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Justice Department Expands Probe To Include Missing IRS Emails

Justice Department Expands Probe To Include Missing IRS Emails

By Timothy M. Phelps, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has widened its investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of political groups to include the disappearance of two years of emails from a top official involved in the controversy.

The widening of the investigation was announced as Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cole was about to testify Thursday before a House Oversight and Governmental Reform subcommittee. The Republican-led committee has been aggressively pursuing the issue amid allegations of political influence within the IRS.

This spring the IRS said that two years’ worth of emails by Lois Lerner, the head of the IRS unit in charge of the controversial audits, had disappeared because of a hard-drive crash. Republicans were skeptical.

The Justice Department has been investigating whether any laws were broken as the IRS singled out organizations with “tea party” and other politically charged words in their names to see whether they were violating restrictions on political activities by charitable organizations.

On Thursday, Cole said for the first time that that would include an inquiry into the missing emails, though Justice Department officials cautioned that did not necessarily mean a full-scale criminal probe at this point.

In his prepared statement Cole apologizes to the subcommittee for not being able to say more about the investigation.

“While I understand that you are interested in learning about the results of the investigation, in order to protect the integrity and independence of this investigation, we cannot disclose nonpublic information about the investigation while it remains pending,” Cole’s statement says. “I can, however, tell you that the investigation includes investigating the circumstances of the lost emails from Ms. Lerner’s computer.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce defended the investigation against Republican criticism.

“The IRS investigation was launched by the department without hesitation and immediately after Ms. Lerner publicly acknowledged the potential misconduct. It has been conducted with the utmost integrity ever since, and department officials have regularly characterized the investigation as a top priority.”

Photo via WikiCommons

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IRS In ‘Bunker Mentality’ As Interest Groups, Media Join Congress In Seeking Information

IRS In ‘Bunker Mentality’ As Interest Groups, Media Join Congress In Seeking Information

By Kevin G. Hall, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Congress isn’t alone in trying to wrest answers out of the embattled Internal Revenue Service. The courts, public interest groups and the media are all struggling with uneven transparency and cooperation from the agency.

News that the IRS cannot produce long-sought emails is rekindling complaints that the agency has been slow to make public both policy documents regarding the special scrutiny of conservative groups and the emails of IRS decision-makers involved at the time.

Lawmakers are furious that the IRS failed to publicly disclose earlier that the woman at the center of the scandal, Lois Lerner, lost emails when her computer hard drive crashed in 2009.

That was news, too, for those involved in a lawsuit to force the release of Lerner’s emails. A federal judge Thursday will hear from the IRS as to why the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was not immediately informed about potentially missing emails.

The conservative organization Judicial Watch sued the IRS in May 2013 for access to Lerner’s emails, but it only learned of the missing emails after IRS Commissioner John Koskinen appeared before Congress last month.

“They’ve never once communicated to the court that that’s the case,” said Chris Farrell, research director for the group. “You have an ongoing lawsuit and no notification, that’s not generally how it’s done.”

The IRS has been ham-handed at best ever since the scandal erupted in May 2013. Anticipating an inspector general’s report, Lerner took a planted question at a legal conference so she could admit the agency had inappropriately targeted conservatives. Later, before Congress, she refused to answer any questions from lawmakers, citing her constitutional protection against self-incrimination.

As Congress more aggressively sought answers, the IRS simply stopped responding to media questions and information requests from public interest groups.

“I think they are in a greater bunker mentality as this (scandal) progresses,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “I don’t see the ‘new broom sweeping it clean’ … approach. I see just the opposite.”

She added that “all too often we have to file lawsuits in order to get anything in response to our requests.”

Judicial Watch’s suit against the IRS was filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Under the law, public interest groups and the media can seek non-public information from the government.

On his first day in office in 2009, President Barack Obama called on federal agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” when dealing with FOIA requests. But at the IRS and elsewhere in government, little has changed.

In fact, analysts say, it’s become harder to get information as agencies such as the IRS hide behind a widening array of exemptions written into the Freedom of Information Act.

“This has nothing to do with party politics. This is a systemic trend that’s been happening in this country for 30 or 40 years,” said David Cuillien, interim director of the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona. “It’s the professionalization of PR and message control. It’s infiltrated the bureaucracy and the president can’t stop it.”

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Issa: I’ve ‘Never Looked For The White House’ In IRS Investigation

Issa: I’ve ‘Never Looked For The White House’ In IRS Investigation

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, GOP watchdog Darrell Issa (R-CA) claimed on Sunday that he’s never tried to link the White House to the IRS scandal. Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, Issa told host Candy Crowley that, “We have never looked for the White House, other than the White House is not cooperating and continues not to cooperate.”

Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been on a mission to link the Obama administration to any and every “scandal” his committee hunts down. The IRS’ misconduct was supposed to be his big find; according to the congressman, the agency was unfairly targeting Tea Party groups that applied for tax-exempt status, on the president’s orders.

Though the targeting of Tea Party groups seemed to stem from a local Cincinnati branch of the IRS, Issa was quick to suggest that the White House was directly to blame.

On a June 2, 2013 interview on State of the Union, he called then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney a “paid liar.”

“This is a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters and we’re getting to proving it,” Issa said.

Then it came out in late June that progressive groups that applied for tax-exempt status were also targeted by the IRS. So Issa tried to simultaneously argue that he never thought Obama was involved, but the IRS was acting on his behalf.

“I’ve never said it came out of the office of the president or his campaign. What I’ve said is, it comes out of Washington,” the congressman said in a June 26, 2013 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.

“For years, the president bashed the Tea Party groups. He was very public against these groups,” he continued. “And on his behalf — perhaps not on his request — on his behalf, the IRS executed a delaying tactic against the very groups that he talked about.”

By July 2013, Issa was boasting that he had found a connection to the White House. His huge revelation was that one of the IRS staffers took his concerns about the IRS targeting to the chief counsel of the IRS, who, like all other department heads, was appointed by the White House.

But he wasn’t even breaking news — an Inspector General report that came out two months prior had mentioned that very same meeting.

So Issa tried to backtrack again. During a hearing on that same day, he claimed, “I’ve never said it was the president behind this. I’ve never said he led it.”

A year later, the investigation into the IRS is ongoing. Issa is currently looking into former IRS official Lois Lerner and the emails that went missing after her computer crashed in 2011. Issa wants to use the missing emails to prove that there was a cover-up.

Issa’s State of the Union interview from Sunday can be seen below:

Photo: World Economic Forum via Flickr

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GOP Chases Fake IRS Scandal, But Makes The Real One Worse

GOP Chases Fake IRS Scandal, But Makes The Real One Worse

With the exception of the 2012 Benghazi attacks, no Obama-era controversy has animated Republican imaginations quite like the one surrounding the Internal Revenue Service.

Congressional Republicans’ version of the scandal originally went like this: President Obama ordered the IRS to target right-wing organizations applying for tax-exempt status as non-political “social welfare” groups, leading the agency to harass those on the president’s Nixonian enemies list.

It turns out that none of that ever happened; the IRS targeted liberal groups as well as conservative ones, not a single Tea Party group was denied tax-exempt status (despite overwhelming evidence that many of them were engaged in political activity), and no evidence ever emerged that the White House was involved in any of it. Still, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from escalating the “scandal” in increasingly ridiculous ways.

The current outrage centers around the IRS’ claim that thousands of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails were lost when her computer crashed in 2011. Although evidence and logic suggest that this was not part of a massive cover-up, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is threatening to impeach Attorney General Eric Holder unless he appoints a special prosecutor to investigate it, and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Bill Flores (R-TX) have introduced a bill promising a $1 million bounty to anyone who can restore the lost emails, while threatening to cut the salaries of IRS employees by 20 percent unless the emails are recovered.

As it happens, Republicans have already hammered IRS employees with cuts since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011 — and they didn’t even need a “Nixonian” “scandal” to do so.

In a report released Wednesday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities illustrates just how badly Congress has constrained the IRS’ ability to do its job. Due to a combination of discretionary budget cuts and sequestration, the IRS has been left with an $11.3 billion budget for 2014. That’s $840 million lower than it was in 2010, amounting to a 14 percent cut when accounting for inflation.

CBPP Chart 1

As a result of the cuts, the IRS has been forced to reduce its workforce by 11 percent since 2010, even as the agency’s workload has substantially increased (for example, in addition to the IRS’ new campaign finance responsibilities, CBPP notes that the number of individual tax returns has grown by 1.5 million annually over the past decade).

CBPP Chart 2

Furthermore, even as the IRS’ remaining workers have been forced to take on more responsibility, the agency’s training budget has been slashed by an astonishing 87 percent between 2010 and 2013, the most recent year with available data. If Congress wants to know why the IRS struggled so badly at sorting out the glut of groups that applied for tax exemption, there is your answer.

President Obama’s 2015 budget would reverse the rapid slide in the IRS’ funding; it would increase the agency’s budget by $1.2 billion from this year’s level, returning it to roughly its 2010 level (before adjusting for inflation).

The House appropriations subcommittee wants to go further in the other direction, however; it has proposed cutting IRS funding by yet another $340 billion. This is especially illogical considering the GOP majority’s supposed desire to limit the budget deficit. According to the Treasury Department, each $1 spent on the IRS budget yields $4 of revenue.

“Policymakers should give the IRS sufficient resources to carry out its mission,” the CBPP paper concludes. “In particular, policymakers who profess to be concerned or even alarmed about the nation’s current or future fiscal course should provide the IRS with the funding it needs to administer the nation’s tax laws and collect taxes due under the laws of the land.”

CBPP is not the first to sound the alarm over the IRS’ lack of funding; The National Memo’s David Cay Johnston made a similar argument in 2013, at the height of the “targeting” controversy.

Republicans are clearly desperate to uncover a real scandal at the IRS. But if they really want to improve things at the much-maligned agency, they need look no further than their own budget proposals.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons