IRS Emails Found!

"The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed."

Washington Times

Look, they found all those missing IRS emails.  Despite the multiple crashed and trashed hard drives, the emails are still there.  Wow!  I don't work at the IRS and I knew the emails were still available.  Somehow, the head of the IRS reported to Congress that the emails were lost.  He claimed to have made much effort into retrieving the emails.  Either he is abysmally ignorant of how email works or he was lying to Congress.  The lowliest of lowly IT personnel at the IRS could have explained to Commissioner Koskinen that the emails were recoverable from offsite backups.  Obviously, he didn't ask.  Or, if he did, then he was clearly lying to Congress.

So why would he lie?  If, as some have told me, the IRS was equally harsh against both conservative Tea Party groups and liberal groups, why try to cover up the evidence that must surely show exactly that?  Obviously, it doesn't show that.  It almost certainly shows that the IRS under the Obama Administration was used to harass enemies.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, there would be demands to track this to its source.  In fact, it would be assumed that the source was the Republican president and the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment.

Link to the story:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/irs-watchdog-reveals-lois-lerner-missing-emails-no/?page=2

Email Archiving! What a concept!

Came across this link on Instapundit.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac

The IRS has had an email backup solution since 2005 with a company that advertises as 'Email Archiving Done Right.'  Huh.  Either this company is going to take a major hit for such a huge - and growing - failure or it might say, "Here they are."

 

Again, the idea that the emails are lost is ludicrous and will only convince the ignorant or willfully blind.  This is an obvious cover-up.  I'm sure the media would be equally understanding if a Republican administration apparently used the IRS to squash opposition and then stonewalled a Congressional investigation.

You don't have mail

There are times when I am astonished at the stories the administration will tell.  As an IT guy who has a basic understanding of email, I look at the story of Lois Lerner's lost emails on account of a hard drive crash as an obvious lie.  We use Exchange at my work.  My email is not on my computer, it is on the Exchange server.  It is also in the inbox to whomever it was sent.  So, unless Ms. Lerner only sent email to herself, one hard drive failure can't destroy any of her emails.  Our server has multiple backups in case of failure and the data is backed up to tapes should the building burn down.  I was doing this sort of backup 16 years ago, which makes it unbelievable that the IRS isn't doing it today.  How many hard drives, servers, and offsite tape backups would have to be destroyed or fail to get rid of Ms. Lerner's emails?  A lot more than the one that is claimed.  This story is even worse since most people must see that it doesn't make sense.  Your average smartphone user can access email on the phone, or on the computer, or even on a tablet.  Most know that if their computer crashes, they haven't just lost all their emails.

If these emails really have been lost, it is because someone chose to lose them.  That would be a crime.  Why commit a crime to hold back these emails?  Much like Nixon's tapes, there is something in those emails the administration or the IRS doesn't want revealed.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, the media would be howling day and night.  This cover-up is so obvious as to insult the intelligence of anyone with even a moderate amount of tech savvy.

Insanity in Government

Imagine you own a business.  Everything seems to be humming along fine but you start getting complaints about one of your employees.  Being a responsible business owner, you call the employee in and ask about it:

"I've been getting a lot of complaints about you.  Tell me your side of the story."

"I did nothing wrong but I'm going to invoke my 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination."

"Oh?  Well, I'm going to have to put you on administrative leave - with full pay, of course - until I get to the bottom of all these complaints."

Employee whistles a happy tune as he heads home for an extended paid vacation.

Not how you would react to an employee who essentially admitted criminal wrongdoing?  That is how the Federal government reacted to Lois Lerner of the IRS.  She declared her innocence and then pleaded the 5th.  Greg Roseman, a Deputy Director of the IRS, also invoked the 5th.

Maybe I'm missing something, but any employee who refuses to report to the boss on what is happening in his department by saying it might be self-incriminating should be fired on the spot.  The original purpose of that clause in the 5th Amendment was to disallow law enforcement from wringing confessions via torture.  There is no threat of torture by Congress, unless one considers droning self-aggrandizing speeches to be torture.  These folks either did something that may be criminal or they are protecting someone else.

 

The original story was that 'rogue agents' were being overzealous but that doesn't jibe with the deputy director invoking the 5th.  Something stinks at the IRS.  As I have long suggested, we should repeal the 16th Amendment (Income Tax) and thus rid ourselves of the IRS and starve an increasingly tyrannical government of funds.

Scandal Smorgasbord

Hardly even into his second term and Obama has been beset by a bumper crop of scandals, any one of which would topple a Republican president.

 

Benghazi: Oh, look, it turns out that there wasn't a demonstration that got out of hand and that stupid video played no role in the attack.  Susan Rice's talking points had undergone a dozen revisions before she was sent to parrot the nonsense on 5 Sunday talk shows.  The White House knew that it was a terrorist attack while it was still in progress.  Moreover, they knew it was an Al Qaeda affiliate.  Gosh, lucky none of that came out during the campaign.

 

IRS: The IRS harassed conservative groups from 2010 through the 2012 election and the former acting commissioner brushed it off as 'bad customer service.'  Funny how only Tea Party groups suffered this bad service.  Back in 2009, people laughed when Obama playfully joked about auditing them for not giving him an honorary degree.  Well, it seems he wasn't joking.  Many will say that Obama never gave the order so he isn't to blame.  Hmm, I remember the Bush White House saying something like that with regard to Abu Graib but the press asserted that Bush had baked such into the culture of his administration.  Let's see, who said you should reward your friends and punish your enemies?  Obama.  Who attacked the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision (the one that made these tax-exempt groups possible)?  Obama.  Sounds like the president gave some guidelines in his speeches.

 

AP Phone Records: The DOJ scooped up the phone records of a wide swath of AP reporters for two months to catch a leaker.  Hey, why not just get the phone records of every reporter so you don't miss something?

 

Fox News: AG Holder approved naming James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a leak investigation.  So, a reporter who gets a scoop is now to be a criminal.  Must not allow information to be released that the government doesn't want the people to know.  What Freedom of the Press?

 

Obamacare Donations: The Congress has not allocated sufficient funds to get all of the state exchanges up and running so HHS Secretary Sebelius has been making the rounds asking for 'donations.'  Sure, she is going to be regulating these companies once Obamacare is fully in force but don't think that a failure to offer a 'donation' will affect how stringently the rules are enforced.

 

Government Bullying: A couple in Texas sought to get tax-exempt status for a Tea Party related group and soon thereafter were interviewed by the FBI (multiple times), audited by the IRS, audited by ATF (twice), and had a visit from OSHA.  Somehow, that doesn't seem like a coincidence.

One Republican said that impeachment wasn't off the table; that Republican is a fool.  Short of being captured on camera killing someone (who is not a Republican), there is no way a Democrat Senate is going to convict a Democrat President in an impeachment trial.  It is an utter waste of time to go down that path, or even suggest that path is a possibility.  It didn't work out too well last time.

 

David Axelrod made a cogent point (accidentally, I suspect): he said that the government is too big for one man to control.  I am in complete agreement.  We need to shrink the government to a more manageable size.  When it gets down to a size where Obama isn't still claiming to be out of the loop, we will know we have reached the appropriate amount of government.  Oh happy day!