Tag: Lois Lerner

Still at Large

IRS, drain the swamp, Trump, Lois Lerner, tax, tax man

Blogger Paul Caron, dean of Pepperdine Law School, still counts the days since we learned that the IRS was blocking applications for nonprofit status from right-leaning groups at the behest of former IRS honcho Lois Lerner.

Now years later, the agency can still arbitrarily victimize any one of us. Nor have Lerner and other bad guys been brought to justice. Lerner collects a six-figure pension, instead.

And so, on Day 1699, Caron highlighted Kimberly Strassel’s proposal that President Trump make 2018 “the year of civil-service reform — a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.” Exhibit A? The IRS and civil “servants” like “Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits.”

And on Day 1709, Caron called our attention to Lerner’s attempt to suppress a deposition she gave in June “for a civil suit that victims [of IRS targeting] brought in 2013.” Lerner thinks we have no right to know why she felt justified in discriminating against applicants for tax-exempt status based on their political viewpoint.

Unfortunately, not everyone cares about justice as much as Caron.

Consider an obtuse Washington Post editorial pretending that the IRS didn’t really target conservative groups. Instead, “conservative groups, their allies in Congress and the IRS itself all bear responsibility” for the appearance otherwise.

And the aftermath.

Uh huh. If only victims of the abuse of power would stop being so indelicate as to object!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags drain the swamp, IRS, Lois Lerner, tax, tax man, Trump

Accountability crime and punishment government transparency

Impeach IRS Boss Now

Last week National Review reported that Republicans in the U.S. House have long been pondering impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen for stonewalling about whether Lois Lerner’s emails were lost and irretrievable.

Lerner is the former IRS official who oversaw the obstructing of applications for non-profit status by right-leaning and Tea Party organizations. The timeline that has the GOP considering impeachment of the IRS boss goes like this:

March 2014: Koskinen testifies before Congress to the effect that it would take quite a while to retrieve Lois Lerner’s archived emails.
June 2014. Koskinen tells Congress (eliciting “audible gasps”) that many of Lerner’s scandal-relevant emails had been lost in a “computer crash.” (What happens when you hit hard drives with hammers.…)
June 2015. Congress learns from the Treasury Department’s inspector general that IRS wasn’t merely lethargic about finding the emails, and didn’t accidentally lose them to a sweeping Lerner-targeting technical glitch, but actively sought to destroy files “most likely to have contained Lerner’s emails.”

However, investigators have recovered data, including 30,000 Lerner emails, that probably do contain many scandal-related epistles. Which anybody who knows anything about the Internet and servers and backups knows had never been lost to begin with — not prior to specific attempts to lose them.

How many weeks must drag on before Congress does what is necessary? Koskinen strung Congress along for his benefit, not ours — giving him more time only plays into his hands.

Stop procrastinating, Congress. Do it. Now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags emails, impeachment, IRS, Koskinen, Lois Lerner

general freedom government transparency tax policy

Latest Learned About Lois Lerner

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 15, 2015
2 Comments on Latest Learned About Lois Lerner

Lois Lerner, IRS, collage, photomontage, puzzle, investigation, illustration, editorial, abuse, law, foundations, harassment,

Is it time to spell out the IRS as the Internal Revenue Scandal?

The IRS has so many scandals under its belt.

But the biggest, from a broad, threat-to-the-republic point of view, surely remains the agency’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative organizations seeking 501c(3) and 501c(4) nonprofit status. Agents ideologically tagged their applications for special obstruction in the run-up to the 2012 presidential campaign. And after.

I don’t bother Googling to get my IRS-scandal updates, I just visit the indefatigable Paul Caron’s TaxProf Blog. Day in, day out, for the past 700+ days and counting, TaxProf has aggregated all the latest reportage and analysis about this abuse of power.

Lois Lerner — former head of the IRS’s stomp-conservative-nonprofit-applicants division — has both declared herself innocent of any wrongdoing and asserted her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself.

But evidence is piling up of her actual attitudes and what-she-knew-when.

TaxProf points to an email by Lerner from way back in February of 2012 in which she advocates training for IRS staffers in the fine art of “understand[ing] the potential pitfalls” of providing too much information to Congress. A 2013 email by Lerner states that she can understand “why the IRS criteria” leading to the targeting of Tea Party and other groups “might raise some questions.”

The documents are out in the wild now, thanks to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests. JW has been relentless in trying to hold the IRS accountable.

Which has to be one of the very toughest jobs on earth.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags income tax, Lois Lerner, tax

crime and punishment insider corruption

Learning Lerner’s M.O.

I fib. We’re not really learning anything new about Lois Lerner’s modus operandi. It’s just the same old wiping of evidence — evidence that she and others at IRS knew was relevant to congressional inquiry into IRS misconduct.

Lerner is the former IRS department head in charge of reviewing applications of non-profits for tax-exempt status. Her department targeted right-leaning applicants for special obstruction and delay. The practice began to come to light a couple of years ago.

Congress has asked for a great deal of documentation from the Internal Revenue Service that has yet to be supplied, including all of Lerner’s pertinent email. As I’ve discussed before, the IRS has claimed that her hard drives accidentally crashed in June of 2011 — and not hers alone — so that much of the relevant email is gone.

No backups on any server, either.

It all sounded pretty bogus back when the story was “hot.” And now, according to testimony of an IRS employee just filed in the case of Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service, it transpires that Ms. Lerner had a BlackBerry on which her email traffic was routinely duplicated and that this device was wiped in June 2012, months after Congress started asking questions about the ideological targeting of applicants for tax-exempt status.

Judicial Watch, my hero, is now urging the court to require the IRS to divulge the relevant dates of the wiped data, then subpoena BlackBerry for the data. Because we all know that it hasn’t really disappeared forever into the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags IRS, Judicial Watch, Lois Lerner

crime and punishment insider corruption

IRS Says We Wuz Wrongish

The IRS has a “Love Story” relationship with citizens. Being the IRS means never having to say you’re sorry.

Actually, in real life, as opposed to cinematic catch phrases, people who care about each other do often feel a need to genuinely apologize about actual wrongs. But the IRS doesn’t care about us except insofar as we have wallets. And doesn’t feel sorry about anything they do to get our cash or to protect their turf except insofar as they get caught.

Getting caught isn’t so bad. The worst is a little public embarrassment and maybe having to fork over some of the money provided by all taxpayers to a subset of all taxpayers. Example: the agency has agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage, whose tax return and donor list the IRS illegally divulged to an opposing political group two years ago.

The guilty IRS employee has still not been identified. And the IRS is not really regretful. All spokesman Bruce Friedland will say is that privacy law “prohibits us from commenting.”

This isn’t the only recent occasion on which IRS has divulged private tax-return info for ideological purposes. What about an employee’s abuse of the private tax information of U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell during a political campaign? What about Lois Lerner’s illegal provision of tax data on tax-exempt organizations to the FBI?

Yes, the IRS targets us ideologically, in addition to the other ways they target us. And they’re not sorry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Tags IRS, Lois Lerner

crime and punishment government transparency ideological culture insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

The Dog-Ate List

It’s hard to keep track of things. It helps to make a list.

I’m trying to follow all the IRS-scandal stonewalling, the latest example of which is how emails inculpating Lois Lerner and others have mysteriously disappeared; with, allegedly, no server backups (see my latest Townhall column, “The Dog Ate My Country”).

How many ways have fedgov officials fudged, fabricated, prevaricated, and otherwise non-cooperated with investigators after news broke that IRS had targeted for special harassment sundry conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status?

When the head of IRS’s department overseeing nonprofit applications, Lois Lerner, felt compelled to admit that IRS had specially targeted right-leaning organizations applying for nonprofit status, she and others put the main blame on a few low-level clerks.
Lerner twice formally refused to testify to Congress about the doings of her own department. Yet she also asserted, formally, that “I have not done anything wrong.”
IRS says it’ll take many years to comply with congressional requests for relevant documents. IRS was prompter when it handed abundant confidential information on conservative nonprofits to the Justice Department so that they could be selectively prosecuted.
DOJ selected an “avowed political supporter” of President Obama to lead a meaningless “investigation” of the targeting of Obama’s critics. No prosecutions of wrongdoers are in the works.
Initially professing outrage at the IRS’s “inexcusable” targeting, Obama later airily dismissed the affair as a “phony scandal.” On which occasion was he lying? (Hint: both.)
Major media outlets do all they can to abet the stonewalling.