Jihadin wrote:
One cannot favor or disfavor either party in capacity of her job.

She portrayed a negative perception towards conservative groups

which seems to have carried over into her professionalism needed for the job

 whembly wrote:
If this was a Republican administration, do you really believe media outlets would choose to report crazies over donkey-caves?

The IRS, the President, and his No. 1 Muse: Kathryn Ruemmler

The president’s longest serving White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, was, until her sudden departure for Latham & Watkins, “a regular presence in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, making legal judgments and helping coach other senior officials on how to discuss them publicly,” according to the Washington Post. Our first article, “All The President’s Muses,” described Ms. Reummler’s outsized role in the aftermath of the Benghazi tragedy. It’s undisputed she starred in the president’s expansive use of executive powers, increased secrecy and recent Supreme Court reversals.

With the near daily revelations from the IRS, the question becomes, what exactly might Ms. Ruemmler know?

The Inspector General of the Treasury confirmed that the IRS targeted the president’s political opposition with audits, harassment and denials of tax-exempt status. Patrick Howley reported from congressional hearings that even more IRS computers surrounding Lois Lerner and the White House had crashed. Now the IRS is claiming that the number is greater than seven (the prior count) but fewer than 20. There may be emails on back-up devices, but the IRS still claims it isn’t sure.

The burning question is: have they looked in the White House?

We know that “when the House Energy and Commerce Committee subpoenaed the White House for documents relating to the almost $400 million in taxpayer money lost on Solyndra, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler refused, writing: ‘The committee’s extremely broad request for documents—now a subpoena—is a significant intrusion on executive branch interests.’ Ruemmler added that the investigation ‘was driven more by partisan politics than a legitimate effort to conduct a responsible investigation.’” Ironically, if ever there was an expert in partisan politics, it’s Kathryn Ruemmler, who also served in the Clinton White House.

The Washington Post reported that Ms. Ruemmler was “very deliberate” and “a fierce opponent of public disclosures that could expose communications within the executive branch, especially those between the president and his advisers.” Ms. Ruemmler’s intense protection became “the focus of growing criticism of the White House’s insular and often secretive posture.” Simple logic dictates that Ms. Ruemmler’s “fierce” protection and President Obama’s promised “transparency” are mutually exclusive.

Ms. Ruemmler’s recent midnight departure from the White House left her actions largely unscrutinized. Yet, she was squarely in the middle of the IRS controversy from the very beginning. As she told the Wall Street Journal, “The White House really sees everything, and you touch everything.”

As White House counsel, Ms. Ruemmler led the president in all federal appointments. Her fingerprints are all over the president’s attempt to appoint Mary Smith, a colleague from Ms. Ruemmler’s days in President Clinton’s Counsel’s office, to head the powerful Tax Division of the Department of Justice. Senator Grassley blocked that confirmation, leaving the White House “very upset.” In response, Lois Lerner suggested auditing Senator Grassley.

Not long ago, the president said he knew nothing about the IRS target-hunting. Roger Aronoff reported that both the White House Chief of Staff and White House Counsel Ms. Ruemmler knew about the targeting of conservative groups at least a month before (the now infamous) Ms. Lerner “planted a question” regarding the IRS’ abusive actions. “President Obama later claimed on national television that in terms of the IRS scandal, there wasn’t a ‘smidgeon of corruption’ in his administration, and blamed the whole episode on ‘bone-headed decisions’ of bureaucrats.”

Ms. Ruemmler claimed she did not tell the president—prompting even some Democrats, including Lanny Davis, a prominent Democratic crisis manager, to call for her resignation more than a year ago. Yet, she remained safely in place.

“Either Ruemmler was incredibly incompetent or the White House is lying about when Obama knew of the scandal,” writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. “We got a big hint . . . when Obama changed the context of a question about his awareness of the scandal to his awareness of the IG report, which is pointedly not the same thing.” Or, perhaps Mr. Obama was simply on the 17th at Pebble Beach and couldn’t be reached.

Soon we learned that it wasn’t just Cincinnati bureaucrats who had targeted the president’s political opponents with IRS terror tactics. The effort was directed from D.C. Next came the revelation of substantial foot traffic (155 visits) from IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram, who oversaw tax-exempt organizations, to the White House from 2009-12, when she left to oversee IRS implementation of Obamacare—another of Ms. Ruemmler’s projects.

In an incredible stroke of luck, the emails on multiple computers that might reveal IRS agents’ communications with the White House were precisely the ones that mysteriously disappeared.

That lucky streak continued when by mere happenstance Ms. Ruemmler left the White House shortly before IRS Commissioner Koskinen was forced to admit that thousands of emails between Ms. Lerner, the White House and others were “missing.” At least now we know why the president so frequently visits Las Vegas.

Ms. Ruemmler has buried evidence before. It took counsel for Merrill Lynch defendants six years to find evidence that she had hidden when she prosecuted four Merrill executives—and then it was only produced accidentally by the third team of Department lawyers assigned to the case. The long-hidden evidence also proved that the “disclosure letter” Ms. Ruemmler signed to defense counsel was false and misleading.

In a later appeal, the Fifth Circuit held that Ms. Ruemmler and her team “plainly suppressed” evidence favorable to the defense. That finding establishes a clear violation of the ethical rule for federal prosecutors (Rule 3.8)–not to mention the Supreme Court’s admonition that the United States Attorney should “seek justice.”

If Magistrate Judge John Facciola, appointed by Judge Emmet Sullivan to “assist the parties” in finding the missing IRS emails from other sources, or if a special prosecutor is appointed to conduct a real investigation as Judge Sullivan ordered in the Ted Stevens case, Ms. Ruemmler’s history, and her knowledge of the IRS scandal, could lead to many questions.

Ms. Ruemmler wouldn’t be the first White House counsel to be forced to take the witness stand or participate in a cover-up. Anyone remember John Dean?

These IRS emails are today’s White House Watergate tapes. Who and how many people in the White House were recipients or senders? Surely, their computers haven’t crashed, too. How could 155 visits by a key IRS agent be missed by White House Counsel—the president’s fiercest protector?

So what did Ms. Ruemmler know and when did she know it?

 d-usa wrote:
Facebook just went down.

We should probably check the White House emails to see if Obama ordered that the servers be destroyed so that Republicans can't talk to each other...

 whembly wrote:
...then the Republican wouldn't be able to stage all those committee hearings and doing the "hey, look at me! I'm tough in the face of Obama's IRS scandal!!!!" for their constituents.

 dogma wrote:
Alternatively, they don't believe the prosecutor would find anything. Something which is, in my opinion, the most likely scenario.

Twenty different Obama administration officials have lost or destroyed a portion of their email traffic. Email traffic that was, in some cases, under subpoena or in others requested as part of a larger inquiry into the conduct of the executive branch.

House Committee on Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) expressed his frustration at the revelation that another Obama official, Marilyn Tavenner, the director of the Center for Medicare Services, deleted emails in the wake of the botched Healthcare.gov website roll out, stating, "It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal recordkeeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their e-mails [sic]."

Yes, Rep. Issa, it does defy logic.

The brazenly contemptuous stonewall-and-erase-evidence approach to congressional inquiries preferred by the Obama administration is perhaps this president's greatest affront to our constitutional system of government.

When you have records going missing across an administration, it is impossible to conclude anything other than it is a coordinated and condoned cover-up, and not just a series of incompetent, coincidental keystrokes wiping out information.

The conclusions get even uglier when you realize that the IRS dismissed the government contractor responsible for maintaining back-up files of their emails concurrent with Lois Lerner and her band mysteriously having their computers flatline.

The question is, where are the Democrats in the face of this obvious malfeasance?

During the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon, a few Republicans came forward and urged the president to come clean. Yet, the silence is deafening from Democrats in both the House and Senate in the wake of this obvious obstruction of the congressional oversight function.

Where are the patriots on the Democratic side, who are willing to stand up to an executive branch that has declared them inconsequential?

The Democrats' partisan acquiescence to Obama's declaration of war against congressional prerogatives sets the precedent that future presidents can hardly be faulted for following. A precedent that makes a mockery of the legislative branch and brings into question why we bother even providing office space for Congress at all?

With 20 Obama officials from all over the government losing critical emails, one wonders what, if any, is the threshold for Democratic outrage?

When are the Democratic Party and their elected officials going to put our nation ahead of partisanship?

If the past few years are any indication, I'm not holding my breath.

 Ahtman wrote:
That which is already dead can never die.

 Ahtman wrote:
That which is already dead can never die.

 whembly wrote:


But hey... you're buying the whole "Most Transparent Administration Ever™" schtick... eh?

 d-usa wrote:

 whembly wrote:


But hey... you're buying the whole "Most Transparent Administration Ever™" schtick... eh?

Not really.

I think we are just buying the whole "whembly really really really hates Obama so everything that happens while Obama is president is pure intentional malicious evilness because Obama" schtick

 whembly wrote:
Whatever man.

 Ahtman wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Whatever man.

When you have a propensity and a reputation for beating dead horses it doesn't really behoove you to also get sensitive about people recognizing the pattern.

 Ahtman wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Whatever man.

When you have a propensity and a reputation for beating dead horses it doesn't really behoove you to also get sensitive about people recognizing the pattern.

 whembly wrote:
Who lawfully demand the evidence in order to mount legal criticism against this Administration...

 whembly wrote:

But if you're willing to have a debate... let's have at it!

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Who lawfully demand the evidence in order to mount legal criticism against this Administration...

I thought they were mounting criticism against Lois Lerner.

 whembly wrote:

But if you're willing to have a debate... let's have at it!

This thread is 16 pages long, I'm pretty sure any matters of debate have already been hashed out.

 whembly wrote:

Lerner was a cog in this administration... so, "this administration".

 whembly wrote:

Snip.

 dogma wrote:

 whembly wrote:

Snip.

No, there isn't too much data to analyze. If you believe that, then you're a gak data analyst.

Don't you work in IT?

 whembly wrote:

That's the WHOLE fething POINT of these investigation.

 whembly wrote:

Don't you find it odd... that maybe even a little more than a smidgen of corruption, that about 20 employees across multiple departments lost their emails. Emails that were subjects to actual investigations?

jamesk1973 wrote:
So...if it reflects badly on the Democrats and this administration it is grandstanding.

jamesk1973 wrote:
So...if it reflects badly on the Democrats and this administration it is grandstanding.

Let this issue slide by and wait for the Republicans to be in power....ACORN will be audited so hard they will beg to be prison raped.

Judge Sullivan Gave Them A Chance. What’s next?

On July 10, D.C. federal judge Emmet Sullivan gave the IRS thirty days to provide him sworn declarations in the Freedom of Information Act suit filed by Judicial Watch, seeking much of the same information the IRS has effectively kept from Congress. After an “extraordinary” hearing, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to tell him under oath exactly what happened to Lois Lerner’s hard drive. He demanded sworn declarations specifying what the agency had done to recover the thousands of emails missing. Time’s up.

The IRS filed its “declarations” yesterday. As an attorney who has read the filings and who has written extensively about this dedicated judge in my book Licensed To Lie, I could not in good conscience sign those filings. It’s not that they are false. Oh no, . . .each is very carefully worded to be literally true (hence, not perjurious). But, each says little, answers less, and reveals nothing that would actually lead to recovery of the emails or to anyone’s accountability for their disappearance in any form. In fact, the few pages say less than has already been revealed elsewhere.

Judge Sullivan may be quite impressed with IRS declarations—but not favorably. He’s the kind of judge who expects forthrightness and good faith, along with truth from the government. He wants to know what every citizen who gave any thought to the issues would want to know—real answers. Those emails have not disappeared. Remember, Emmett Sullivan is the no-nonsense and gutsy judge who held DOJ lawyers in contempt for their gamesmanship. He later named an independent special prosecutor of his own choosing to investigate the Department upon discovery that it had hidden evidence favorable to the defense in its corrupt prosecution of US Senator Ted Stevens.

Judge Sullivan knows better than to trust the government’s blanket, bald, and rote denials of wrongdoing and the existence of evidence. He’s seen the difference between an internal investigation’s results and the fresh report of an independent prosecutor who has neither a job, nor power, nor a personal or political agenda to protect.

While Judge Sullivan might appreciate the details of the tests IRS technicians ran on Lois Lerner’s laptop, like us, he will probably have more questions than ever upon reading the IRS’s flaccid verbiage.

Who among us doesn’t receive and send emails from more than one device—each of which often has a different server? Did Lois Lerner have a desktop computer? Did she have any other device on which she could or did receive office emails? Did she have a Blackberry, a smartphone, an iPad or other similar devices? Where are those now and what servers did each use?

As AIM reported earlier, an American Center for Law and Justice complaint cites Lerner—and her comrades Douglas Shulman, Sarah Hall Ingram, Nikole Flax and Judith Kindell—for “repeatedly us[ing] nonofficial, unsecure, personal email accounts to conduct official IRS business, including sending tax return information and official classified documents to non-agency email addresses. . ..” Did their home computers crash too?

And what about Sara Hall Ingram, who was Commissioner of the tax-exempt section of IRS from 2009 to 2012? She made 165 trips to the White House . . . then was promoted to head the IRS division managing Obamacare. Clearly, since the IRS’s competence in record retention is so stunning, it should be entrusted with the nation’s healthcare. Was that promotion payback for Hall’s and Lerner’s work targeting political opposition to the president and illegally sharing taxpayer information with the White House?

Speaking of the White House, who among the staff there received emails from Lerner, Hall, and friends? It’s already been disclosed that Hall was talking with the White House about lawsuits attacking the controversial contraceptive mandate in Obamacare—the recent Supreme Court reversal in Hobby Lobby poking yet another hole in the incomprehensible legislation.

Like many of us, Judge Sullivan just might have already read that Deputy Associate Chief Counsel of the IRS, Thomas Kane, admitted to Congress on July 21 that the number of hard drive crashes had not only expanded from one (Lerner’s) to seven, but had risen to just fewer than twenty; and, there might be copies of the emails on back up devices, but they weren’t sure yet. How long does that take? It’s been weeks—actually years.

Yesterday’s declarations mention nothing of these facts. Apparently, Mr. Kane, who is not even in the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector General, but rather, has coordinated the IRS’s painful and pathetic “response” to multiple Congressional inquiries, believes that his superficial representations are all that Judge Sullivan should need.

Mr. Kane obviously hasn’t read Licensed to Lie. Judge Sullivan won’t be fooled again by a “just-trust-us” internal investigation—especially when Mr. Kane and his colleagues provided no details and no timeline. Of course, the IRS says it will give Judicial Watch the documents that it has already found—after it reviews them. No IRS official has even asserted to Judge Sullivan that he was trying to find the emails elsewhere.

And someone in the IRS recommended that Lerner’s hard drive be given to an outside technician to retrieve the emails, but instead, it was destroyed. Who made that recommendation? Who over-rode it? Who authorized the destruction of a hard drive containing evidence of correspondence with the White House? How would that excuse work for a taxpayer’s records? Oooops, sorry. That’s a felony.

When these few pages of declarations were written, Mr. Kane must have forgotten that Defendant Lerner alone “accumulated more than 1,600 pages of emails and documents related to official IRS business in a nonofficial, unsecure, personal email account, including almost 30 pages of confidential taxpayer information.”

What about her “personal” email accounts, other devices, the multiple devices of others—not to mention the servers? That’s right—no declaration mentioned the servers. Yet, everyone knows emails reside on servers, and there had to have been multiple servers.

It looks like Magistrate Judge John Facciola, who has expertise in electronic discovery, will indeed have to provide substantial assistance to the parties to locate the emails and perhaps issue some subpoenas to have devices brought into court, get data from servers, or open discovery for depositions. The parties have until September 24 [whembly: Remember this date kids! ] to resolve it with the Magistrate’s help.

The IRS claims it has found about 24,000 of Lerner’s emails on the computers of others. Why weren’t hard copies retained as was required by the Federal Records Act? Whose computers in the White House have been checked? Did they all crash at the same time too—just losing the emails with the IRS?

There are far more questions than answers from the IRS declarations. And law-abiding citizens want to know.

The only thing these miserly declarations prove is that IRS has abdicated all responsibility and has no interest in finding the emails. But Judge Emmet Sullivan does.

Sidney Powell worked in the Department of Justice for 10 years and was lead counsel in more than 500 federal appeals. She served nine U.S. Attorneys from both political parties and is the author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.