More evidence that Eric Holder is covering up the IRS scandal?

What possible reasonable justification could the Obama administration have for not providing contact information for a former employee?  From Fox News:

A top House Republican is demanding the Department of Justice hand over contact information on a former employee accused of having a conflict of interest in the IRS targeting scandal investigation.
In a Sept. 3 letter, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, once again asked Attorney General Eric Holder for information on Andrew Strelka’s whereabouts.
“Despite notifying [Oversight and Government Reform] Committee staff that the [Justice] Department no longer employs Mr. Strelka, the department has refused to assist the committee in speaking to Mr. Strelka directly,” Jordan wrote. “The department’s efforts to prevent the committee from learning Mr. Strelka’s whereabouts suggest the department has cause for keeping him from speaking with the committee.”
Jordan says he wants Strelka’s contact information so the Oversight Committee can conduct a transcribed interview. The letter gives Holder a Friday deadline for the information. . . .

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A look at the types of things Lois Lerner called conservatives while writing on her government email account

If Lerner called conservatives these things on her government email account, imagine what she might be writing on her personal account.  But you would think that a government official would be somewhat circumspect in writing something down in a permanent form for others to see.  However may be she knew that these emails wouldn't be permanent!  From the WSJ:

A newly discovered email shows that former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner once referred to conservatives as "---holes," according to new documents released by House Republicans.In the November 2012 email exchange, Ms. Lerner also suggested that conservative "crazies" could threaten the nation's future.
Her comments came in a wide-ranging email conversation, apparently with a friend or family member, while Ms. Lerner was traveling in England. At one point Ms. Lerner wrote that she overheard two women saying the U.S. had bankrupted itself and is "going down the tubes."
"Well, you should hear the whacko wing of the GOP," the person conversing with Ms. Lerner responded. "The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to."
"Great," Ms. Lerner replied. "Maybe we are through if there are that many ---holes." The word used by Ms. Lerner is redacted, with the first three letters blacked out.  . . .
Ms. Lerner adds later: "So we don't need to worry about alien teRrorists [sic]. It's our own crazies that will take us down." . . .

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Industry IT experts say IRS claims about lost emails make no sense

From Fox News:

An industry group is claiming the IRS should have kept full records of its apparent destruction of ex-official Lois Lerner's hard drive, saying "the notion that these emails just magically vanished makes no sense whatsoever."  

The latest to weigh in on the lost emails controversy is the head of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers. Group president Barbara Rembiesa released a statement on Thursday questioning recent testimony by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who told Congress last Friday that Lerner's hard drive was "recycled and destroyed" after it crashed in 2011.  

She claimed that a certified "IT asset destruction" team should have been brought in to document and complete that process.  

"If this was done, there would be records. If this was not done, this is the smoking gun that proves the drive or drives were destroyed improperly -- or not at all," she said. . . .

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Isn't it enough that Lois Lerner was using the IRS to target conservatives? Now it turns out that she was also targeting Republican politicians

From Fox News:

Congressional investigators have uncovered emails showing ex-IRS official Lois Lerner targeted a sitting Republican senator for a proposed internal audit, a discovery one GOP lawmaker called "shocking." . . . .
The emails appear to show Lerner mistakenly received an invitation intended for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, in 2012.
The event organizer, whose name is not disclosed, apparently offered to pay for Grassley's wife to attend the event, which caught Lerner's attention. The December 2012 emails show that in response, Lerner suggested to an IRS colleague that the case be referred for an audit.
"Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for his wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?" she wrote.
Her colleague, though, pushed back on the idea, saying an offer to pay for his wife is "not prohibited on its face." There is no indication from the emails that Lerner pursued the issue any further.
Republicans pointed to the exchange as yet another example of Lerner using her position in the Exempt Organizations unit to apply scrutiny to conservatives.
"We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., said in a statement.
"At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights." . . .

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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on the hot seat

In response to Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa asking about IRS Commissioner John Koskinen's earlier promise to the committee in March to turn over all documents.
Koskinen engages in some amazing double talk about what he meant by his promise that there would be no problems with him turning over all the promised emails: "I never said that I would provide you emails that we didn't have."

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WH withholds information on IRS turning over a database of tax-exempt organizations to the FBI

Obama administration claims that release of confidential IRS tax information that was turned over to FBI wasn't political, but why won't the Obama administration unwilling to tell congress about what information released?  From Politico:

Republicans charged the IRS on Monday with potentially violating federal tax privacy laws by turning over a database of tax-exempt organizations to the FBI, the latest salvo in their ongoing probe of the IRS’s scrutiny of tea party groups. 

The IRS acknowledged that some non-public taxpayer information was shared in the documents but said a tiny fraction of the data at issue was “inadvertently” shared. 

During the course of its probe into the IRS tea party targeting scandal, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said it learned the tax agency sent 1.1 million pages of tax return data about 501(c)(4) organizations to the FBI just before the 2010 midterms, Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. . . . 

the IRS said, the data on such disks “can sometimes inadvertently include material that should have been redacted.” 

Oversight contends that the IRS — as well as Lerner — potentially broke the law by releasing taxpayer data, protected under parts of the tax code known as 6103, the lawmakers told Koskinen. . . .

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Only 37 percent of Americans trust the federal government

These results are from a new Fox News poll.  One thing that should be explained is that Democrats trust in government goes up when there is a Democratic president and Republican trust is up when there is a Republican.  That explains the different results for Republicans and Democrats.  Interestingly, despite all the scandals with the IRS, NSA, EPA, AP, State Department, Benghazi, VA, and others, the level of trust in the federal government is actually higher now than last year or in 2010.

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Ending Democracy in the US?: Evidence of Obama's corruption in using IRS to destroy political enemies becomes too much to ignore

At this point the evidence clearly points to political appointees in Washington, DC coordinating the IRS to target conservatives.  The fact that the Obama administration has just as clearly hid this information and also stymied investigations at every possible point is evidence of what lawyers would call "a guilty mind."  Using the power of government to destroy his political enemies is surely what happens with governments move towards dictatorship.  In this case, with the IRS not granting tax exempt status to conservative groups, it made it much harder for Obama's opponents to organize and raise money.  Who knows how much of a difference this made in the 2012 elections, but the Obama administration was apparently willing to take a huge political risk so they must have throughout that this was important for them to do.

Without competitive elections and government putting its heavy hand on one side of the scale, those in power can pretend that they live in a democracy without actually living in one.

Fox News has some of the new emails that have just been released available here.  From Mediaite:

The Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers suggested that Congress simply submit Freedom of Information Act requests when they ask the administration to release documents. “It’s kind of hard to believe that they couldn’t have figured out that D.C. was involved in this,” she added.
“It gives lie to the administration claim that this had nothing to do with the election, nothing to do with targeting opponents of the administration,” Krauthammer submitted.
“This is a major abuse of power,” he continued. “They covered up for two years and now they say, ‘Hey, dude, two year old story.’ So it’s old news.”
He concluded by asking if the media would cover the story as he saw it, evidence of the White House “misleading America and covering it up.” . . .

Note that one of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon included his alleged misuse of the IRS. Article 2 of the Articles of Impeachment was carefully framed to charge that Nixon “endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigation to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

The key word here is "endeavored."  Nixon's efforts with the IRS were clearly disturbing, but they were also remarkably unsuccessful.  In University of Wisconsin–Madison historian Stanley Kutler's history of Watergate entitled "The Wars of Watergate," he mentions only one person who was audited for three years: Washington Post attorney Edward Bennett Williams.  Information had been acquired on others, but nothing was apparently done with it.  Indeed, Nixon's White House complained about their inability to do what they wanted.  For example, Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield noted that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.”

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Tea party donors audited at 10 times the rate of other taxpayers

From the Washington Times:

Despite assurances to the contrary, the IRS didn’t destroy all of the donor lists scooped up in its tea party targeting — and a check of those lists reveals that the tax agency audited 10 percent of those donors, much higher than the audit rate for average Americans, House Republicans revealed Wednesday. . . . 

Republicans said 24 conservative groups were asked for their donor lists. The IRS initially told Congress that those lists were destroyed, but when they went through their files they discovered three lists that weren’t destroyed. 

Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS to review the names on those lists to see whether any had been audited. The IRS reported back that 10 percent were audited — substantially higher than the average rate of 1 percent of average Americans who are audited each year. . . .

The IRS audit rate for tea party donors is three times the rate for those making above $200,000 per year.  You have to hit an income of over a million dollars a year before you audit rate gets to be about 10 percent.  To put it differently, only if all the Tea Party donors are making over $1 million per year, would you expect them to reach the audit rate that is observed.  Instead I suspect that Tea Party individuals were pretty much all middle income individuals, so the actually rate of auditing is well obviously dramatically higher than 10-to-1.  Even if they were audited at the same rate as the average taxpayer, the rate would actually be 11.4-to-1.  The Washington Times thus very likely understated the bias against conservative donors.

Here is some information on audit rates.

As incomes climb, so does the audit coverage rate. The IRS selected 3.26 percent of returns for examination from taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 in 2013 compared to 0.88 percent for taxpayers with incomes under $200,000. Both percentages reflected a drop from 2012, when the IRS selected 3.70 percent of returns for examination from taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 and 0.94 percent of returns for examination from taxpayers with incomes under $200,000.
The audit rate for taxpayers with incomes over $1 million also fell in 2013. The IRS selected 10.85 percent of returns for examination from taxpayers with incomes above $1 million . . . . 

More on this case from Fox News. 

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