IRS Watchdog Continues to Hide Records on White House Leaks

[Geee]

Free Beacon:

An independent IRS monitor announced Monday it will block the release of roughly 400 more pages of documents related to unauthorized leaks of confidential taxpayer information to the White House.

 

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) told the watchdog group Cause of Action it would be withholding nearly all of the 2,500 documents it located that were related to unauthorized IRS leaks to the White House. Earlier this month, TIGTA told Cause of Action it was withholding roughly 2,100 of the documents and said it would take an additional two weeks to review the rest.

 

TIGTA released 31 pages of documents on Monday to Cause of Action, 27 of which were already publicly available. Most were responses to letters from Republican senators.

 

As previously reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Cause of Action filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against TIGTA for the long-sought-after records after the agency refused to even acknowledge whether they existed or not.

 

A federal judge ruled in September that TIGTA could not hide the existence of its investigations into improper leaks. In response TIGTA identified 2,509 responsive documents to Cause of Action’s FOIA request but said it was barred by law from releasing them.

[Valin]

@Geee

 

On A Related Note

 

Why the Freedom of Information Act Is Virtually Worthless

John Hinderaker

December 16, 2014

 

Conservatives often express frustration that so little, seemingly, can be done about the corruption of the Obama administration. Part of the problem is that when a party is determined to stonewall, our legal system is generally too slow to provide an effective remedy within the time frame of a presidential administration.

 

The case of Austan Goolsbee is instructive. In August 2010, Goolsbee, who directed Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and later chaired his Council of Economic Advisers, gave a press briefing in which he discussed corporate income taxes. In that briefing, he suggested that he had access to confidential IRS data, and accused the administration’s beta noire, Koch Industries, of not paying corporate income taxes:

 

(Snip)

 

Yesterday, President Obama’s Treasury Department finally served its response to Cause of Action’s FOIA request, more than two years after the request was made on October 9, 2012. The response disclosed that there are “2,509 pages of TIGTA records potentially responsive to your request.” So the Inspector General has done a considerable amount of investigation into criminal transfers of taxpayer data to the Obama White House.

 

(Snip)

 

So now litigation will continue over Treasury’s objections. A briefing schedule is being set for the next round of motions. But you get the picture: when an administration is determined to stonewall, which has been President Obama’s response to every inquiry, it can drag the process out nearly indefinitely. We haven’t yet gotten to the point where the administration appeals the district court’s order to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been packed with Democrats due to Harry Reid’s revocation of the filibuster as to judicial nominees, but that may eventually be coming.

 

In all likelihood, the Obama administration will be long gone before we find out whether its IRS fed taxpayer information to the White House for political purposes. But that’s the point: as with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the targeting of conservative 501©(4)s and other Obama scandals, a cynical determination to run out the clock, combined with the federal government’s infinite litigation budget, can prevent damaging information from coming to light for years. There might be effective remedies for Executive Branch corruption, but the Freedom of Information Act is not among them.