Sorry for getting that song stuck in your head, by the way.
Imagine, if you would, the following exchange:
IRS Agent: What you did here is suspicious.
Audited individual: I haven’t broken any laws!
IRS Agent: Really? What are the relevant laws?
Audited individual: …I don’t know.
I want you to imagine what the IRS agent’s most likely response would be to that. You can, right? It’s pretty easy. We all know just how much give there is when it comes to dealing with the tax man.
Now let’s flip it around.
“You have already said, multiple times today, that there was no evidence that you found of any criminal wrongdoing,” Gowdy said. “I want you to tell me: What criminal statutes you have evaluated?”
“I have not looked at any,” the IRS commissioner [John Koskinen] admitted.
“Well then how can you possibly tell our fellow citizens that there is no criminal wrongdoing if you don’t even know what statutes to look at?” Gowdy followed-up.
“Because I’ve seen no evidence that anyone consciously –”
“Well how would you know what elements of the crime existed? You don’t even know what statutes are in play,” Gowdy said, visibly annoyed.
The Weekly Standard really, really needs a better-synced copy of that exchange between Trey Gowdy and John Koskinen, because it’s choice. Gowdy’s history as a prosecutor shines through here: if Koskinen thinks that he came out of that with his credibility intact, Koskinen is mistaken. Then again, the man has already set himself up for possible perjury allegations:
THIS – CONFLICT: Koskinen just told Congress he learned about hard drive issue in FEB. Monday he told me IRS learned about it “late Spring”.
— Lisa Desjardins (@LisaDCNN) June 20, 2014
More here: and as Ed Driscoll dryly notes, you can probably hazard a guess why it took two months for Koskinen to mention the hard drive problem once you simply look at the man’s campaign contribution history. If you’re wondering why the White House picked as IRS Commissioner somebody who hasn’t practiced law in decades – which you might think would be a hindrance, given that the organization is having serious legal issues right now – well, wonder no more. There’s competent, and then there’s reliable. John Koskinen is apparently reliable.
Although I don’t think that he knows the one about how if you play poker for a half hour and you haven’t figured out yet who the idiot is at the table, well, it’s you. You think the administration will mind seeing an appointee get hauled off for perjury? At this point, all Barack Obama wants is personal peace and quiet for the next two years while he plans out his speaking fee schedule. The travails of the Democratic party as a whole are not really his problem.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
The Obama administration expires January 2017.
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The Statute of Limitations .. does not.
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Choose wisely.
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Mew
Somebosy is banking on a very long list of Obama pardons before he leaves office. It would not shock me in the least if almost everybody involved in this admin gets a blanket pardon Jan 2017.
Somehow I doubt it. Because at that point, what’s in it for Obama?
Obama is not “of the democrat hive” …
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Why should he pardon someone who isn’t part of *his* inner circle?
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I fully expect pardons for Holder and Jarret and possibly a couple others and, unless he can funnel the ca$h to OFA I don’t expect a rash of last-minute semi-random Clinton-style pardons either.
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Mew
Pardons for sale? Er…I mean as contributions to the presidential library, contributions, yeah, that’s the ticket.
Completely agree Skip, because if pardons come down then the blame shifts to Obama himself.
So… It’s not like anyone is going to prosecute Obama in 2017 for anything. The deranged left talked about charging Bush and nothing came of that, I highly doubt a GOP government would be eager to jump into that PR disaster.
The only option, Spegen, is to prosecute in 2015, but that would require Boehner receiving a spine-and-gonad transplant from a suitable donor …
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Mew
I dunno Moe, most years here in Texas February counts as ‘late spring’… Now if he’s from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts or something, yeah, that’s perjury.
Y’know .. even as far back as 1999, running MS-Exchange on Windows NT 3.51** .. we implemented RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) for e-mail .. prior to that, the UNIX mail server was also on RAID… and this was at a rather small and very cost-conscious (read that as “cheapskates”) company where they asked the UNIX guy (me) to “figure out how to implement Exchange on NT”.
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I bring this up because it’s been a common corporate standard for .. I think it’s fair to say *DECADES* .. that critical information should be stored on a RAID array so that, if one disk fails, no data is lost.
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I hesitate to bring this up because, honestly, I’m not sure “our” congresscritters can get their heads around RAID-1, let alone RAID-5, but .. the point is, the IRS claims either are bullshit, or indicate that there are a lot of techies who need to be fired.
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Mew
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** I have nightmares about this server.
Hah, in 1999 you should have been running NT4 at least, with Exchange 5.1.
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In any case, parts of this have become more believable, and parts of this have become less believable. The more believable part is that they’d actually have had the policy to reuse tapes after 6 months, and such tiny mailbox size limits. Sure, it breaks Federal law, but that’s just general incompetence, and I’d be willing to bet there’s extensive documentation on them doing this. I mean, look at how well they implemented healthcare.gov. A base level of competence is not something we can expect.
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The less believable part is that seven individuals who “coincidentally” had hard drive crashes making the information unavailable. Without actually running numbers, I’d guess that in general over the years I’ve seen about a 2% failure rate per year per drive. So simple statistics, comparing the failure rate from the target group versus, say, the rest of the IRS will be fairly conclusive.
I have a new implausible for you today.
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Go watch the video at this Hot Air post:
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/24/virginia-democrat-grills-irs-commissioner-discovers-democrats-2014-campaign-strategy/
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For those who aren’t inside IT, the “average cost” for a RAID-protected megabyte of disk space on a monster disk array (EMC, Hitachi, IBM) was hovering around $0.05 since .. 2004, I think. What’s been changing are the speed and physical footprint. This might have dropped even lower, I kind of stopped watching around 2010.
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Point is, the IRS crying “poor” is taking bullshit to a whole ‘nother level .. and I honestly hope they try it.
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Mew
There are reasons, Skip, why I have nightmares about that server.
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Mew
Heh, well, starting with 2000 if you’d contacted MSFT you might have dealt with me – from 2000-2004 I was part of the group that investigated bugs and generated hotfixes for Exchange 5.1 and 2000. I know far, far more about Exchange than I’d prefer to, at this point.
I can’t help but believe that the entire issue of the Lerner’s failed hard drive is a red herring — a “distraction,” to use one of the administration’s favorite terms. Yes, Lerner’s hard drive failed; we have contemporaneous e-mails about that. And yes, they probably recycle tapes. But there’s no evidence that Lerner kept her e-mails on her personal hard drive, and at that time the IRS contracted with Sonasoft to back up their e-mail messages.
I hope Rep. Gowdy doesn’t confine his questions to Lerner’s hard drive, but also asks (1) whether Sonasoft made the backups they were paid to make, (2) where those backups are now, (3) why the contract with Sonasoft was allowed to lapse, and (4) why the e-mails weren’t recovered from Sonasoft at the time that they had been subpoenaed and Sonasoft was still under contract.
If I had to guess, Herp, I expect Rep. Gowdy (or, more accurately, the member(s) of Rep Gowdy’s staff who read Moe Lane) to be actively seeking answers to those very questions.
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Prosecutors don’t like to ask questions where they don’t know the answers, don’cha know…
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Mew
That’s what I’m hoping, too …
I wonder what the good folks at Sonasoft will have to say about the matter. So far, there’s no indication that they did anything wrong, and as a result they’d have little incentive to lie to keep the administration’s ample posterior covered.
(On the other hand, telling the truth might make them subject to a cavity-search-level audit every year, of course.)
I honestly hope the IRS has threatened them, and they testify before congress that the IRS has threatened them.
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All hell would break loose.
Trey Gowdy doesn’t need to read me in order to know how to be a proper bastard.
There’s always room for improvement, no?
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Mew
I’d say there is more than enough here to file Articles of Impeachment.
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Because the Justice Department is refusing to conduct a serious investigation into the IRS, and Barack Obama isn’t going to fire Eric Holder and put someone in charge that will conduct a serious investigation, then I would say that’s grounds for naming President Obama as an accomplice in the IRS targetting of Conservatives because he is committing Obstruction of Justice.
What I don’t understand is why the server’s tape backups are even a concern. It’s my understanding that it was her local hard drive on her computer that failed. This would suggest that she had Outlook personal folder files stored on her local drive where she had archived messages out of her exchange server mailbox. I restore data from crashed hard drives for a living at a large corporate enterprise. I would say that over 95% of the time I’m able to recover all the data on a “crashed” hard drive. Simply mounting it to the SATA bus on another computer and moving the files over to a new hard drive is all it takes. Most of the time a “crashed” hard drive is damaged to the point where it can no longer reliably run an operating system. Rarely I’ll get a hard drive that has suffered a severe head crash that it causes cyclic redundancy errors to the point of total data loss. Even then I can run the robocopy command to skip over unreadable files and get a good deal of the data off the disk. Any files that are corrupted by the disk damage I just restore from the data recovery server that backs up the clients hard drive on a daily basis. I find it mind boggling that the IRS doesn’t have SOME type of client side backup solution like Symantec system restore, HP Connected Backup, or Unitrends. Not to mention there are data recovery specialists with access to sophisticated equipment that can recover data files from a drive in nearly any condition short of it being crushed or shredded. At that point when her hard drive failed the IT dept. should have had multiple layers of data recovery options available to them to restore her local data files. And don’t even get me started on the notion that this highly rare event of complete data loss not only happened to her but 6 other people all involved in this fiasco. It’s just not possible from my professional point of view.