Courtesy of Larry Doyle.
Saturday morning in America.
Should be a great day and a beautiful weekend with plenty of great sports activity to captivate fans and fathers in the crowd. In the process of making the most of the weekend, though, let’s not lose sight of the fact that our nation remains under assault both from without and within.
I am very concerned for the future of our land. While I am concerned about the threat of terrorism and our fiscal condition among many other reasons, my greatest concern actually centers on the lack of moral fiber and true leadership that is integral to the ongoing degradation of the rule of law in America.
Why so concerned — er, actually pissed off — on a beautiful Saturday morning? I am insulted and hope you are as well that we are forced to swallow such a line of horse$&it that e-mails within the IRS were lost because a computer crashed. This crock might only be compared to the junior high excuse that my dog ate my homework.
But rather than my railing further on this degrading end of week insult, let’s review Karl Denninger’s commentary “That’s a Lie” at The Market Ticker:
The Internal Revenue Service told Congress Friday it has lost a trove of emails to and from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the agency’s Tea Party controversy, sparking outrage from congressional investigators who have been probing the agency for more than a year.
The IRS said it cannot locate many of Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year.
Horsecrap.
Lerner’s computer sent those emails through a mail server. That server is a centralized device that, in a government installation (like the IRS) is, with a high degree of certainty, backed up and those backups are archived on a permanent basis.
In addition good business practice requires that Lerner’s computer be subjected to the same routine backups and some generation of those are typically retained permanently by policy, law or both.
Where are the backups?
“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.”
Yep.
I don’t believe there are no backups of both the server and Lerner’s computer. This means that they were almost-certainly deliberately destroyed, which is a crime (obstruction.)
This, in fact, is what usually gets government people when they get busted. It’s not the original act — it’s the attempt to cover up what they did.
As for Mr. Camp he needs to get a special prosecutor and independent auditor in there. Asking the DOJ to look into this is sort of like asking a Mexican Drug Lord to investigate whether one of his “mules” is involved in money laundering…..
Thank you Mr. Denninger for laying it out so poignantly. This issue is not one of right vs left but rather right vs wrong.
If it looks like corruption and abuse of power, and smells like corruption and abuse of power, and feels like corruption and abuse of power, then . . . quack, quack . . .
America and our children deserve so much better.
Yes, I’m pissed and I am glad I have the voice provided by my blog to voice my concern and disgust. I hope that regardless of your political leanings that you are pissed as well. Abuse of power is central to degrading the rule of law which undermines our democracy.
I think fighting for our democracy is a worthy cause.
To add further fuel to this fire and to confirm Denninger’s line of reasoning, you might find this 5-minute clip from a hearing on April 1, 2014 to be of real interest. In fact, you really need to watch this. Specifically at the 2:25 mark, the current head of the IRS John Koskinen is quoted as saying, “We can find Lois Lerner’s emails.”
Happy Saturday . . . and, as always, navigate accordingly.
