“She Can See Things 16 Days Before They Happen”: The Woman At The Center Of The IRS ‘Scandal’ Must Be Clairvoyant
If I were the Republican Party, rather than attacking Lois Lerner as a modern-day E. Howard Hunt, I’d hire her as an election consultant. Why? Because the former commissioner at the center of the “newly re-burgeoning” IRS “scandal” is clearly a clairvoyant. I should think she’d be pretty handy for Reince Priebus to have around this October. You see, she can see things 16 days before they happen.
How do I know this? Consider the timeline of events. Lerner, who worked in the service’s Washington office, was first alerted that employees in the Cincinnati branch were using “inappropriate criteria” (key words like “tea party”) to process the applications of nonprofit groups on June 29, 2011. This comes from the very Treasury Department IG report that first made this whole business public. See the timeline here.
OK, so that’s that. Now, you’ve been hearing all this stuff lately about her lost emails, right? Her emails from between January 2009 and April 2011 disappeared. Went poof. It was in early 2010 that the IRS began using the inappropriate criteria. Looks awfully suspicious, doesn’t it? She lost all her emails pertaining to the period under examination and then some. Stinks to high heaven. Some have compared the missing two-plus years to the famous 18 1/2-minute gap in the Watergate tapes.
One problem. Her computer crashed on June 13, 2011. It was the following day that she wrote to other IRS personnel to tell them: “My computer crashed yesterday.” This date was noted last week by Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
That was when all those emails disappeared on her. It happened 16 days before she even knew about the problem in the Cincinnati office. So how likely is it that she deleted those emails in order to prevent House investigators from being able to learn anything about the “scandal”? Considering that she didn’t know about the problem yet, I’d say bloody unlikely.
In other words, this is just another ridiculous allegation in a parade of them. Admittedly, all of these revelations have looked dubious at first glance. But all of them have fizzled upon serious examination. It wasn’t just groups on the right that were targeted. The IRS head who visited the White House 155 times or whatever it was turns out to have gone to the Old Executive Office Building, not the White House, most of those times, and largely to talk about the IRS’ role in crafting and implementing Obamacare. And so on.
On top of that, the idea that Obama himself had some hand in this stuff, which was of course the original suspicion and orgasmatronic dream in Wingnuttia, is and always has been utterly crazy. I wouldn’t have put much past George W. Bush, but I would never have believed that even he would have orchestrated a scandal with such little upside (keeping some groups from getting 501c3 status) and such massive downside (possible Nixonian illegality). Dick Cheney, maybe, but not Bush.
And on top of that, the extremely unsurprising fact is that federal government computers crash all the time. These agencies’ internal operations are all underfunded, and bureaucrats all over the country are using primitive computers that groan under the weight of today’s demands. Plus, requirements for data preservation are fairly lax—and even if they weren’t, problems happen in this realm frequently.
Remember the Bush-era U.S. attorney firings? The Bush White House announced that it had lost 5 million emails during that probe. Not all emails relating to the Valerie Plame investigation were properly preserved. And finally, a Justice Department report found that many emails written by and to two Bush administration officials who’d been involved in crafting the “torture is legal” argument had suddenly gone missing. I’m sure the people today saying that the IRS scandal is bigger than Watergate were making excuses then.
In this case, no excuses need to be made. Unless Lois Lerner is a clairvoyant, the idea that she deleted emails on June 13 to cover up behavior she didn’t even learn about until June 29 is simply preposterous to any rational person with even a passing respect for facts and evidence. Unfortunately, that doesn’t describe Darrell Issa, who is holding another hearing Monday night (yes, night!), casting his fishing line out into the sea one more time. His colleague Trey Gowdy is going to be getting all the Benghazi headlines once that committee is up and running, so Issa has to find something to do, I suppose.
What’s amusing to me here is this: Conservatives are the people who think government can’t do anything right. That is exactly the situation we have here. IRS employees in Cincinnati really screwed up the processing of applications. The people in the charge of them in Washington were to some degree asleep. Computers crashed and emails were lost. As far as conservatives are concerned, that’s what government does all the time.
To conservatives, that usually explains a lot. But here of course they thought they had a chance to advance the more delectably sinister theory that Obama is out to destroy his political enemies. But sorry. Obama’s no Nixon, and Lois Lerner is no Rose Mary Woods.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 23, 2014
“When A Bombshell Is A Dud”: Republicans Don’t Seem To Realize The Extent To Which They Are Embarrassing Themselves
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), struggling to shake his well-deserved reputation as a “laughably inept” clown, did his level best this week to revive the discredited IRS “scandal.” Relying on a partial transcript — one of his favorite tactics — Issa fed the media what he said was a scoop.
When IRS officials in Cincinnati needed guidance on how to deal with questionable tax-exempt applications, they solicited feedback from the agency’s Washington office. Among those who weighed in was the IRS’s lawyer, which obviously makes sense given the circumstances.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan, whose uncontrollable contempt for President Obama has become difficult to watch, found this revelation fascinating.
The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office — that had been established — but to the office of the chief counsel.
That is a bombshell — such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing…. Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it.
Sigh.
It troubles me that the right doesn’t realize the extent to which it’s embarrassing itself. The revelation isn’t a “bombshell”; it’s trivia we learned in mid-May. Indeed, Peggy Noonan herself knows this. I don’t mean she should know this; I mean there’s evidence she literally knows it — she wrote a column in May that referenced the same boring tidbit she now considers a “bombshell.”
Here’s what probably happened. Noonan learned a fairly mundane detail in May and wrote about it in a column. Then she forgot it. Two months later, Darrell Issa said he wants the media to take the mundane detail seriously for no particular reason, and Noonan, unwilling to reference her own work, rediscovers her fascination with the unimportant point.
Ben Smith recently characterized Noonan as the “last interesting columnist standing.” If by “interesting” he meant “lazy and blindly partisan,” I’m inclined to agree.
Of course, Noonan isn’t the only Republican who’s failing miserably to revive the ridiculous IRS “scandal.”
Issa’s hearing was itself an attempt to convince the political world the story still deserves to be taken seriously. It arguably had the opposite of the intended effect.
The inspector general behind the critical report about the IRS’ targeting of tea party groups acknowledged Thursday that the information in his report was not complete.
J. Russell George, the IRS inspector general, told the House Oversight Committee that only in the past few weeks has he become aware of documents showing that the IRS screened progressive groups in addition to conservative ones. George said he was “disturbed” by the fact that these documents were not provided to his team of investigators prior to the audit’s release and that he was continuing to investigate the issue.
“I am concerned that there may be additional pieces of information that we don’t have,” he said. “I’m very concerned about that sir.”
Oh, you mean “additional pieces of information” such as the fact that liberal groups were subjected to the same scrutiny as conservative groups? And there was no targeting of conservative organizations? And that politics had nothing to do with the added scrutiny?
And that this entire controversy is based on a report that by its author’s own admission, presents an inaccurate picture of reality?
Perhaps my favorite moment of yesterday’s hearing came when George was asked why his report failed to mention that he found literally zero evidence of political motivations on the part of the IRS, even after he reviewed 5,500 emails on the matter. George responded that he couldn’t have known “if there was an email that was destroyed.”
Oh my.
Making matters much worse, the hearing devolved into farce when Issa accused Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who is African American, of reminding him of a “little boy.” Issa later clarified he didn’t mean for the comment to sound so racist.
I’m not going to say the IRS scandal is officially over now, because for anyone who gives a darn about reality, this point came and went weeks ago. I will say that to continue to believe this story has merit and deserves to be taken seriously is deeply, painfully foolish.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 19, 2013
“An Untenable Position”: How John Boehner And Republicans Helped Create The IRS Scandal
The political powers the IRS was recently accused of abusing to harass Tea Party groups were given to it against its will by Congress — including some of the agency’s biggest critics today — over 10 years ago, according to documents and a former senior tax official. The revelation, which has been missing in most if not all of the commentary on the scandal, adds a key bit of context to it.
In a half-measure effort to strengthen campaign finance disclosure laws in 2000, Congress put the IRS, effectively for the first time, in the awkward position of having to make judgment calls about whether nonprofit advocacy groups would be required to disclose their donors because too much of their activities crossed the theoretical line between “issues advocacy” and “political campaign intervention.” It’s a messy and inherently subjective business, and something officials did not want to get more involved in, predicting it would lead to exactly the kind of controversy we just witnessed. “The IRS would inevitably be subject to claims of discrimination and political bias for actions taken or not taken,” an internal memo from the Treasury Department’s office of Tax Policy sent in June 2000 and obtained by Salon reads.
“The fuse was lit in 2000 with this law, which put the IRS in an untenable position. It’s almost surprising it didn’t explode on them earlier,” Steven Arkin, a former senior Treasury and IRS official, who proceeded Lois Lerner as the director of rulings and agreements for the IRS’ tax exempt organizations office, told Salon.
The law, a stand-alone bill numbered H.R.4762, had the best of intentions, but backfired thanks to an enormous loophole. After a comprehensive campaign finance bill failed, reformers pushed a narrow bill to increase disclosure of groups organized under section 527 of the tax code. That was reserved for groups primarily involved in electoral politics — but before this law, 527s that didn’t engage in explicit electoral intervention didn’t have to file any paperwork of any kind with the IRS. They incorporated as legal entities in their states, and that was that. No information on donors, expenditures or even their existence needed to be made public. If they did engage in electioneering, they would have to disclose that information to the FEC, but only for each specific activity. Thanks to the lax standards, these groups earned the moniker “Stealth PACs” and became the bane of campaign finance reform advocates.
When lawmakers brought up a bill to force 527 groups to disclose their donors just before Congress was about to go on its July 4 recess in 2000, they made a concession to skeptical Republicans and some Democrats who were looking out for liberal nonprofits: 501(c) groups — business leagues and the so-called social welfare organizations at the center of this year’s IRS controversy — would not be included. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, since almost everyone who wanted to meddle in politics organized as a 527 and not a 501(c)4. Both types of groups are tax-exempt, but 527′s had free rein to engage in electoral politics, while 501(c)4′s are limited to spending less than half their money on it. Social welfare and other groups are permitted to engage in unlimited issue advocacy, so long as their efforts to elect or defeat particular candidates were not their “primary” activity.
But former Sen. Russ Feingold, a staunch campaign finance reform advocate, saw what would happen if you cracked down on 527′s and not 501(c)4′s. “By only focusing on disclosure in one type of tax-exempt organization and not on others, we leave open the use of the other type of tax-exempt organizations by those who want to hide their contributions and activity behind the cloak of anonymity that these tax-exempt organizations provide,” Feingold warned on the floor during the Senate’s very short debate. He added that he was concerned that the IRS was “not prepared” to take on this burden, given the administration’s concern.
Sen. John McCain, the Senate sponsor, said that while it would be nice to do all groups, “focusing narrowly on 527 organizations” was necessary to “ensure that the legislation survives a constitutional test.” In the House, Wisconsin Democrat Tom Barrett, acknowledged that “this bill is not perfect” since it exempted social welfare organizations, but said including them might be “poison pill provisions” that would “scuttle this important reform effort.”
The bill passed overwhelmingly in both chambers. In the House, it was 385-39, with the “yay” column including Republican Reps. John Boehner, Dave Camp, Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint and many others who would later make hay of the way the IRS regulated 501(c) groups. Meanwhile, the Senate approved it 92-6, with McCain, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum and many others voting in favor. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a longtime opponent of campaign finance reform, voted no, but said, “I recommend to my Republican colleagues that they vote for this bill,” calling it “relatively benign and harmless.”
The fallout was not particularly surprising. Two months after the law went into effect, the Washington Post reported that “instead of complying with the new law, a number of groups are instead reconstituting themselves under other provisions of the tax code that do not force them to reveal their donors.” Ben Ginsberg, a prominent GOP election lawyer, told the Post he couldn’t keep up with with his clients’ requests to convert. “We’d be running out of fingers and toes” just to count them all, he said. Claiming to be new groups, they reorganized as 501(c)4′s, which can do basically all the same things the old 527′s did, just under a different section of the tax code. So in the end, Congress swapped out 527 “Stealth PACs” for 501(c)4 “Dark Money” groups.
But while the change seems banal, it effectively transferred oversight of this species in the campaign finance ecology to the IRS, an agency less well equipped to handle delicate political questions than the FEC, which was designed with a bipartisan commission and other features precisely to handle touchy political issues, including fundraising matters impacting members of Congress themselves.
“The proposals to amend the Internal Revenue Code would put the IRS in the position where it, rather than the FEC, must become the “watchdog,” the Treasury Department memo, first reported by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, warned before the law passed. “Imposition of such a burden on the IRS would be an administrative nightmare for the agency.”
“It never should have been given to the IRS,” said Arkin, the former tax official.
It’s a fitting coda to the IRS scandal that the problem was largely created by the people most outraged by it.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, July 11, 2013
“An Incompetent Glory Hound”: Darrell Issa Is Really Terrible At His Job
In case you lost track of the IRS scandal, here’s where it’s at right now: House Oversight Committee members are releasing dueling transcripts of witness testimony to the press. There is a big fight about it. It is maybe kind of boring.
Darrell Issa, Republican chairmain of the committee, has been selectively releasing snippets of testimony to the press, all of it designed to support his contention that the IRS targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny of their nonprofit status was a political maneuver ordered or somehow directed by the White House. There is literally no evidence for that claim and it’s not true but Issa is sort of bad at his job in many important respects. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings asked Issa to please release full transcripts of witness testimony, but Issa refused, so Cummings just did so, with a full transcript of the committee’s interview with an IRS employee who seems to have been the first one to flag a “Tea Party” group’s application for tax-exempt status for further review.
This employee describes himself as “a conservative Republican” and he states outright that there was no political motivation, and certainly no White House responsibility, for the IRS’s actions.
Issa’s response to this is to claim that releasing the testimony will hurt his investigation because it will provide a “road map” for future witnesses wishing to mislead the committee. (Denying that politics had anything to do with it, who else would have independently come up with that?) The right-wing media response has been to basically ignore the content of what Cummings released and to trash him for attempting to defend the White House.
Cummings isn’t trying to sway right-wing bloggers, though. He’s not even trying to sway the public at large. What he’s trying to do is get the press to say outright what everyone in Washington already knows: Issa never has the goods to back up his claims. Cummings is trying to make it possible for the press to challenge Issa’s credibility without violating their own rules of objectivity.
Of course, everyone in the political press knows that Issa is a publicity hound who regularly makes outrageous accusations and insinuations and rarely has any evidence supporting his more outrageous claims. Everyone in the press knows this, but conventions of objective journalism prevent them from saying as much to their audiences, and so 47 percent of Americans believe the White House directly instructed the IRS to target conservative groups.
In that respect the IRS investigations looks like a huge success. But Issa’s record is actually really terrible. He has investigated everything he can think of and nothing went anywhere.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s one job is to get scalps. He is supposed to force embarrassing resignations. He has not yet forced a single one. When Issa took control of the House Oversight Committee in early 2011, he announced plans to investigate WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae, corruption in Afghanistan, the FDA, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and business regulations. He has investigated Solyndra and Fast and Furious and Benghazi and come up with nothing. So far the acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, because the president asked him to. Issa hasn’t managed one single clean hit.
What Issa has managed to do is create a series of very silly graphics hyping his investigations in the style of funny image macros and film posters. He has managed to make conservatives agree with him that Barack Obama is the most corrupt president in history and he has managed to make a large minority of voters feel that the White House is probably hiding something.
In terms of the 2014 elections, he is, so far, probably helping the GOP more than he is hurting it. So Issa’s record, honestly, is mixed. He is quite bad at his job in most respects, but not quite as historically useless as Tea Party mascots like Louie Gohmert. But it does seem to me that Republicans would be better served by not having an incompetent glory hound chairing the most politically useful House committee. I guess they don’t have a lot of great options, considering the rest of the House GOP.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 19, 2013
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