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发帖数: 29846 | 1 The Internal Revenue Service found 6,400 more Lois Lerner emails — but they
’re not handing them over in court.
The IRS’ latest excuses are nothing short of infuriating.
Department of Justice lawyers Geoffrey J. Klimas and Stephanie Sasarak,
acting as counsel for the IRS, submitted a U.S. District Court filing June
12 in the case Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service. The court filing,
provided to The Daily Caller, claims the IRS received new Lerner emails
from the Treasury Department’s inspector general (TIGTA) but can’t fork
over the emails to Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group suing to get the emails
. Why? Because the IRS is busy making sure that none of the emails are
duplicates – you know, so as not to waste anyone’s time.
However, the inspector general already made sure that none of the emails
were duplicates, so the IRS’ latest excuse falls flat. Here are takeaways
from the court filing.
TIGTA gave the IRS 6,400 Lerner emails that they recovered from backup tapes:
“On April 23, 2015, TIGTA provided approximately 6,400 forensically-
recovered emails to the Service,” Klimas and Sasarak wrote. “Certain of
the emails forensically recovered by TIGTA were not readable, or not
entirely readable, as initially provided to the Service. TIGTA subsequently
provided some of these documents to the Service in readable form on May 8
and June 1, 2015. To date, TIGTA has not provided any other recovered emails
to the Service.”
TIGTA already checked for duplicate emails:
“Prior to providing the Service with the approximately 6,400 forensically-
recovered emails, TIGTA identified and removed emails which appear to be
duplicates of those which the Service has already produced to the
Congressional Committees or were duplicates of other recovered emails.”
As TheDC reported, the inspector general needed some kind of special
software to make sure the emails weren’t duplicates, then they received the
software, so the “checking for duplicates” explanation should have been
put to rest.
But the IRS is going to go ahead and do some “deduplication” anyway, just
to make sure TIGTA de-duplicated correctly:
“Such emails are also duplicates of those the Service has already retrieved
in connection with responding to the FOIA requests at issue in this case.
The Service is in the process of conducting further manual deduplication of
the 6,400 forensically-recovered emails to supplement the automated
deduplication conducted by TIGTA. TIGTA also is further reviewing the 6,400
emails to verify that they were not already produced to the Congressional
Committees by the Service.”
The deduplication might take a long time:
“The emails which TIGTA has recovered, and any additional emails that TIGTA
may recover and provide to the Service, could affect the Service’s ability
to complete its review and production of Lerner communications by September
2015.”
The IRS isn’t going to start de-duplicating the emails it has until AFTER
it reviews “Lerner communications which were not forensically recovered.”
In other words, they’re going to review Lerner emails that they DON’T HAVE
before they look at the ones that they DO have:
“The Service expects to begin processing and reviewing the recovered emails
immediately following its review and production of Lerner communications
which were not forensically recovered. At this time, the Service is unable
to estimate when it will finish processing and reviewing the forensically-
recovered emails.”
Why can’t they just turn over all the emails and let Judicial Watch or the
congressional committees “de-duplicate” them? Who cares if they hand over
duplicates? Is the House Oversight Committee going to get angry because the
IRS accidentally gave them two copies of the same email? Of course not!
Judicial Watch isn’t buying it. The group’s president Tom Fitton told
TheDC in an exclusive statement that he’s not giving up.
“Even though TIGTA already identified and removed emails that are
duplicates, the IRS is in ‘the process of conducting further manual
deduplication of the 6,400′ emails, rather than reviewing them in response
to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests that are more than 2 years old now,”
Fitton said. “Our legal team will continue pursuing all necessary and
available legal options to hold the IRS accountable for its flagrant abuse
of power.”
Meanwhile, as TheDC reported, DOJ lawyers tried to shut down the search for
Lois Lerner’s missing backup tapes, which were only located recently at a
storage facility in West Virginia.
The legal advocacy group Cause of Action is also encountering ridiculous
excuses in its own lawsuit to get Lerner’s emails. Secretary of the
Treasury Jacob Lew, Obama’s former White House chief of staff, seized all
of the emails that went back and forth between the IRS and the White House
and won’t hand them over, arguing that since confidential taxpayer
information was illegally disclosed in the emails, then it would be illegal
to make the emails public – since they have confidential taxpayer
information in them. Get it? |
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