Articles: The Good News Democrats
By week’s end, perhaps recognizing that the story was not finding willing buyers, IRS Commissioner Koskinen, tried another tack, claiming that the emails were not “records’” and therefore could be destroyed without consequence. John Hinderaker, the ace litigation lawyer who is one of the authors of Powerline found this argument unpersuasive, citing federal law and the agency’s own operating manual and concluding:
As the IRS investigation continues, Koskinen and others at the Agency should not be allowed to get away with the facile suggestion that Lerner’s emails -- all of them! -- were not “records” and therefore could be destroyed with impunity. It would be interesting to know what documents the IRS didpreserve as “records” during the relevant time period. Unless the IRS was simply thumbing its nose at its statutory duty to maintain records of its actions and deliberations, a large number of emails should have been preserved in some fashion.
A final point: the IRS whines that it has 90,000 employees and that managing its internal documents is therefore difficult. But take a look at the IRS’s budget. In fiscal years 2012 and 2013, the IRS’s budget for “Information Services” was in excess of $1.8 billion annually! Nearly two billion dollars in “information services,” and the agency can’t keep track of emails? And that doesn’t count another $330 million, annually, for “Business Systems Modernization.”
If the IRS can’t preserve its senior managers’ email accounts on an information systems budget of $1.8 billion a year, the federal government is even more inefficient and incompetent than we thought.
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