Another incredible account of federal officials failing to follow federal law.
The IRS has acknowledged destroying 400 backup tapes containing 24,000 Lois Lerner emails. This happened, inadvertently the agency says, after Congress subpoenaed the material in its investigation into the IRS improperly targeting conservative groups.
Lerner was an IRS manager at the center of the controversy. She and the IRS claimed that emails Congress wanted were destroyed. Congress discovered that they were, in fact, contained on backup tapes, though the IRS had not volunteered that fact. Congress then subpoenaed the tapes. Now, the IRS has revealed it erased the backups after receiving the subpoena and a protective order prohibiting the destruction of the emails.
When such a thing happens with investigations involving ordinary citizens, those responsible are held accountable, even if they claim ignorance of the law.
In this instance, nobody has– so far– been held accountable.
Read the story below:
There’s some astounding coincidences in that once again it’s a couple of low level employees who are the “problem.” This is reminiscent of the blame laid on “those rogue employees in Cincinnati” when this scandal first broke a couple of years ago.
And the Democrats are still trying to make the scandal go away–similar to President Obama saying “there’s not one smidgeon of corruption.” A June 25, 2015 AP article quotes Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the committee’s top Democrat: “This investigation has squandered tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in a failed scavenger hunt for any possible evidence to support wild Republican accusations against Lois Lerner, the IRS, and the White House.”
In the 1990’s the IRS, with help from the Merit Systems Protection Board, made some truly serious scandals “go away.” So, they’ve progressed–they now seem to feel they’re impervious to Congressional oversight!