ISSA: IRS COVER-UP A ‘MATHEMATICAL’ NEAR-CERTAINTY
WND.com
WASHINGTON – Republican investigators say the evidence now shows it is now a mathematical near-certainty that the IRS has been engaged in a cover-up.
At the opening of a hearing into the IRS scandal Wednesday morning, House Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, expressed exasperation that the IRS story has gone from reporting the crash of just Lois Lerner’s hard-drive crash, to seven or eight hard drive crashes, to now, as many as 20 crashes of hard drives of IRS personnel under investigation.
Calling it “unbelieveable,” Jordan noted the committee has now learned that almost a fourth of the IRS people under investigation may have had hard crashes.
Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif, said it was now clear that there was a “convenient loss of data by far more people than is explained by the relevant math formulas.”
The GOP committee leaders, frustrated by what they see as an IRS cover-up and a Justice Department that refuses to investigate, are clearly attempting to build a case for having a special prosecutor take over the investigation into the IRS scandal.
The committee on Wednesday recalled IRS Commissioner John Koskinen who said he could not give “a definitive answer” because the matter is still under investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA, who had asked him to “not muddy the waters” by speaking with IRS personnel involved in the investigation.
While currently defending his department before Congress, Koskinen could end up defending himself against criminal charges in court if the DOJ decides to investigate whether he failed to inform investigating committees about Lerner’s missing emails in a timely manner, as he was required to do.
Subcommittee ranking member Matt Cartwright, D-Pa., asked the IRS commissioner whether the DOJ has informed him if he is under investigation for not informing Congress about the missing emails promptly.
Koskinen said no.
GOP committee members have raised that prospect because Koskinen did not inform Congress about Lerner’s missing emails and her hard drive crash until late June, although he learned of it in April, and someone in the IRS informed the White House that same month.
Koskinen’s testimony follows a dizzying series of revelations in the preceding days about Lerner’s missing hard drive, two years of missing emails and other possible hard drive crashes.
Lerner, the former head of the IRS tax-exempt division who has admitted her unit improperly targeted conservative groups, claimed she lost two years of emails in a critical time period for the investigation, from mid-2009 to mid-2011, after her hard drive supposedly crashed.
On Friday, WND broke the news that IRS personnel had sworn under oath to a federal judge that the agency could not say with certainty what happened to that hard drive, but it had probably been destroyed.
On Monday, Issa, R-California, revealed that an IRS lawyer had recently testified in a closed session that it was possible back-up tapes of Lerner’s email might exist, contrary to what Koskinen told the committee last month.
Then, on Tuesday, House Ways and Means Committee investigators said Lerner’s hard drive may have only been scratched, not irreparably damaged, as Koskinen had said.
It was not clear if the scratch was deliberate or accidental.
And, after interviewing an IT analyst who worked on Lerner’s hard drive, House investigators revealed it might have been possible for outside forensic technicians to find some information from her computer.
“The committee was told no data was recoverable and the physical drive was recycled and potentially shredded. To now learn that the hard drive was only scratched, yet the IRS refused to utilize outside experts to recover the data, raises more questions about potential criminal wrong doing at the IRS,” Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan said on Tuesday
That committee also has doubts about the declaration under oath the IRS recently filed in federal court, which said it tried to recover data but the hard drive’s information was destroyed.
The committee said an internal IT tracking system had listed Lerner’s hard drive as “recovered” at one point. Investigators said an IRS employee interviewed by the committee was unable to explain the discrepancy.
Also on Tuesday, Issa called for Deputy Attorney General James Cole to appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate why Commissioner Koskinen delayed informing Congress and the Department of Justice, or DOJ, about the destruction of critical evidence to congressional and criminal investigations.
The committee also revealed new testimony by IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane that senior IRS leadership first became concerned about the possibility of Lois Lerner’s emails on February 2, 2014, and confirmed a hard drive crash only two days later.
It was Kane who also revealed that as many as 20 IRS hard drives may have crashed.
Last week, Cole testified the DOJ is investigating the delay by the IRS in alerting other agencies that they had lost former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails.
“The Committee has obtained information that senior IRS leadership knew in February 2014 that e-mails on Ms. Lerner’s hard drive were unrecoverable,” Issa and Jordan wrote.
“The IRS’s failure to disclose in a timely manner that it had destroyed evidence critical to congressional and criminal investigations is further reason that a special prosecutor is needed to thoroughly and independently investigate all facets of the IRS targeting.”
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