IRS to Congress, “Don’t like our answer? Tough!”

Good day all. As I write this, IRS commissioner John Koskinen is testifying before the House Ways and Means committee on the lost email, destroyed hard drives and all the other items regarding the IRS’s abuse of power.

To say that the committee is not happy with the answers would be the same as saying the Titanic had a small leak. Even Paul Ryan appears to have had enough with the obfuscation and dissembling by the Internal Revenue Service. Here are some of the details from Fox News:

Incredulous lawmakers tore into IRS Commissioner John Koskinen over the agency’s claims that subpoenaed emails of ex-official Lois Lerner and other employees are gone forever because a hard drive was destroyed.

“This is unbelievable,” Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., angrily told Koskinen. That’s your problem. Nobody believes you.”

Koskinen responded, “I have a long career. That’s the first time anyone’s said I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ryan shot back again.

I suspect that your long career Mr. Koskinen is going to be a bit shorter then you anticipated. You’re arrogant responses aren’t helping your agency at all and they aren’t doing your reputation much good either.

Koskinen set a defiant tone during his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, telling lawmakers he felt no need for the agency to apologize amid accusations of a cover-up in the targeting scandal of conservative groups. Republican lawmakers had demanded the emails between Lerner and other government officials – including at the White House – be turned over to determine whether there was a coordinated effort to stymie conservative groups prior to the 2012 elections.

“I don’t think an apology is owed,” he said. “We haven’t lost an email since the start of this investigation.”

I will say, in my opinion, that was an outright lie. The IRS is bound by very stringent data retention laws. The fact that they “Lost” Lois Lerner’s email for the exact period Congress is interested in, and then announced they also happened to “Lose” the email from six other parties makes everyone think “COVERUP!!!” The Republicans tore into Koskinen, ripping one bloody chunk after the other from his hide.

GOP lawmakers are furious after learning a week ago that many Lerner emails from a two-year period supposedly have disappeared. Committee Republicans now say that the IRS may have known about this for months, and that the agency may have lost emails from another six employees. That didn’t sit well with Chairman David Camp, R-Mich., who pressed the commissioner on the timeline of events and accused the agency of “keeping secrets.”

“The IRS in charge of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ information. And you’re now saying your technology system was so poor that years’ worth of emails are forever unrecoverable?” Camp charged. “How does that put anyone at ease? How far would the excuse ‘I lost it’ get with the IRS for an average American trying to file their yearly taxes who may have lost a few receipts.”

Not far at all, unless the prison they stick you in happens to be across the United States. Now the IRS was getting some help from Democrats on the committee, which is no surprise at all.

Rep. Carl Levin, D- Mich., stood up for the IRS Friday and likened the investigation and calls of a cover-up to a political witch hunt brought on by Republicans who he claims will try “to tie the problem to the White House” and will “keep up this drumbeat until the November election.” Levin chided his colleagues that, “witnesses deserve some respect.”

Now Carl Levin is not without a few problems regarding the IRS targeting conservative groups. Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information request with the IRS and managed to collect a few nice documents showing that Levin and other Democrats were pressuring the IRS to go after conservative tax exempt groups. Interestingly, other than Fox News, the only news organizations that actually reported this aren’t even American or in the United States. Here are a few details from the Mail Online:

Judicial Watch, a center-right group that specializes in Freedom Of Information Act document requests and lawsuits, said it received a cache of papers from the IRS showing the depth of the Obama administration’s involvement in what officials have previously called the work of a few ‘rogue agents’ in Cincinnati, Ohio.

And letters from U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, show his involvement in pressing the IRS to target mostly conservative organizations with cumbersome questionnaires seemingly calculated to slow down their applications for tax-exempt status in the middle of an election year.

I have a feeling that Representative Levin is perfectly happy that those emails are “lost” and will happily aid the IRS in burying this in a deep dark hole somewhere. Now one of the big sticking points is the status of hard drives of Lerner and the other IRS people that Congress wants to know about. The IRS reportedly sent the drives off to a recycler to be scrapped.

While I can understand getting rid of a dead drive, sending something that might have confidential information on it to an outside company is just asking for trouble. Simply because a drive won’t load doesn’t mean the data on it can’t be recovered. I have tools I’ve used to recover data from a bad drive and there are many companies that specialize in recovering data from dead drives. The FBI has an excellent group that specializes in just that. They arte quite good at recovering kiddie porn from pedophiles computers even after they have been formatted. The excuse “The Dog at my email: won’t cut it these days.

If the drives were toasted, then they should have been destroyed in house before being sent to a recycling service. Every company I’ve worked for either keeps the drives in secure storage or requires their physical destruction by either the I.T. department or the in house Information Security group. The fact that the IRS didn’t do this also makes people think “COVERUP!!!” Then we have the lost emails themselves. As I explained elsewhere, current mail systems are designed to protect and recover email. That the IRS is claiming they lost it is raising questions elsewhere. According to Fox News:

The lost emails are raising questions even by the government’s records officer. In a June 17 letter to the IRS, Paul Wester Jr. asked the agency to investigate the loss of records and whether any disposal of data was authorized. Wester, the chief records officer at the National Archives and Records Administration, was responding to the IRS’ June 13 disclosure of Lerner’s lost emails. Wester’s letter did not address the lost records of six other employees that the IRS disclosed that day. Wester said the IRS is required to report its finding within 30 days. Federal agencies are supposed to report destruction of records — whether accidental or intentional — to the National Archives “promptly” after an incident.

That would be true in most cases Mr. Wester. However, in the case of a coverup, reporting the data lose to the National Archives isn’t even on the list of “Things to do today.”

It’s similarly unclear why the IRS didn’t attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, “There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.” Shawn Henry, the FBI’s former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.

“If they knew there was a problem in 2011,” said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, “they could have or should have been able to recover it.”

Hello? Obama ordered coverup in progress!! What part of this is not getting through to you??

The IRS told Congress last week that recovering emails has been a challenge because doing so is “a more complex process for the IRS than it is for many private or public organizations.”

I think the term for this in polite company is “Bovine Droppings!” I can tell you from first hand information that email systems today, and I believe the IRS uses Microsoft Exchange, are designed to be backed up and restored fairly easily, and that the applications in use for backing up mailboxes are specifically designed so that in a legal procedure, the data can be easily recovered and read out.

At the time that Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees’ email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today. The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.

Now this is either a case of utter and complete incompetence by everyone, or serious criminal actions by the Internal Revenue Service and the Obama administration. Normally we would have the Department of Justice start a criminal investigation, but thanks to Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the DOJ has been so corrupted that it is no longer trusted to actually do its constitutionally required duties. It may be time to put a special prosecutor on the case. Actually, considering all the criminal activities by the Obama Regime, we might need to call “Prosecutors R Us” and ask for a bulk discount.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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