The IRS watchdog charged with investigating Lois Lerner’s missing emails told the House Oversight Committee, on Thursday, that he is looking into the possibility of “potential criminal activity.” This latest stunning development in the IRS-Tea Party scandal has yet to be reported on any of the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening or morning shows.
On February 26, The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan reported the following:
The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.
Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.
Also on Thursday, Politico’s Rachael Bade alerted her readers that there “at least a half-dozen conservative applicants” still waiting for their tax exemptions. In the February 26 article headlined “From IRS: ‘Death by Delay,’ Bade reported the following:
Nearly two years after the IRS was exposed for improperly sidetracking requests for tax exemptions from tea party groups, POLITICO has learned that at least a half-dozen conservative applicants are still waiting for an answer.
This challenges repeated assertions by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen that his embattled agency has “completed” a set of recommendations to fix the problem and address a backlog of nearly 300 applications, some of which had been pending already for three years.
The groups that are still waiting include Karl Rove’s giant Crossroads GPS, which spent at least $26 million against Democrats in the last election cycle. But most of the half dozen are mom-and-pop outfits from New Mexico to New Jersey, run by volunteers out of their own houses and operating at a fraction of Crossroads’ budget.
The years-long delay has gutted these groups’ membership, choked their ability to raise funds, forced them to reserve pots of money for possible back taxes and driven them into debt to pay legal bills.
These recent developments come on the heels of the news, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon’s CJ Ciaramella, that Lerner raked in “$129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013.”
