The Washington Examiner posted a story today about the investigation into the Internal Revenue Service‘s (IRS) discrimination against conservative political groups.
The article reports:
In a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen Wednesday, the pair of Republicans questioned the tax agency’s record-keeping policies, which have come under fire for years thanks to a series of lengthy congressional investigations that were stymied by the IRS’ failure to turn over key documents.
“For unknown reasons, the hard drive in question was not recycled, and in December of [2014] a FOIA request was issued that may have pertained to documents on the hard drive,” Hatch and Wyden wrote of the wiped hardware. “In April 2015, the IRS subsequently ‘sanitized’ the hard drive, in potential violation of IRS procedure and the relevant litigation hold.”
It is very easy to avoid the consequences of your actions when you erase all of the evidence. Unfortunately, despite the fact that it was illegal, that is what the IRS did.
The article concludes:
Chaffetz (Representative Jason Chaffetz) and Jordan (Representative Jim Jordan) likened the development in the Microsoft case to the now-infamous destruction of 422 back-up tapes containing the emails of Lois Lerner, former head of the IRS’ tax-exempt unit.
Tax officials wiped those tapes “in spite of the existence of a preservation order, a non-destruction order from the Department of Justice and a congressional subpoena,” the congressmen wrote.
Led by Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, House Republicans moved to impeach Koskinen in October after he misrepresented the IRS’ search for documents that had already been deleted.
We need to elect people who will hold our government accountable when it acts contrary to the Constitution it has pledged to protect. Anyone involved in this deletion of documents needs to be fired immediately and prevented from ever working for the government again. It is obvious that the people who destroyed these documents and records figured that the price of destroying them would be less than the penalty if they were released.