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The Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch. The IRS recently claimed that it lost 24,000 of 67,000 emails that ex-official Lois Lerner sent between 2009 and 2011, due to a computer crash. The IRS, which agreed to turn over all of Lerner’s emails to the House Committee on Ways and Means, specifically lost emails Lerner sent to other Obama administration agencies and the White House. Lerner is a major...

As an IT professional I am calling BS on the claim that Lerner's emails are lost. The BHO regime has choosen to gleem the cube on this one and it is going to bite them in the a$$! I think it is time Ed Snowden is asked to apply his skills and retrieve the files in question. I have no doubt he is the man for the job.

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal. The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal. The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding...

by Sharyl Attkisson on June 14, 2014 in News 2 Comments The news came late in the day on Friday the 13th. According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS reports having “lost” former IRS manager Lois Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees sent between January of 2009 and April of 2011 due to a ‘computer crash.’ In light of the disclosure, these are some of the logical requests that should be made of the IRS: Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how...

The Internal Revenue Service may have been caught violating federal tax law: In October 2010, the agency sent a database on 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups containing confidential taxpayer information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to documents obtained by a House panel. The information was transmitted in advance of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s meeting the same month with Justice Department officials about the possibility of using campaign-finance laws to prosecute certain non-profit groups. E-mails between Lerner and Richard Pilger, the director of the Justice Department’s election crimes branch, obtained through a subpoena to Attorney General Eric Holder, show Lerner asking about the format in which...

So it comes to this: After all that has been said about Barack Obama, in the end there is very little to say. You are either willing to overlook Barack Obama’s foibles and foolishness; or you aren’t. We we're right, you were wrong. You can either admit or you can't. There is no middle ground. There is no saying for example “Well he’s kind of new in the job,” or “This is an example of one bad apple in his Cabinet,” or “The president didn’t know about it.” Going into his second term, you either knew what we had...

As one of the characters in “Anchorman” observed of its bloody brawl between news teams: Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast. Two days after President Obama broke the law to arrange an insanely reckless swap of five incredibly dangerous Taliban terrorists for captive American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, virtually every aspect of the deal has blown up in Obama’s face, and the whole thing has soured into another five-star scandal for an Administration riddled with them. Maybe it’s the accumulated weight of Obama fatigue, or the sheer stupidity and arrogance the President displayed in...

Liberals wanted a national enrollment system under Obamacare. They might just get it. Right now, 36 states rely on HealthCare.gov, the federal exchange, to enroll people in health coverage. At least two more states are opting in next year, with a few others likely to follow. Only two states are trying to get out. That’s precisely the opposite of the Affordable Care Act’s original intent: 50 exchanges run by 50 states. The federal option was supposed to be a limited and temporary fallback. But a shift to a bigger, more permanent Washington-controlled system is instead underway — without preparation, funding...

The IRS has agreed to overhaul a controversial proposal that Republican lawmakers warned would revive the agency’s “harassment and intimidation” of conservative groups, after receiving a record number of comments on the proposed regulation. […] At issue were new rules that would prohibit so-called 501(c)(4) groups from counting “candidate-related political activity” and other political work as activities that qualify them to be tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations. Critics of the proposal warned that this would effectively force many grassroots organizations to shut down. …

Contrary to the White Houses explanation that a few rogue agents in Cincinnati lead the targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS, newly released emails obtained by Judicial Watch detail Democratic Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) pressuring the IRS to target conservative groups. On March 30, 2012 Levin wrote to then IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman about his concern with the political activity by conservative nonprofits. “Some entities claiming tax-exempt status as social welfare organizations under 26 U.S.C.&501(c)(4) appear to be engaged in political activities more appropriate for political organizations claiming tax-exempt status under 26 U.S.C.&527. Because of the urgency of...

New documents obtained and released through a Judicial Watch lawsuit show the targeting of tea party and conservative groups came directly out of Washington D.C., not a rogue IRS office in Cincinnati. On July 6, 2012, former Director of the IRS Rulings and Agreements Division and current Manager of Exempt Organizations Guidance Holly Paz sent an email to IRS Attorney Steven Grodnitzky asking for an explanation of how tea party group applications were being handled. Grodnitzky responded by confirming the cases were being handled in Washington. "EOT is working the Tea party applications in coordination with Cincy. We are developing...

“This is the law. And every two years — let me tell you something. Every two years I come to the Congress, just like my good friend, Mr. Labrador, we put up our hands to swear to uphold the Constitution and the laws of this country. It is the law.” That’s what Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings told Anderson Cooper last October. What was he talking about you may wonder. Was it the disastrous Fast and Furious scandal and the cover-up that followed? No, Rep. Cummings dismissed questions over the DOJ Attorney General Eric Hold’s role in the affair as “an...

Less than a day after former IRS official Lois Lerner was found in criminal contempt of Congress, her old agency has agreed to turn over copies of all her emails and other correspondence to one of the Republican-led House committees investigating the scandal that led to her retirement. The agency´s quick concession came after Wednesday night´s 231-178 contempt vote, which closely followed the passage of a second resolution demanding the appointment of a nonpartisan ´special counsel´ at the Department of Justice. Lerner has twice refused to answer questions in congressional hearings after lawmakers issued a subpoena for her appearance. ´This

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to hold a former Internal Revenue Service official in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into the agency's special targeting of groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names that were seeking tax-exempt status. On a 231 to 187 vote, the House approved a contempt citation against Lois G. Lerner, whose admission last year that the tax-enforcement agency had targeted conservative groups infuriated lawmakers in both parties, led to an overhaul of the IRS and Lerner's eventual retirement from government service. Six Democrats -- a band of moderates...

Today, the House Rules Committee is considering a resolution recommending that former IRS official Lois Lerner be held in contempt for refusing to answer questions about her role in the IRS targeting of President Obama’s political opponents. It is likely that the resolution will pass, and then it will come to the floor for a full vote in the House. When it does, the vote to hold Lerner in contempt should be bipartisan – if not unanimous. Any Democrats who vote “no” should be labeled as enablers of obstruction of justice. It should be impossible for Democrats to defend a...

Ironic huh? I challenge my left wing congresswomen Nita Lowey now all of a sudden, for the first time in 27 years, i get audited....i'm now suppose to prove that i paid the $21K plus in real estate and school taxes which they charge me (and i pay)...i'm also expected to not only provide my daughters birth certificate but proves she lives with us for the child care credit... any ideas???

According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner contacted the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for "lying" about political activity. "I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their...

As millions of Americans race to meet Tuesday’s tax deadline, their chances of getting audited are lower than they have been in years. Budget cuts and new responsibilities are straining the Internal Revenue Service’s ability to police tax returns. This year, the IRS will have fewer agents auditing returns than at any time since at least the 1980s. Taxpayer services are suffering, too, with millions of phone calls to the IRS going unanswered. “We keep going after the people who look like the worst of the bad guys,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in an interview. “But there are going...

Catherine Engelbrecht became the face of the IRS scandal with her riveting testimony before Congress on how her group True the Vote was targeted by the IRS for selective persecution and harassment. Recently, it was discovered that Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings had a hand in the IRS targeting True the Vote. You might remember Cummings as the grandstanding Democrat who railed against Darrell Issa’s investigation of the scandal after a Congressional hearing with IRS official Lois Lerner had closed (and then implied that Issa was racist): Further making the situation ironic and unsightly for justice-avoiding Democrats is that emails show...

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