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IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere. The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens.

We’ve reached a sufficiently high level of implausibility now, I think, that this story technically qualifies as a news-of-the-weird palate cleanser, not actual news.Assuming the data isn’t recovered and no one is punished, as seems likely, this is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the next president’s administration, no? If some Democratic Senate oversight committee demands to see e-mails from President Christie’s underlings and the reply comes back that the hard drives were all corrupted, what’s the grounds for complaint? IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the...

Could the IRS have those missing Lois Lerner emails after all? New testimony from a key Internal Revenue Service official indicates the IRS may not have lost two years of emails sent by former top IRS official Lois Lerner after all. That is what the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee suggested Monday morning in a newly released transcript of a recent closed-door interview with IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane. Kane is responsible for producing documents requested by Congress that are related to a a probe into the IRS past practice of targeting conservative groups. Kane met with...

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it was investigating the circumstances behind the disappearance of emails from a former senior Internal Revenue Service official, part of a broader criminal inquiry into whether the agency had targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Monday made yet another request to the federal government for details about a crashed hard drive that may have contained information allowing criminal charges to be brought against a federal official. Issa’s newest letter concerns the hard drive of April Sands, a former employee at the Federal Election Commission who resigned in the spring after admitting to violations of the Hatch Act. That law puts restrictions on the ability of government officials to conduct political activities while on the job, or from government offices.

In its latest liberal rant coming to the aid of the IRS – that poor defenseless government leviathan – it repeats the same tired leftist talking points about the root of all the IRS’s problems being that it doesn’t have enough money. Yet in doing so, it may have just stumbled across a new motive behind the targeting, good old-fashioned revenge. He’s what the New York Times calls the “real scandal”: There is a scandal going on at the Internal Revenue Service, but it has nothing to do with Lois Lerner or her missing emails. . . . No, the...

There is a scandal going on at the Internal Revenue Service, but it has nothing to do with Lois Lerner or her missing emails. No, the real scandal is what Republicans did to cripple the agency when virtually no one was looking. Since the broad Tea Party-driven spending cuts of 2010, the agency’s budget has been cut by 14 percent after inflation is considered, leading to sharply reduced staff, less enforcement of the tax laws and poor taxpayer service. The budget cutters are also trying to prevent the agency from performing its new job of collecting higher taxes on the...

July 4, 2014 Revenge: Republicans to Strip $341 Million From IRS in Response to Scandals Pete Kasperowicz After months of frustration with the IRS over the targeting scandal and lost emails, House Republicans will exact some revenge next week by passing legislation that cuts the IRS operating budget by $341 million compared to current levels. GOP leaders plan to call up a spending bill for fiscal year 2015 that funds the IRS and other agencies, but singles out the IRS for the targeting scandal and other problems that have surfaced over the last few years. “The committee remains troubled by...

Meet the Deep State. It’s embedded inside a massive remorseless bureaucracy with no conscience or restraint. Ex-Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner tried to audit Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley after Grassley blocked President Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Justice (DOJ) tax division, an executive branch insider told The Daily Caller.Grassley made it more difficult for the IRS and DOJ to work together to target conservative groups by blocking Obama’s political appointee Mary L. Smith from taking over the DOJ Tax Division, which prosecutes criminal cases for the IRS. Grassley held up the nomination in early 2010, just as...

Issa to IRS Commissioner: Want to Revise Your Testimony? Sharyl Attkisson Today, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asking if he wants to amend his earlier testimony about Lois Lerner. Koskinen testified on June 23 that Lerner, a former IRS official at the center of the controversy over the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups, followed terms of the Federal Records Act in her handling of public records and materials. When asked about emails that have been reported as lost when Lerner’s hard drive crashed in 2011, Koskinen stated, “The responsibility is,...

Another federal judge tells IRS to explain itself on lost emails BY MARK TAPSCOTT | JULY 1, 2014 | 5:04 PM 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...

There is “no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” the Internal Revenue Service assured Americans during an internal investigation of the agency’s targeting of conservative groups. Few will find comfort in those words, and understandably so. Last week, while seeking to reassure Americans he has seen no evidence of a crime, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen acknowledged he had not even bothered to review any of the applicable laws. It seems like only yesterday that President Obama called the scandal “inexcusable” and pledged to work “hand in hand with Congress to get this thing fixed.” More recently, though, he dismissed it as a...

Five years ago, Sonasoft promoted its data-retention services by claiming that the IRS trusted the company to back up its servers, and the agency contracted with Sonasoft for something until 2011. Last week, however, Sonasoft backed away from its 2009 claims, and now says that the contract never included services that would have archived e-mail servers

Posted on June 28, 2014 by sundance WOAH – BOMBSHELL !! The plot thickens. We might just have found a biggie…. In a recent Politico interview (publish date 6/27/14) with the Lois Lerner’s attorney William Taylor III an interesting aspect is buried midway through page #2. During part of the interview Politico author Rachel Bade inquires about the 1.1 million pages of documents Lerner sent to the Department of Justice that became an issue when discovered by the House Oversight Committee on June 9th 2014. BACKSTORY HERE. The documents were sent from IRS to DOJ on a series of 4...

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday evening, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen revealed that a number of taxpayers are confused by his agency’s conduct. Like the IRS, they would also like to claim that corrupted or lost data prevents them from complying with the tax collection agency’s requests with for several-year-old documents. Koskinen told Blitzer that what may come to be known as “The Lerner Defense” is and has been acceptable to the IRS. During Thursday’s interview, an eager Twitter user submitted a question to Blitzer which he helpfully read on the air. “Why shouldn’t tax payers...

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,...

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...