The IRS Conservative Targeting Scandal involved:
- Hundreds of conservative groups were targeted
- At least 5 pro-Israel groups
- Constitutional groups
- Groups that criticized Obama administration
- At least two pro-life groups
- An 83 year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor
- A 180 year-old Baptist paper
- A Texas voting-rights group
- A Hollywood conservative group was targeted and harassed
- Conservative activists and businesses
- At least one conservative Hispanic group
- IRS continued to target groups even after the scandal was exposed
- 10% of Tea Party donors were audited by the IRS
- And… 100% of the 501(c)(4) Groups Audited by IRS Were Conservative
Now we know…
** Lois Lerner’s computer mysteriously crashed, was thrown out and recycled 10 DAYS after House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp asked if the IRS was engaged in targeting on June 3, 2011.
** And six other top IRS employees involved in the targeting scandal also lost their emails around the same time.
Kim Strassel at The Wall Street Journal reported:
We have emails suggesting that IRS staff aided Sen. Levin in putting together his letters of complaint to the IRS. We have staff for House Democrat Elijah Cummings asking the IRS for information to use in Mr. Cummings’s campaign against a specific conservative organization, True the Vote. Ms. Lerner got involved in that one—querying her staff as to whether they’d helped Mr. Cummings.
As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
Is there something in those lost emails? The fact that they are “lost” at all probably answers that question.
