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Here at SteynOnline every cutting-edge pop culture reference has to be at least three-quarters of a century old. So, watching the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, I found him a dead ringer for Guy Kibbee, the beaming befuddled sugar daddy who was a mainstay at Warner Brothers in the early Thirties. Mr Koskinen is a Democrat sugar daddy who has given generously to his party since the Seventies: He's not the kind of sober civil servant you'd appoint if you were looking to signal to America that King Barack's revenue collectors are cleaning house and returning, chastened, to their previous role...

<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>

By the time Lois Lerner suggested auditing Sen. Chuck Grassley in a Dec. 4, 2012, email, the Iowa Republican had spent five years scrutinizing Lerner's IRS division. Grassley, during his tenure as top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, zeroed in on abuses by charities and other nonprofit groups improperly claiming tax-exempt status under Lerner, and he spearheaded a 2006 change in federal law making it harder for organizations to improperly claim the credit. Grassley and Lerner were no strangers to each other, and it’s one of the reasons Republicans fear Lerner’s push to audit Grassley might have been politically...

In the absence of a special prosecutor, the best opportunity for piercing the veil of secrecy and evasion that surrounds the IRS handling of groups perceived as enemies of the Obama administration lies in civil litigation. The National Organization for Marriage has just obtained a $50,000 settlement from the IRS for its criminal release of confidential donor information to an opposition group. ~snip~ The absence of any official judicial inquiry into the inner workings of the IRS processes is why it is so important to note that yesterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street...

A former White House counsel during the Clinton administration said Thursday that it’s time for an independent counsel to look into the growing IRS email scandal. Lanny Davis, a close adviser to Hillary Clinton and a frequent defender of the Obama Administration, appeared on my morning talk show in Washington, D.C., on WMAL. I asked him to comment on the latest hearings on the lost IRS emails conducted earlier this week in Congress: If this were a Republican administration I’d be saying when hard drives have been obliterated and this recent Lois Lerner—I think very inappropriate, maybe innocent but completely...

“It’s good to be King,” said Mel Brooks as Louis XVI in the director/actor’s “History of the World, Part 1.” No question Brooks was onto something as the Internal Revenue Service–one of the principle organs of Barack Hussein Obama’s 2012, Reelection Campaign—just paid $50,000 dollars to settle a lawsuit brought against the Service by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Of course the settlement was paid with taxpayer dollars. During the 2012 presidential campaign, NOM accused the IRS of leaking information concerning the group’s contributors to Joe Solomese, head of the far-left Human Rights Campaign (HRC). The Huffington Post then...

Unsurprisingly, 90 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independents are of a suspicious mind. What should have the Obama administration rethinking their strategy so far is that 63 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of self-identified liberals also believe the email destruction was no accident. Because that means, by a 3-to-1 margin, even Democrats and/or liberals believe a crime was committed somewhere in the IRS with the intentional destruction of government records.

The IRS will pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 to settle a lawsuit over claims the agency improperly disclosed confidential tax information, according to a consent judgment released this week. The lawsuit stemmed from information an IRS worker sent to an individual who identified himself as a member of the media who requested it in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, which he then sent to the pro-gay rights group Human Rights Campaign. The Huffington Post then ran a story noting a political action committee linked to Mitt Romney had been a donor to NOM. John Eastman, NOM’s...

This is how partisan and corrupt Lois Lerner is: Here is more from Rep. , chairman of Ways and Means committee: Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman (R-MI) announced the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative individuals includes a sitting United States Senator. According to emails reviewed by the Committee under its Section 6103 authority, which allows the Committee to review confidential taxpayer information, Lois Lerner sought to have Senator (R-IA) referred for IRS examination. “We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS...

Lois Lerner targeted US Sen. Chuck Grassley for an audit- for having done nothing wrong. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional investigators say they uncovered emails Wednesday showing that a former Internal Revenue Service official at the heart of the tea party investigation sought an audit involving a Republican senator in 2012. Now catch this: The emails show former IRS official Lois Lerner mistakenly received an invitation to an event that was meant to go to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. Grassley presumably received Lerner's invitation. She "mistakenly" received his invitation? Because G and L are next to each other in the alphabet?...

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

In a stunning discovery, the Executive Director listed on the 990-EZ for the Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF), which was approved by the IRS’s Lois Lerner, is Ray Baysden, a former U.S. intelligence agent. Baysden, who knows the Obama family, is a former State Department employee who was stationed in Karachi, Pakistan at a time when President Barack Obama is said to have visited Karachi, in the 1980′s. He is also a registered Republican who has worked within the Intelligence Community (IC). BHOF was founded and is run by Malik Obama, the brother of the President. Malik is also steeped...

The Mounting Proof of an IRS Cover-UpPosted By Matthew Vadum On June 25, 2014 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 10 Comments More proof the Obama administration is covering up the political persecution it inflicted on its conservative political enemies through the Internal Revenue Service emerged yesterday as a federal official accused the White House of breaking the law by hiding emails.Whenever the records, including emails, of federal agencies are destroyed — whether intentional or inadvertent — the law requires that the National Archives be notified. But that did not happen when the computer hard drives of a...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) prematurely “retired” computer data storage devices worth millions of dollars and filed “disposal” documents for computer hardware that still existed, according to an internal inspector general report reviewed by The Daily Caller. snip The IRS, which spent $44.1 million in information technology (IT) hardware maintenance in fiscal year 2011 and $47.8 million in fiscal year 2012, closed out its six-year business relationship with the email archiving-and-recovery company Sonasoft in September 2011. Meanwhile, sophisticated data storage devices were being thrown away in the agency’s national IT offices in Maryland, even though the IRS was still paying...

The consensus is: it’s no accident. More than three-quarters of voters -- 76 percent -- think the emails missing from the account of Lois Lerner, the ex-IRS official at the center of the scandal over targeting of conservative groups, were deliberately destroyed. That’s according to a new Fox News poll. That suspicion is shared across party lines, albeit to varying degrees. An overwhelming 90 percent of Republicans think the emails were intentionally destroyed, as do 74 percent of independents and 63 percent of Democrats. Overall, just 12 percent of voters believe the emails were destroyed accidentally. Another 12 percent are...

Exclusive: Inside the Company Targeted in IRS Scandal Email "Doesn't go away." By Scott Budman | Tuesday, Jun 24, 2014 | Updated 1:11 PM Sonasoft is getting threats. On email, and over the phone, saying, according to company founder Andy Khanna, "Provide the emails!" And that's the clean version. Sonasoft is the company you may have read about online over the last couple of days, linked to the IRS email scandal. They had a contract to replicate emails for IRS lawyers through 2011. They even sent out a tweet reading, "The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why...

Those were the days. It was June, 2011. 24,000 pages of former Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails were released by the state of Alaska. She had resigned as governor nearly two years before, and was by then a happy private citizen. The media were so interested in getting into every nook and cranny of those emails that they facilitated their release, and then crowdsourced processing them. The Guardian even published a guide. “We think it’s important to get the documents out into the world as soon as possible and see what you think about them – just like we did with...

<p>Lerner refuses to testify, refuses to produce emails - compel her to testify regarding the recipients, senders, subjects and contents of the "lost" email conversations or jail her for contempt of congress.</p> <p>How far up the ladder does this criminal conspiracy go?</p>

CNSNews.com) - "I said I would provide all the emails. We are providing all the emails. The fact that three years ago, some of them -- not all of them, but some of them -- were not available, I never said I would provide you emails we didn't have," IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a Monday evening hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Frustrated Republicans and apologetic Democrats questioned Koskinen about Lois Lerner's vanished emails for several hours, beginning with Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who asked Koskinen if he knew those critical emails were missing when...

On his Monday radio show, conservative talk show Mark Levin reacted to how congressional Democrats in a House Oversight Hearing had conducted themselves earlier over the committee’s inquiry into missing emails related to an investigation of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. Levin said it was clear to him the response from congressional Democrats was orchestrated in advance in tandem with the highest level of the Obama White House to obstruct the inquiry into the Internal Revenue Service missing emails congressional hearing. “So let me be very blunt about it – the Democratic Party now is conducting itself as...