THE IRS ODDITIES ADD UP

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Curiouser and curiouser. It's hard to see how the details of the ongoing IRS investigation could anything but mystify a fair-minded and careful observer.

 

Yesterday came news that employees at the tax-collecting agency use an internal instant messaging system called OCS, and that conversations held on it are not archived automatically. Further, Lois Lerner, the woman in charge of the department that targeted conservative non-profit groups, had specifically inquired about that very point. “I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails — so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails,” she wrote to IT support in 2013. “Someone asked if OCS conversations were also searchable — I don’t know.…Do you know?”

 

Then there’s the matter of Lerner’s missing email between 2009 and 2011, which the agency says was lost in a hard drive failure. About 24,000 of Lerner’s emails have been reconstructed from copies in other employees’ inboxes. But this strategy offers no way to recover all of her correspondence with those outside the IRS — those, just for the sake of argument, in the White House. When agents began to throw the exceptionally heavy IRS codebook at Tea Party organizations, did Lerner correspond with anyone in the administration, and, if so, did she include in that message a transcription of her own gleeful cackling? We may never know for sure.