9 thoughts on “The Missing IRS Emails”

  1. Austan Goolsbee had been identified as the official who had told reporters “on background” that the Koch brothers “do not pay corporate income tax” through their company, Koch Industries.
    Goolsbee could not have made his claim without access to the Kochs’ private tax data, …

    Of course he could have. Goolsbee’s statement was incorrect. It doesn’t prove that he had access to secret, accurate IRS information about Koch Industries; if anything it proves the opposite.

    The Goolsbee thing is old news, as is most of the linked article. Here’s what appeared to be new, or at least newish:

    Now, the Treasury Inspector General For Tax Administration (TIGTA) has announced that 30,000 of the lost emails of Lois Lerner — the person at the heart of the tax collectors’ culture of corruption and author of Tea Party-targeting by the IRS — found on 744 disaster recovery tapes, include some that seem to indicate these incidents were the tip of a corruption iceberg.

    It would be news if the TIGTA had announced “the tip of a corruption iceberg”, but it hasn’t; that’s just the writer conflating what TIGTA actually announced (30,000 emails, some unknown subset of which might not have been found previously), and what the writer hopes and/or believes.

    In an email from the Department of Justice’s tax office requesting a delay in the delivery date of the formerly “lost” documents, it noted that TIGTA “has located 2,500 potentially responsive documents” and needed extra time “to make any necessary withholdings.”

    “Potentially responsive” means they could relate to the release of private taxpayer information by the IRS to administration officials, including the White House.

    No, “potentially responsive” means that they might be responsive to information requests from Congress or the courts, and therefore would need to be reviewed for private taxpayer information before being released to those parties. They “could relate to the release of private taxpayer information by the IRS to administration officials” in the very broad sense that they could be about anything, so sure, they could be about that. But there’s no more reason to think that these new messages contain a “smoking gun” than there was to think that of the previous tens of thousands of emails that were turned over.

    What we have is a bunch of emails, some of which might not have been seen by investigators before. That could be a big deal, or nothing.

    Only if they haven’t been vacuumed before they’re released.

    If no conspiracy is found, it must be proof of an even bigger conspiracy.

    1. found on 744 disaster recovery tapes

      You told us there was nothing to recover on the tapes because there were no tapes.

      1. Ha! No, I wrote that it didn’t make sense to hope to find messages deleted from the server before the June, 2011 hard disk crash (the famous missing Lerner emails) on backup tapes that were made between December 2012 and May 2013. What didn’t occur to me is that the tapes might contain copies of message that Lerner sent before June, 2011 that were deleted from the recipient’s server mailbox between December 2012 and May 2013. Those messages wouldn’t have been found earlier (since they weren’t on the server when the IRS got the request to hand over emails).

        TIGTA has yet to say whether they found any such messages, or how many, and it seems unlikely that most of the missing emails could be found that way (some were sent to non-IRS recipients, and presumably some were deleted before December 2012). I suppose it’s a win-win for the GOP: they might get some more messages to look through (a good excuse for more rightist media stories on the “scandal”, even if the messages are benign) and since there will still be missing messages they can keep arguing that the IRS is still hiding the real smoking gun.

          3. I’ve said the same for you

            I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that you wrote something, and then refused to back it up by providing a link or quote. If you think I’ve done that, you can prove it: by providing a link.

    1. I had 23 minutes so I’m out of the pool as well.

      I’m still hoping to win the:

      “Jim lies about what he said in the past” pool except that the pot there is so tiny because of the high odds of it happening.

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