Phony IRS Email Scandal Debunked (VIDEO)

Republicans will stop at nothing to discredit the Obama administration, particularly as the country nears the mid-term elections.

Most recently, conservatives have been pounding the airwaves with a seemingly never-ending barrage of newscasts about the faux scandal at the IRS. Conservatives were initially whimpering that conservative groups, particularly those with terms such as “Tea Party” and “Patriots” in their names, were being targeted for closer scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status. However, federal investigations, to include an FBI investigation ordered by Attorney General Eric Holder, revealed that liberals groups such as those associated with the Occupy movement or with terms like “progressive” in their name were also targeted. Most noteworthy, the only tax-exempt status denied by the IRS involved the revocation of a previously granted tax-exempt status for a progressive group, the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.

With the failures of the initial faux IRS scandal looming over conservatives, they have now shifted gears and are going ballistic over a batch of lost emails in 2011 belonging to Lois Lerner, the former IRS official accused by Republicans of giving extra scrutiny to small-government groups seeking tax-exempt status.

In the latest installment of conservative phony outrage, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Darrell Issa (R-CA) held a late-night witch hunt Monday in Washington, DC, for the benefit of conservatives – particularly Fox News viewers. The source of Issa’s latest outrage: the acknowledgement by the IRS a week and a half ago that it had lost Ms. Lerner’s emails because of a large-scale computer failure. However as commissioner John Koskinen pointed out to the committee, Issa has known about the loss of those emails since last year, effectively making the IRS email scandal another example of conservative exaggeration/lies/slight of hand.

Issa lashed out at Koskinen at the hearing telling him: “You worked to cover up the fact that there were missing emails and came forward to fess up on Friday afternoon only after you had effectively been caught red-handed. I’m sick and tired of your game-playing.”

Koskinen fought back pointing out that computer failure and resulting loss of emails was known to Issa already.

As the New York Times reported:

Mr. Koskinen testified that he had hidden nothing from Congress and that he did not learn until April that Ms. Lerner’s emails were missing. “All the emails we have will be provided,” he said in a testy exchange. “I did not say I would provide you emails that disappeared. If you have a magical way for me to do that, I’d be happy to know about it.”

Further, he said, the committee had been put on notice last fall that some of Ms. Lerner’s emails had disappeared. “So it should be clear that no one has been keeping this information from the Congress,” he said.

And it is not just Issa who is going ballistic with faux-outrage of the fake IRS email scandal. Other leading conservatives, such as failed vice-president candidate Paul Ryan (R-WI) have jumped on the bandwagon. You might recall last week when he basically called Koskinen a liar last week, telling him “I don’t believe you” at a Ways and Means Committee hearing.

Well, as it turns out, the phony nature of the email scandal is further complicated by Lerner, herself, as she reported her computer failure and the resulting loss of many of her emails back in 2011, long before the IRS scandal broke. As Vox reports:

Over the past week, there have been many headlines about “lost emails” from a key IRS figure. This has fed some fears of a possible cover-up in the scandal over the IRS’s treatment of conservative groups.References have been made to Watergate and the infamous gap of 18 and a half minutes in one of President Nixon’s tapes.

But right now, this doesn’t look like much of a cover-up. Lerner reported the emails lost, and tried to have them recovered, in mid-2011 — two years before the IRS scandal broke. So while the IRS’s technical proficiency doesn’t come off looking particularly good, the timeline we have suggests that the lost e-mails have little to do with the scandal.

On top of all that, as Crooks and Liars reports, there was plenty of documentation kept of the computer crash as well:

On June 13, 2011, reference first turns up in internal IRS emails that Lerner’s hard drive had crashed. In a series of emails afterward, Lerner attempted to get technical help restoring her data — but on August 5, 2011, she was informed that it was unrecoverable.Those dates matter because there was no IRS scandal back then. The scandal didn’t break until May 2013 — nearly two years after the reported hard drive crash. Issa’s committee didn’t start looking into the IRS treatment of nonprofit groups until early 2012, and the Treasury Department’s inspector general started his investigation months after that.

You have to wonder what fake scandal conservatives are going to come up with next.

Until then…

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