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Ellison's Must Read of the Day

Ellison must read
June 20, 2014

My must read of the day is "IRS boss faces ‘cover-up’ claims ahead of Hill hearing on missing emails," in Fox News: 

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is facing accusations of a "cover-up" over the Tea Party targeting scandal, after claims surfaced that ex-official Lois Lerner's hard drive was destroyed and emails from several other officials also have gone missing.

The commissioner is set to face lawmakers at a Capitol Hill hearing on Friday before the House Ways and Means Committee. GOP lawmakers are furious after learning a week ago that many of 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.

To boot, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) said he's been told that Lerner's hard drive was simply destroyed.

"They just got rid of it," he told Fox News. "It really looks bad and I've got to say it looks like a cover-up to me."

There is not a single, logical reason as to why the IRS waited so long to tell Congress about Lerner’s missing emails, when they knew long ago.

There is also not a single, logical reason as to why the IRS only told one congressional committee about the missing emails of six other employees when numerous committees are investigating the agency.

Did Lois Lerner’s hard drive crash? Yes, it seems that it did and we have email evidence of it from 2011, but that does not explain the delay in telling Congress that they would never be able to recover them.

Omitting that kind of information is suspicious and Republican’s are right to call it out.

At best, utterly incompetent people run this agency.

Due to the Federal Records Act at least some of the emails should have been saved as official record, but we have nothing between 2009 and 2011. That would suggest the IRS was not properly adhering to the law, and attributing this to malfunctioning technology is not an adequate excuse—and Democrats know that too.

Published under: IRS , Lois Lerner