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House Oversight Committee video outlining key events in the IRS targeting scandal, titled: “There Must be Accountability”
WASHINGTON – It’s one of the rarest sights on Capitol Hill: members of Congress testifying before their own committee. They are making the unusual move because they will be gunning for such big game.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah
U.S. Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., will be questioned by their fellow House Judiciary Committee members on Tuesday as to why the two believe IRS Commissioner John Koskinen should be impeached.
Their key points will be that, following the IRS targeting of conservative groups for several years, Koskinen:
- failed to comply with a congressional subpoena which resulted in destruction of key evidence;
- made false statements during his sworn congressional testimony;
- and did not notify Congress that the emails of key IRS scandal figure Lois Lerner were missing.
Chaffetz and DeSantis are also on the House Oversight Committee, which has doggedly investigated the IRS targeting scandal for the last three years. Chaffetz has been the committee chair since the beginning of 2015.
He introduced a bill to begin proceedings to impeach Koskinen on Oct. 27, 2015, which now has 69 co-sponsors. But there is a reason that bill has not come up for a floor vote in the House, and why there is now this hearing instead.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen
A congressional source told WND, as much as conservative lawmakers want to impeach Koskinen, they also want to “preserve regular order,” that is, follow the established process and respect committee jurisdictions, something they felt was not done under the leadership of former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
So, according to the source, instead of pressuring current House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Ohio, for a floor vote on the impeachment bill, conservative leaders in the House agreed to let the Judiciary Committee hold a hearing where the case for impeachment could be made publicly.
The hearing might also help convince key members of Congress that impeachment proceedings would be warranted.
Like Chaffetz and DeSantis, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is also on both the Judiciary and Oversight committees. He is also the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio
“IRS Commissioner John Koskinen failed to fulfill his duty to the American people,” Jordan told WND. “He allowed back-up tapes containing potentially 24,000 emails to be destroyed. He failed to inform Congress about the destruction of these back-up tapes in a timely manner. He gave false testimony before Congress regarding the back-up tapes. He refused to correct the record when given the opportunity.”
Jordan recalled the founders had provided Congress a remedy expressly intended for such a circumstance.
“Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that impeachment should be used to protect the public against ‘the abuse or violation of some public trust,’” he continued. “Commissioner Koskinen has most assuredly violated the public trust, and it’s time for him to go. While I’m happy that we’re holding hearings, ultimately Congress should hold a vote on impeachment.”
Koskinen was invited to testify after Chaffetz and DeSantis, but he declined. A House source told WND the IRS commissioner now will be subpoenaed and compelled to testify at a later date.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.
President Obama appointed Koskinen to a five-year term on Dec. 23, 2013. He was supposed to clean up the IRS after it became known the agency had inappropriately targeted and hindered conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. Instead, according to key conservative lawmakers, Koskinen became part of an ongoing IRS cover up of illegal activities at the agency.
Three months before Chaffetz introduced the bill to impeach Koskinen, Jordan and DeStanis wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Stonewall at the Top of the IRS,” outlining the case against the commissioner, that was published on July 28, 2015.
That piece made these key charges against Koskinen:
- Destruction of evidence. Lois Lerner, at the time the director of the IRS’ exempt-organizations unit, invoked the Fifth Amendment on May 22, 2013, when appearing before Congress; her refusal to testify put a premium on obtaining and reviewing her email communications. On the same day the IRS’ chief technology officer issued a preservation order that instructed IRS employees “not to destroy/wipe/reuse any of the existing backup tapes for email, or archiving of other information from IRS personal computers.” Several weeks later, on Aug. 2, the House Oversight Committee issued its first subpoena for IRS documents, including all of Ms. Lerner’s emails. On Feb. 2, 2014, Kate Duval, the IRS commissioner’s counsel, identified a gap in the Lerner emails that were being collected. Days later, Ms. Duval learned that the gap had been caused in 2011 when the hard drive of Ms. Lerner’s computer crashed.Despite all this – an internal IRS preservation order, a congressional subpoena, and knowledge about Ms. Lerner’s hard-drive and email problems – the Treasury inspector general for tax administration discovered that the agency on March 4, 2014, erased 422 backup tapes containing as many as 24,000 emails. (Congress learned of the discovery only last month.)Ms. Duval has since left the IRS and now works at the State Department, where she is responsible for vetting Hillary Clinton’s emails sought by congressional investigations of the Benghazi attacks.
- Failure to inform Congress. Mr. Koskinen was made aware of the problems associated with Ms. Lerner’s emails the same month Ms. Duval discovered the gap. Yet the IRS withheld the information from Congress for four months, until June 13, 2014, when the agency used a Friday news dump to admit – on page seven of the third attachment to a letter sent to the Senate Finance Committee – that it had lost many of Ms. Lerner’s emails.During that four-month delay, Mr. Koskinen testified before Congress under oath four times. On March 26, 2014, he appeared before the Oversight Committee and pledged that the IRS would produce all of Ms. Lerner’s emails, not mentioning that the IRS already knew of the problems with her emails and hard drive. Mr. Koskinen deliberately kept Congress in the dark. Based on testimony received by the committee, we now know that the IRS appears to have spent the four months working with the Obama administration to fine-tune talking points to mitigate the fallout.
- False testimony before Congress. Mr. Koskinen made statements to Congress that were categorically false. Of the more than 1,000 computer backup tapes discovered by the IRS inspector general, approximately 700 hadn’t been erased and contained relevant information. But Mr. Koskinen testified he had “confirmed” that all of the tapes were unrecoverable.He also said: “We’ve gone to great lengths, spent a significant amount of money trying to make sure that there is no email that is required that has not been produced.” In reality, the inspector general found that Mr. Koskinen’s team failed to search several potential sources for Ms. Lerner’s emails, including the email server, her BlackBerry and the Martinsburg, W.Va., storage facility that housed the backup tapes.The 700 intact backup tapes the inspector general recovered were found within 15 days of the IRS’s informing Congress that they were not recoverable. Employees from the inspector general’s office simply drove to Martinsburg and asked for the tapes. It turns out that the IRS had never even asked whether the tapes existed.Three weeks after the 422 other backup tapes were destroyed by the IRS, Mr. Koskinen told the committee that he would produce “all” Lerner documents. This statement was clearly false – you can’t give Congress “all” of the material if you know that you have already destroyed some of it.
- Failure to correct the record. After his false statements to Congress under oath, Mr. Koskinen refused to amend them when given the opportunity at a public hearing earlier this year. If a lawyer makes a false statement to a court, he has a duty to correct it. Civil officers like Commissioner Koskinen have a duty to the American people to revise their testimony when it contains inaccuracies.
- Failure to reform the IRS to protect First Amendment rights. Mr. Koskinen hasn’t acted on the president’s May 2013 promise to “put in place new safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again.” A Government Accountability Office report released last week found that the IRS continues to lack the controls necessary to prevent unfair treatment of nonprofit groups on the basis of an “organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.” In other words, the targeting of conservative groups may very well continue.
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/lawmakers-to-testify-before-own-committee-to-nail-irs-chief/
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