Free Republic

(CNSNews.com) - Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Wednesday called out the IRS on holding back information regarding lost emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner, telling the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen at a House Subcommittee for Economic Growth, Job Creation, and Regulatory Affairs on Capitol Hill, “You guys were never going to tell us until we caught you.” At the hearing titled, “An Update on the IRS Response to its Targeting Scandal,” Jordan explained the timeline of events in the ongoing IRS investigation, citing how Koskinen knew about the missing emails in April yet waited until June 13, 2014 to...

The Lois G. Lerner emails released this month revealed a potentially huge loophole in federal open-records practices when an IRS tech staffer acknowledged that the agency doesn’t regularly store — and never checks — instant message chats as official government records. Analysts say there is no question that the Internal Revenue Service and all other federal agencies should be storing chats and even cellphone text messages that may constitute official government documents, but a check by The Washington Times suggests that hardly any agency is doing so. Of 17 agencies surveyed by The Times, just two said they had policies

The IRS can’t say with certainty what happened to the computer hard drive used by Lois Lerner, or exactly where it is now.. On July 11, Judge Reggie Walton ordered the agency to find out what had happened to the hard drive... Manning said Lerner’s hard drive was then “delivered to the IRS Criminal Investigation Division Electronic Crimes Forensic Laboratory for additional efforts to recover data from the malfunctioning hard drive.. testimony revealed another bizarre turn in the saga: The technician, or, specialist, who tried to recover the data from Lerner’s hard drive on that June day in 2011 may...

Amid a flurry of Republican calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups, the Justice Department is set to defend its own probe of the matter as exhaustive and sufficient during a House hearing Thursday on the department’s response to the scandal. A top Justice Department official will tell the hearing that the department is now looking at how some of former senior IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails disappeared -- a new area of inquiry, Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News in an exclusive interview Friday.

Obama administration fights to seize Microsoft emails held in IRELAND in landmark legal battle The U.S. Justice Department is claiming that Microsoft must hand over emails that the company stores in databases in Dublin, Ireland, in a case that is being watched closely by tech companies legal scholars. The U.S. federal government is claiming that it can force any company that conducts business operations within its borders to comply with warrants for data stored on its databases, even if those databases aren't physically located within the United States. Several companies that operate within the U.S. keep databases in other countries....

Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_53pGUr0SdM

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the IRS to explain under oath how it lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency's tea party controversy.

Several DHS agencies are involved in apprehending, processing, and repatriating UAC, while the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is responsible for the care and custody of UAC. The Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) in the U.S. Department of Justice conducts the immigration removal proceedings. Health and Human Services (HHS) is assigned responsibility from President Obama to shelter “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UAC’s). In the email below FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is requesting facility recommendations for the housing of the UAC’s. Here is the secretive guideline email requesting help in locating facilities. Note the paragraph: …”This is an...

An Attack That Came Out of the Ether ( excerpt from page 3 of 4) Of the file folders that are spread in neat rows across Allen's desk, only one is bulging. It holds printouts of the reams of conversations about Obama's religion appearing on Free Republic. Since its start in 1996 by Jim Robinson of Fresno, Calif., the site has grown into a home for discussion of all types -- though it is particularly noted for spirited political discussions dominated by conservatives and libertarians. Freepers, as they're called, converse with a varying degree of transparency. Most remain anonymous. Allen...

IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency. They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn't be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.

Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago. “She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.” Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/lois-lerner-irs-scandal-108399.html#ixzz35x9YRwbt

Judicial Watch today filed a Motion for Status Conference, and within hours was granted a hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to confer about the emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials, which were the subject of longstanding Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and a lawsuit, and which the IRS now claims to have “lost” (Judicial Watch v. IRS(No. 1:13-cv–1559)). The hearing is scheduled for July 10. The emails Judicial Watch has sought since May 2013 cover portions of the same period for which the IRS on June 13, 2014,...

While most of President Obama's Cabinet was touting the anniversary of President Obama's landmark speech in which he laid out plans to address climate change, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy was left facing a contempt threat from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa. (snip) The hearing also included a bit of deja vu for the committee when members grilled McCarthy on lost emails from a hard-drive crash (the same issue that wiped out emails from IRS employee Lois Lerner). In this case, the emails in question were from retired EPA employee Philip North, who was involved in the...

<p>Congressional investigators have uncovered emails showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit of a Republican senator in December 2012.</p>

Chad Pergram works for Fox News, and has been covering the IRS scandal. On Twitter he just dropped a bombshell. #BREAKING: #IRS email dump to Congress reveal Lois Lerner sought to have Sen Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred for IRS examination. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014 Sources tell Fox #IRS‘s Lerner came across invitation for Grassley to event. Lerner then referred Grassley for probe. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014 Camp: At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights. — Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) June 25, 2014

Apparently this wasn’t just an isolated innocent: a second federal agency is also having trouble finding emails that a congressional committee is demanding in order to fulfill its oversight responsibilities: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy confirmed to the House Oversight Committee Wednesday that her staff is unable to provide lawmakers all of the documents they have requested on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, because of a 2010 computer crash. “We’re having...

Scandal: The IRS canceled a contract with an email storage contractor weeks after Lois Lerner reported lost personal files and before other IRS officials had their hard drives crash as Tea Party-targeting investigations began. Timing is everything, the saying goes, and sometimes the timing of events is also very curious, as in the case of the lost emails of Lerner and at least six other officials at the very same time the IRS canceled its contract to back up and preserve those emails as required by federal law. Lerner's computer supposedly crashed in June 2011, an alleged event the IRS...

Vid at link.

Rep. Darrell Issa forced a White House attorney to testify Tuesday as he and other GOP lawmakers seek answers on why years' worth of emails from ex-IRS official Lois Lerner have disappeared. Tensions flared almost from the beginning. The chairman of the House oversight committee, shortly after White House attorney Jennifer O'Connor began to testify, accused her of being a "hostile witness" when she did not immediately answer one of his questions. "I'm not a hostile witness," she retorted. "Yes, you are," Issa, R-Calif., said. He later clarified to say she is "non-cooperative." O'Connor was brought before the committee because...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress aren't buying the contention by the head of the Internal Revenue Service that he has seen no evidence anyone committed a crime when the agency lost emails that might shed light on the targeting of tea party and other political groups before the 2010 and 2012 elections. On Tuesday, a House panel will hear from a White House official who once worked at the IRS. Jennifer O'Connor worked at the IRS from May to November 2013, helping the agency gather documents related to the congressional investigations, said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the...