Posted on 04/29/2015 7:36:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
It’s an April miracle, Charlie Brown! While the old and largely forgotten IRS scandals have been replaced by whole news sets of scandals, I guess there was still some work going on in the background. The Inspector General for the Treasury announced this week that more than six thousand of Lois Lerner’s emails – lost when “her computer crashed” a few years ago – have been recovered from backup tapes and will be turned over.
The Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration notified the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday that they have recovered thousands of Lois Lerner emails that were not previously produced to Congress, committee members told Fox News.
The inspector general recovered approximately 6,400 Lerner emails and will carefully examine them as part of the committee’s bipartisan IRS investigation…
The IRS, in a statement to the website, said that it was pleased to hear the Treasury’s inspector general found the emails saying it was an “encouraging development that will help resolve remaining questions and dispel uncertainty surrounding the emails.”
The IRS also said it took the inspector general around 10 months to come up with the emails sent or received during the period affected by Lerner’s computer crash.
The emails were mostly from 2013, with a smaller number from 2011 and 2012, so they are at least from the time period when the targeting of conservative groups was taking place. But will any of them be relevant to the case? And if there were any smoking gun style messages contained in the lost files, will they see the light of day? The work is being overseen by the Inspector General, J. Russell George, appointed to the position by George W. Bush in 2004 and having an impressive resume.
Following his nomination by President George W. Bush, the United States Senate confirmed J. Russell George in November 2004, as the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Prior to assuming this role, Mr. George served as the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service, having been nominated to that position by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate in 2002.
In addition to his duties as the Inspector General for Tax Administration, Mr. George serves as a member of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, a non-partisan, non-political agency created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to provide unprecedented transparency and to detect and prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement of Recovery funds. There, he serves as chairman of the Recovery.gov committee, which oversees the dissemination of accurate and timely data about Recovery funds.
While there is rarely any sense in pining for “the good old days” when it comes to the government, we’re once again seeing an oversight process where the public’s confidence is, to be charitable, marginal at best. Paper records are mostly a thing of the past, replaced by collections of digital ones and zeros which can be invisibly wiped away. Of course, hard copy documents could be burned or shredded, but at least you knew they existed at one point. The entire episode with Hillary Clinton’s server has probably done more to cast doubt on such record keeping than anything else.
Still, I may be proven to be too much of a pessimist in this case. Perhaps the Inspector General will come up with something useful. We won’t know right away since it will obviously take some time to comb through that many messages. Cross your fingers.
That was my first thought. After all this time, they miraculously find a bunch of emails. Odds are they don't show anything other than hard working public servants doing their job.
I disagree. The republicans are far too loving, forgiving, and unwilling to stand for truth. They would rather cover it up and act like everything is ok now.
in other news, the IRS just discovered that it lost dozens more computer backup tapes in a tragic boating accident...
Hope springs eternal that the truth will out.
Remember...Obama has the power to forgive.....as long as Lois does what she’s told.
She’s go’en down...
The cynical side of me says the reason it took this long to produce these 6,400 emails is so they could scrub out the incriminating ones while making it appear they’re looking at the full record.
I’m convinced that some of the things Hillary and Lois wrote—believing they would never be disclosed—in their e-mails are so shocking and unprofessional that the executive branch and their counterparts in the GOP-e are afraid that those of us in the middle who pay the bills would march on Washington, if we were privy to their contents.
Consequently the gals are correct that the Beltway crowd concurs with them these revolutionary messages never will be disclosed, because they are expressly saying in what, at least according to the Freedom of Information act, is a public venue and most importantly, it is what they and their peers actually think.
Thank goodness for them—federal laws are optional in recent years.
And as soon as the Obamanites are flushed from the Tidal basin—assuming they eventually do leave—you can be sure the GOP-e will drop this matter asap, as well as all their other feeble “investigations” of the Democrats.
Guess what’s going to come up missing?.
Hillary chuckles
How long to recover Hillary’s emails?
6400 emails
250 working days/year
2.5 years
=> about 10 emails a day
seems a little on the light side for the Director of the IRS, but it could be all of them
lol....maybe after O leaves office????
“That is my first thought. After all this time, they miraculously find a bunch of emails. Odds are they don’t show anything other than hard working public servants doing their job”
It can’t be ruled out that they are incompetent hard-working public servants and that they missed these new tapes during the first clense and they have not been screened yet.
My cynicism modulator was burnt to a crisp years ago.
Not a chance in hell. Neither party will allow a bureaucrat to fall on their sword. The bureaucrats have too much dirt on the political class, the help have become equals in the halls of power that is government.
If they can recover 6500, they can recover them all.
I wonder if Hillary is going to disappear for a while?
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