Issa Subpoenas IRS Commissioner – IRS Required By Law To Keep Records of all Agency Emails

The Regime’s “dog ate my homework” excuse for losing 24,000 of 67,000 of Lois Lerner’s emails sent between 2009 and 2011 — ain’t gonna cut it.

Via the Daily Caller:

“The [Federal Records Act] requires agencies to make and preserve records of agency decisions, policies, and essential  transactions and to take steps to safeguard against the loss of agency records,” said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, who subpoenaed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Monday.

The IRS’s own definition of the Federal Records Act makes clear that emails must be saved and documented, according to an instructional page for employees on the IRS website.

“The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media,” according to the IRS. “Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business. Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities; or Valuable because of the information they contain.”

“If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly,” according to the IRS. “The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.”

Obviously, the White House is deeply involved in the IRS scandal-  Obama and his flunkies have made that abundantly clear with their ongoing efforts to poo-poo and controversialize a legitimate investigation into IRS malfeasance.

Josh Earnest deployed the Regime’s tried and true “conspiracy theory” defense on reporters aboard Air Force One, yesterday. This is how they (as Sharyl Attkisson so aptly put it) “controversialize” a story that’s damaging to the Regime. Read closely.

Asked by a reporter aboard Air Force One whether he thought the technical glitch was in fact a “reasonable explanation,” Earnest, the incoming press secretary, was at first dismissive.

“You’ve never heard of a computer crashing before?” Earnest asked.

Regime: “Move on, you guys, nothing to see, here.”

When pressed that emails are stored on servers and not hard drives, Earnest gave a more detailed response, including attacking Republicans in Congress.

“I think it’s entirely reasonable because it’s the truth and it’s a fact,” Earnest said. “And speculation otherwise I think is indicative of conspiracies that are propagated in a way that left people with a disinformation about exactly what occurred.”

Regime: “Do you want to align yourselves with tea party conspiracy theorists?” Reporters’ expected response: “Oh God, no.”

Earnest said the IRS provided 67,000 emails to and from Lerner to congressional committees. He said this included emails during the period of time that the IRS said the crash included.

“So a good-faith effort has been made by the IRS to cooperate with congressional oversight,” Earnest continued. “The far-fetched skepticism expressed by some Republican members of Congress is not at all surprising and not particularly believable.”

Actually, it’s Josh Earnest’s pathetic spin that isn’t believable.

Via Communities Digital News, here’s Charles Krauthammer’s reaction to that on Special Report, Monday night.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer reminded viewers that one of the articles of impeachment brought against President Richard Nixon was the abuse of the IRS to pursue political enemies. A missing 18 ½ minutes of audio on Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era tapes versus 26 months of emails? “This is a high crime, this is not a triviality,” Krauthammer warned.

National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, who has, for the most part, been pretty supportive of the Obama administration had this sobering response: “Josh’s statement, with all due respect, is insulting to my intelligence — it really makes me angry. The reason there’s questions about this is because they haven’t answered the questions. The fact of the matter is that, we don’t know the facts, we don’t know if anybody is guilty here or not, but we do know that one of the most pernicious things our government can do is use the IRS to come after us.”

Obama White House is losing many of his liberal supporters because they can no longer defend him and retain any degree of self-respect. That leaves the hard left and the lofo default libs still in his camp.

Meanwhile, on another scandal front that the Regime has tried hard to controversialize: CNN Poll: 61% Say Obama Admin Has Been “Dishonest” With Details Of Benghazi Terror Attack…

(CNN) – Six in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the way the Obama administration has handled the deadly terror attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, a new poll shows.

The CNN/ORC International poll released on Monday indicates only 37% are satisfied with the administration’s response to the September 2012 assault that killed four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya. […]

Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed think the administration has generally been dishonest in providing information about Benghazi in the aftermath of the attack.

The truth is finally catching up to this criminal cartel of a White House.

With the public becoming more aware of the Regime’s ongoing corruption and lawlessness, can the political remedy of impeachment finally become a reality?

We really need to get this guy out of there before he does any more damage to this country. I don’t care if that means the simpleton Biden becomes president – anything is better than this malignant tumor that’s been plaguing the nation for five and a half God-awful years in the person of Barack Hussein Obama.

UPDATE:

This is so brazen…

Via NRO: 

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

Ace says: “Because it’s politically chancey to even mention Impeachment, Obama is now basically daring the GOP to impeach him.”

I say, we take him up on the dare. I’ve had it with him, and so have most sentient beings.

UPDATE:

CBS News: Attkisson On Missing IRS Documents: If The Emails Really Are Lost, ‘That’s Quite A Story In Itself’

This is from a radio interview with Philadelphia talk show host Dom Giordano:

“These emails are not stored on a signal server or a single computer, so if there were a crash of a hard drive or some sort of system failure, they would still be retrievable. According to [John] Koskinen, the IRS Commissioner at the time, he told Congress that emails were stored offsite. That jives with people who said emails were backed up daily. There is a responsibility on the part of government officials to retain the data, make sure that is and can’t be lost in the system. If it’s true that the emails are lost, that’s quite a story in itself,” she said.

She thinks Congress should act fast to investigate if anyone inside the IRS is attempting to hide or destroy the emails.

“I would call in certain officials. Let’s assume there could have been some mischief committed — before they have time to get their stories straight and fix things up, I would get them in there under oath and start digging down and getting the timeline and getting people on the record about this. The only people that I see than can do this are members of Congress. The question is, do they have the will to do that?” Attkisson stated.

She goes on to make several other good points, including the fact that “the IRS is part of Healthcare.gov, if the IRS system can indeed be so vulnerable that some sort of crash can lose all kind of important data like this, what does t say about the federal system?”

MORE:

Glenn Reynolds: “I think it’s fair at this point to assume that the “missing” emails are missing because someone in the White House was behind this.”