IRS EMAIL SCANDAL

Jonah Goldberg


"Congressional investigators are fuming over
revelations that the Internal Revenue Service
has lost a trove of emails to and from a
central figure in the agency's tea party
controversy."
That's the opening sentence of the Associated
Press story on the IRS's claim that it lost an
unknown number of emails over two years
relating to the agency's alleged targeting of
political groups hostile to the president.
But note how the AP casts the story: The
investigators -- Republican lawmakers -- are
outraged.
Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were
a Republican administration, the story
wouldn't be the frustration of partisan critics
of the president? It would be all about that
administration's behavior. With the
exception of National Journal's Ron Fournier,
who called for a special prosecutor to bypass
the White House's "stonewalling," and former
CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, it's hard
to find a non-conservative journalist who
thinks this is a big deal.
Let's back up for a moment. In 2013, IRS
official Lois Lerner planted a question from
an audience member at an American Bar
Association meeting. She used her answer to
apologize for -- and favorably spin -- the
agency's actions, and then later claimed that
the apology came as an unprompted response
to a question.
Lerner laid the blame for the inappropriate
targeting of tea party and other groups to a
few low-level bureaucrats in Cincinnati. That
was a lie. Senior officials in the IRS knew and
helped to coordinate the effort. She said she
only heard about the problem when tea party
groups protested. The targeting, in fact, had
already been under internal and external
investigation.
In short, Lerner worked hard at denying her
agency's tactics on applications for nonprofit
status from groups deemed to be hostile to
the president's agenda. According to IRS
officials' congressional testimony, agents
were told to "be on the lookout" for groups
that "criticized how the government is being
run." Lerner even joked to colleagues that she
should get a job at Obama's activist group
Organizing for Action.
President Obama insists he didn't know about
any of this until he was briefed on it the way
he's briefed on so many issues: from news
reports. Nevertheless, we've since learned
that White House officials were aware
earlier.
Lerner, who was forced to resign, took the
Fifth Amendment rather than clear the air.
In the June issue of Commentary, Noah
Rothman notes that the mainstream media
initially treated the IRS story as a very big
deal. ABC's Terry Moran dubbed it a "truly
Nixonian abuse of power by the Obama
administration." But as Rothman notes, the
media were just as quick to buy the story that
this was a minor bureaucratic screw-up being
whipped up into what the president called yet
another "phony scandal."
More recently, Obama proclaimed there was
not even a "smidgen" of corruption at the IRS,
despite the fact his administration's own
investigations are still underway. Obama's
assurance seemed good enough for most of
the media.
This is one of the great public relations
turnaround stories of all time. Liberal groups
successfully spun the incident as a well-
intentioned mistake by a government agency
trying to deal with a deluge of new
applications from right-wing crazies let loose
by the Supreme Court's Citizens United
decision. The "real" story was -- again --
Republican overreach.
Never mind that there was no evidence for
such an "uptick" in applications -- Lerner's
word. Indeed, evidence suggests that Lerner
went looking for that evidence as an excuse
for abuses she had already undertaken.
So now the IRS claims that a computer crash
has irrevocably erased pertinent emails (an
excuse I will remember when I am audited).
National Review's John Fund reports that the
IRS manual says backups must exist. If emails
-- which exist on servers, clouds and
elsewhere -- can be destroyed this way,
someone should tell the NSA that there's a
cheaper way to encrypt data.
The storied City News Bureau of Chicago
famously lived by the motto "If your mother
tells you she loves you, check it out." The
bureau closed down several years ago.
Perhaps that kind of skepticism died with it.