Free Republic

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...

Americans are appalled over the false testimony of four consecutive IRS Commissioners, Lois Lerner’s countless acts of malfeasance, and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups and specific individuals, among them Senator Grassley. The ultimate outrage came over the lame, intellectually insulting assertions that all of the most relevant emails have gone missing from multiple IRS computers at the same time. Today, Judicial Watch found a federal judge who has the integrity and fortitude to seek Justice—and this isn’t his first whack at the Department of Justice either. Enter Emmet G. Sullivan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia....

Americans are appalled over the false testimony of four consecutive IRS Commissioners, Lois Lerner’s countless acts of malfeasance, and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups and specific individuals, among them Senator Grassley. The ultimate outrage came over the lame, intellectually insulting assertions that all of the most relevant emails have gone missing from multiple IRS computers at the same time. Today, Judicial Watch found a federal judge who has the integrity and fortitude to seek Justice—and this isn’t his first whack at the Department of Justice either. Enter Emmet G. Sullivan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia....

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,...

Scandal: The Internal Revenue Service admits it broke the law after an organization whose private tax data are illegally shared with an ideological competitor wins its lawsuit. So who is going to prison for this federal crime? If IRS Commissioner John Koskinen wants to know which criminal statutes have been broken, he might try reading about one in the morning newspapers, the same place President Obama gets his information about the "phony scandal" du jour. The National Organization for Marriage has been awarded a $50,000 settlement from the IRS after the agency admitted wrongdoing in leaking the organization's 2008 tax...

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.” The IRS two weeks ago told congressional investigators probing the tea party targeting that the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails from 2009 through mid-2011 were...

Internal Revenue Service officials will have to explain to a federal judge July 10 why the tax agency didn't inform the court that Lois Lerner's emails had been lost. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Emmett G. Sullivan quickly granted a motion filed earlier today by attorneys for Judicial Watch seeking a courtroom status conference “as soon as possible to discuss the IRS's failure to fulfill its duties to this court under the law, as well as other ramifications of this lawsuit.” In its motion, the non-profit watchdog noted that the IRS publicly acknowledged loss of Lerner...

President Obama warned people in Minnesota Friday not to believe what they hear on television: "They're fabricated issues, they're phony scandals that are generated. It's all geared towards the next election or ginning up a base. It's not on the level," the president insisted. Here are his remarks in context: I don't -- I don't watch TV news generally, or cable shows, but I suspect if you're out here and going to work and picking up your kids and taking them to soccer or at night sitting there paying the bills, and you just turn on the TV, sometimes it...

Louis Gohmert of the House Judiciary Committee urges those who have copies of the emails or know who does to do the right thing right now and make sure they are handed over to the Committee. The Committee is confident it will find the truth about who knows about this. "The wrong shall fail, the right prevail." Gohmert quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The IRS under the Obama Administration has spent over $4 billion on contracts labeled under information technology and software despite IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testifying this week that budgetary restraints prevented the agency from spending $10 million to save and store emails. Koskinen said “declining budget resources” at the IRS caused the agency decided to reject spending the $10 million needed to ensure emails were properly secured. A review of IRS spending by the Free Beacon shows the agency has spent a massive amount on what it labeled as IT/software and data processing contracts in the past five fiscal years....

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Texas Congressmen Louie Gohmert and Bill Flores introduced legislation that offers a $1 million reward for any individual who can recover former IRS director Lois Lerner’s "lost" emails. An additional $500,000 would be given in exchange for information regarding the destruction of the emails. The Identify and Recover Sent E-mails (IRS) Act (H.R. 4958), if passed, would cut the salaries of IRS employees by 20 percent until the emails are recovered. Flores told Breitbart Texas that he was inspired to take action after groups in his district were unfairly targeted by the IRS. "A Tea Party group in my district...

Attorney General Eric Holder should be impeached if he refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas). With the IRS claiming to have lost two years of former official Lois Lerner’s emails, Cruz is headed to the floor to introduce a resolution calling for the special prosecutor. “He’s going to say, if Attorney General Holder does not appoint a special prosecutor, he should be impeached,” a Cruz aide told National Review Online. “Eric Holder has been at the center of every big scandal in...

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA) demanded a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS over its targeting of conservative groups and the disappearance of emails from key officials. Issa declared that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is “not the ideal person, not even an appropriate person” to oversee the investigation into the IRS’ conducts, and that this case calls for a true, special, independent prosecutor who has the ability to issue warrants, to seize materials, to safeguard documents and other information before it goes away and get to the truth.” He added that a special prosecutor will almost certainly...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is currently claiming that seven different IRS officials experienced computer crashes that erased their emails and made it impossible for the IRS to cooperate with congressional investigations into the IRS targeting matter. The wave of computer crashes apparently struck both Washington, D.C. — where Lois Lerner oversaw the agency’s Exempt Organizations division — and also Cincinnati, Ohio — where agents processed tax-exempt applications. The Federal Records Act requires IRS employees to save all of their emails pertaining to agency business and to also print those emails out in case they have a computer crash.

No hard drive crash could prevent the release of the email revealing Lois Lerner’s attempt to persecute Senator Chuck Grassley for receiving an invitation because it was sent from her Blackberry (hat tip: Ed Driscoll). This immediately raises the question of what other emails may have been routed through her Blackberry.You may recall that just a couple of days ago, IRS commissioner John Koskinen declared that he didn’t know whether or not she had a Blackberry. That convenient obfuscation is no longer operative. Twitchy chronicles the Twitterverse’s reaction. Let’s see what kind of accident Lois will come up with to...

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.

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...

Ways and Means investigation uncovers push to audit Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Washington, DC – Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (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 Chuck Grassley (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 examination against...

Washington (CNN) - Expanding his IRS investigation by more than two decades, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-California, has sent a subpoena to the Federal Elections Commission for all communications involving former IRS administrator Lois Lerner from January 1, 1986 to the present day. This new search is the broadest-yet for records in a year-long investigation by Issa and congressional Republicans, who are trying to assess why the agency targeted tea party and other political groups for extra scrutiny.

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...