IRS Claims to Have Lost Over 2 Years of Lerner Emails

[UncleBeer 244]

Friday seems to be the day the preznit's minions like to try to sneak their bad news past the press.

IRS Had “Secret Research Project” For Conservative Donor Lists

On September 4, we released a new batch of IRS email documents revealing that under former IRS official Lois Lerner, the agency seems to acknowledge having needlessly solicited donor lists from non-profit political groups. According to a May 21, 2012, memo from the IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel: “such information was not needed across-the-board and not used in making the agency’s determination on exempt status.” Outrageously, it wasn’t until one year later, on May 10, 2013, that Lerner finally conceded that the requests for donor names were “not appropriate, not usual.” (These remarks by Lerner were staged and were the first IRS admission of its improper targeting of Obama’s perceived enemies.)

Not surprisingly, the new documents JW obtained also reveal that 75% of the groups from which the lists were solicited were apparently conservative, with only 5% being liberal. So, Lerner and her IRS collaborators knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the donor lists they had wrongly solicited would be filled with the names of those who had opposed the Obama policies.

These new smoking gun documents came in response to a court order from our October 2013 FOIA lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:13-cv-01559)) filed against the IRS after the agency unlawfully refused to respond to four FOIA requests dating back to May 2013. The emails are contained in the sixth batch of documents the IRS has been forced to produce in response to the Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit.

They themselves freely admit they had no business asking for donor lists, and that conservative groups were by far the main targets of this abuse of power.

Time for the preznit to assign a special prosecutor, since he's all about the rule of law.

[lostinblue 1,989]

Holder will be on the job soon ... Have to finish up that zimmerman thing first.

[UncleBeer 244]

Holder will be on the job soon ... Have to finish up that zimmerman thing first.

And Ferguson as well. It's a hectic job, looking out for "his people".

[UncleBeer 244]

Now it appears that IRS was trying to do damage control on their targeting of conservative groups. If it took over a year and scores of lies to Congress for only this much info to emerge, imagine what has yet to be revealed.

E-mails show IRS attempts at damage control

WASHINGTON — The day that former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner publicly apologized for using "inappropriate criteria" to delay tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, she told her colleagues that they were being "beaten up by the press for all the wrong reasons."

It was only going to get worse, she told them in an e-mail, and there was no way around it other than to "ride it through."

Then she left for a week's vacation in Canada.

That e-mail comes in 1,706 pages of newly released documents that shed light on the damage control happening at the IRS — and at the watchdog agency investigating it — as the scandal blew up last year.

Lerner has emerged as the central figure in the IRS' handling of tax-exemption applications by conservative groups before the 2012 election. The Exempt Organizations office she headed subjected groups with names such as "Tea Party" and "Patriots" to more scrutiny and longer wait times than similar liberal advocacy groups, according to congressional Republicans.

The Democratic-controlled Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released the documents Friday along with a report finding that mismanagement, and not political bias, was responsible for the targeting.

The documents show Lerner's efforts to persuade Treasury auditors that there was no institutional bias at the IRS, the agency's attempts to head off a damaging investigation with a pre-emptive apology, and Lerner's pep talk to her staff after the apology.

Lerner has refused to testify about her role in the targeting, and the House has voted to hold her in contempt of Congress.