption in the tax code altogether. I am totally on board, I am all for dooming the entire profession of tax attorneys, who I see as just as nasty a set of leeches as the rich individuals and corporations who use them to reduce their tax liability. So, in other words, no indictments, gotcha. Personally, I would write into the legislation you mention above much stronger punishments for people and corporations who (which) actively avoid the simplified income tax. I agree with mark that such a provision would needlessly politicize the activities of the IRS. It should be enough that enforcement would be dramatically simpler with a severely simplified tax structure. Just that alone should "eviscerate the IRS" as it wouldn't have a labyrinth of tax code which applies differently to different people and/or organizations.
I have no problem with these stipulations. I agree that tax code violators should be punished fairly and equally. I also believe that IRS employees and managers who use their office to further their political aims should be heavily fined and imprisoned. Here I disagree because Congressional committees are almost even in representation (Democrats and Republicans) whereas Presidents (Administration) are far too tempted to use the IRS to punish or further their political agendas. Obama's flagrant use of the IRS has been less than noble, so much so that it stretches into the criminal. Under Congressional control, IRS bureaucrats could be better scrutinized and controlled. After all, the business of the IRS is not political, it's purely for collections.
I agree with this, except for the fact that you seem to be assuming that employees and managers did something wrong recently. Bullsh!t. You should read up on the case, even after millions of dollars spent in investigations, no wrongdoing has even been accused by any but the most partisan hacks. The last time that I know of that the IRS was used in a political way by the President was under Nixon. Again, bullsh!t. Under Congressional control, the IRS would be heavily politicized. The IRS is an Executive branch agency, daily operations fall under the purvey of the Executive. Congress has a place in the process, if they want to specify things the IRS can and can't do, they can pass legislation, to be implemented by the Executive. Agreed, which is the reason they shouldn't be subject to the whims of the Legislative branch.
