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posted by janrinok on Thursday August 28 2014, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-is-wrong dept.

Ars is reporting someone at the DOJ said they have the Lois Lerner emails in off-site backup tapes.

Unnamed Department of Justice attorneys admitted to an attorney from the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch that backups exist of the e-mail messages of former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner. In a press release on the organization’s website, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that the DOJ official claimed that accessing the specific e-mails in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the IRS would be too difficult, as they were retained in an offsite backup for disaster recovery.

Then the Whitehouse promptly denied this.

An unnamed White House official told The Hill that no new backups had been discovered. "The administration official said that the inspector general is examining whether any data can be recovered from the previously recycled back-up tapes and suggested that could be the cause of the confusion between the government and Judicial Watch," The Hill's Bernie Becker reported.

Isn't government corruption theater fun?

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @07:06PM (#87333)

    If you can't be bothered to provide a single citation, I can't be bothered to take your claims seriously.
    It isn't my job to prove you right.
    At this point you'll probably cite a trivial claim like the shill but none of your actually damning accusations, since this story is about to fall off the front page I won't even see that. But you keep right on living in your fantasy world, it gives you something to suckle on.

  • (Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 29 2014, @10:45PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 29 2014, @10:45PM (#87394) Journal

    Let's start with my first allegation, "Lois Lerner planted a shill at a news conference in order to release the story in a controlled manner". After googling for "Lerner staged", I got this [usnews.com] as the third link.

    "I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the [American Bar Association] Tax Section's Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks," Roady said in a statement to U.S. News and World Report. "I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day. We had no discussion thereafter on the topic of the question, nor had we spoken about any of this before I received her call. She did not tell me, and I did not know, how she would answer the question."

    To continue:

    Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted to House lawmakers Friday during an oversight hearing of the controversy that the question was a plant. The IRS was aware of a forthcoming Treasury Department Inspector General Report that would condemn the targeting of groups applying for 501(c)(4) status if they contained the words "tea party," "patriot" or "9/12."

    So we also have motive for doing so. To control release of the information ahead of an Inspector General report which would have announced that the IRS were doing this illegal practice anyway.

    Second allegation: "What we do know is that certain non-profit groups associated with political opposition to the Obama administration experienced a period of two years of limbo where they were neither approved or disapproved by cohorts of Lerner, leading up to the 2012 election."

    Googling for "irs targeting" [google.com] yields the Wikipedia story [google.com] on the IRS targeting scandal high up the list of search results.

    Over the two years between April 2010 and April 2012, the IRS essentially placed on hold the processing of applications for 501(c)(4) tax-exemption status received from organizations with "Tea Party", "patriots", or "9/12" in their names. While apparently none of these organizations' applications were denied during this period,[Note 2] only 4 were approved.[53] During the same general period, the agency approved applications from several dozen presumably liberal-leaning organizations whose names included terms such as "progressive", "progress", "liberal", or "equality".[53][54] However, the IRS also selected several progressive- or Democratic-leaning organizations for increased scrutiny. An affiliate of the liberal group Emerge America had its request for tax-exempt status denied, leading to a review (and the eventual revocation) of the larger Emerge America organization's tax-exempt status.[52] The conservative National Review states that a November 2010 version of the IRS's BOLO list indicates that liberal and conservative groups were in fact treated differently because liberal groups could be approved for tax-exempt status by line agents, while tea party groups could not.[6]

    Those bracketed numbers refer to original sources such as the source [nytimes.com] for the allegation that "only 4 were approved".

    And notice that last sentence. That backs my assertion that "his effect didn't extend to groups more favorable of Obama which usually were accepted or rejected in a timely manner."

    The Wikipedia article goes on to describe a variety of incriminating activities such as Lerner pleading the Fifth (a US amendment that prohibits people from being forced to testify against themselves), lying about the extent of the activity (Lerner originally claimed it was just restricted to some rogue agents in the Cincinnati office, which was later determined to be incorrect), and that Lerner knew of the activities in 2011 long before she issued her staged apology for the affair which kicked off public scrutiny.

    And of course, we have the statements: "Further, when Congress requested emails of Lerner and other workers, suddenly those emails were unavailable with the claim being that they were lost in a hard disk crash more than a year prior. We now find that these emails weren't lost, or at least shouldn't have been lost due to hardware error, because there were other backups done of email systems which Lerner used - as expected."

    These are cited by the links of the current story.

    The Blackberry allegation: "Further, we see that another computer system, Lerner's Blackberry was apparently allowed to be wiped despite knowledge of an ongoing congressional investigation."

    Googling for "lerner blackberry" [google.com] yields this Ars Technica story [arstechnica.com].

    While controversy still swirls over whether the Internal Revenue Service has backup tapes with the “lost” e-mails of former IRS executive Lois Lerner, an IRS attorney confirmed that the agency had disposed of Lerner’s government-issued BlackBerry in June of 2012.

    That would mean that the destruction of the data on the phone—including e-mails that may have been part of the missing messages both Congress and the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch have sought from the agency—happened after congressional staffers had begun asking her about the alleged targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. But it was over a year after the loss of e-mails on Lerner’s personal computer due to a reported hard drive crash.

    Incidentally, this is all illegal not just because it's destruction of evidence in an ongoing investigation of an actual crime, but because it violates the Federal Records Act [dailycaller.com].

    “The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential transactions, and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.