SERIOUS DEVELOPMENT – Just before the IRS Goes Back To Court Tomorrow !
A rather large and explosive development in the ongoing IRS scandal. An email trail revealed today shows IRS Head Lois Lerner was worried in April 2013 about congress looking into her email conversations and warns colleagues to be careful about what is communicated. (*note* read bottom to top) :
Wow – In April 2013 email, Lois Lerner expressed concern abt what Congress might find in internal #IRS emails. http://t.co/7Fuj58YXoW
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) July 9, 2014
(via GretaWire) […] On April 9, 2013, Lois Lerner, the Director of Exempt Organization at the IRS, sent an email to Maria Hooke, who is an IT person at the IRS, and copied Nanette Downing, who was in charge of organizational audits as the Acting Director of Exempt Organizations-Examinations at the IRS.
In the message, Lerner inquires about OCS (short for the program Office Communications Server) and when Congress requests emails from the IRS. Lerner says that she “cautioning folks about email” and how Congress sometimes asks for emails. Therefore Lerner concludes “we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”
Then Hooke responds that messages on OCS “are not set to automatically save as the standard.” She notes someone involved in the messages “in an OCS conversation can copy and save the contents of the conversation to an email or file.”
Hooke says that the emails will not automatically pop up in a request. But they could pop up if the conversation was saved.
Hooke suggests that the IRS “trat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somwhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.”
Lerner replies with a one word missive: “Perfect.”
Tomorrow and Friday might well be two of the most revealing days in the IRS scandal. The IRS will appear in two different court jurisdictions to explain the now infamous, lost but never reported, missing Lois Lerner emails.
Tomorrow the IRS will have to explain in federal court the context of their failure to preserve evidence for the longstanding Judicial Watch lawsuit.
A year ago, back in May 13th of 2013, the Lois Lerner emails were the subject of a specific JW lawsuit over non-compliance with FOIA. The IRS has never told the court in this case that any emails were lost/missing.
This sets the stage to understand the explosive nature of the April 2013 email correspondence, with Lerner worried about outsiders seeing the communication, against this FOIA lawsuit the following month (May 2013) which will be the subject of tomorrows court hearing.
Then on Friday of this week, the IRS will be back in court trying to block a motion filed by Houston based True The Vote which seeks to have independent outside digital forensics experts comb through the IRS email files to see if the IRS claim is valid.
Judge Reggie Walton has agreed to hear arguments in support of True The Vote’s motion.
At the heart of both cases the essential argument is one of the IRS’s non-compliance with evidence security.
“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote’s attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.
Lois Lerner’s actions may lay at the heart of the issues the IRS is now defending themselves against, but Lerner herself has remained silent following her decision to plead the fifth in front of congress.
However, in an odd change of events recently Lerner’s attorney, William Taylor III, has been speaking publicly in defense of his client.
During one of those interviews Taylor seemed to clearly outline that his client was merely responding to requests from inside the Department of Justice when she sent massive data files from the IRS to the DOJ.
Oversight GOP has also hit Lerner for giving 1.1 million pages of tax return data about 501(c)(4) organizations to the FBI just before the 2010 midterms — 33 tax returns that included unlawfully disclosed private taxpayer information.
Taylor said Lerner didn’t know and sent them because Justice requested the documents: “She [understood] the donor information on Schedule B had been removed. In some cases, we later learned, it may not have been.”
The IRS has acknowledged that the 33 returns were not scrubbed of taxpayer information as required by law. (cont.)
The data was sent on a series of CD-Rom discs. However, some of those files contained tax returns for Thirty Three 501(c)(4) organizations – including tax filing information “Schedule B reports” which outline the contributors, donors, supporters and affiliates with the 501 organizations.
HERE’S THE LARGER ISSUE – In short, by violating tax law Lois Lerner gave the DOJ a list of people who align with interests that are adverse to the Obama administration.
If the DOJ extracted the individual donor/supporter information from the thirty three ‘schedule B’s’ – they would possess a significant list of activists who have been working diligently to oppose Obama policy.
The potential exists for the DOJ to have “weaponized various agencies” to target the people who were on that list. [<– This is the ultimate issue at the heart of the matter]
So far the DOJ has remained silent about whether such a list was actually created.
Actually, and perhaps more importantly, so far no-one in congress has even asked the DOJ.
Until recently when William Taylor III spoke in defense of his client, no-one was even aware the originating party for delivery of the data was a request by the DOJ.
We do know that some people and groups have been targeted. We also do know that some of those same people are likely to be on a collective list of the “schedule B” entities.
Individual people who likely would have appeared on that list, if constructed, have specifically been targeted. This is not disputed. The question is: “were they targeted because they were on this list”?
The more dots you gather, the more the picture clarifies.
We feel there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest the DOJ was the origin of the entire Targeting Scheme.
Further, when you place the empirical evidence, especially the IG report, the 21 CD-ROM’s, the 33 Schedule B’s; together with the actual outcomes: groups and individuals found investigated/audited by IRS, ATF, OSHA, EPA etc; and place those two evidence groups beside the circumstantial evidence (the email trail and multi-year communications) a significantly compelling set of facts present themselves to point in a very specific direction.
If it looks like weaponization of government, walks like weaponization of government, talks like weaponization of government and sounds like weaponization of government…. well,…. you get the picture.
However, the search to get to the truth is challenging and made worse by Congress.
Congress is blocking progress toward the truth because the GOP appears to find a higher value in the political advantage of the controversy – more than exposing the unlawful activity behind it; and the law they are sworn to uphold.
Many, including us, are frustrated at Congress’s seeming incapacity to construct direct inquiry and call forth witnesses, specific witnesses, to expose this scheme.
So long as congress remains focused on questioning high level political appointees – skilled in obfuscation and avoidance – they will continue to have multi-hour hearings about the definition of “there”, “is”, and “full”.
However, the private lawsuits provide hope for a genuine discovery and public airing of the entire scheme.
