Lois Lerner fights back
..........................................................
Politico ^ | Jun 27, 2014 | Rachael Bade
Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago.
“She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”
The IRS two weeks ago told congressional investigators probing the tea party targeting that the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails from 2009 through mid-2011 were lost when her hard drive buckled. The time period encompasses the first year IRS agents in Cincinnati began pulling tea party applicants for a closer look.
Democrats point out that no evidence suggests the computer crash was intentional.
Lerner has been silent for more than a year, pleading the Fifth on Capitol Hill and speaking only through her lawyer episodically. The interview marks their first detailed response since the scandal was reignited and suggests Lerner’s camp is going to keep fighting.
“This is a so-called congressional investigation with no pretense of objectivity or bipartisanship,” Taylor said. “Critics of Ms. Lerner and the IRS seize indiscriminately on small pieces of fact to claim they prove scandal.”
Taylor also revealed that Lerner did not print official emails or have any saved on a backup computer.
Lerner’s admission at a May 2013 tax conference that the IRS had been singling out applications for tax-exempt status using terms such as “tea party,” followed by a critical inspector general report days later, set off the original storm. The groups in question were seeking status as a social welfare organization, or a 501(c)(4) that is allowed to engage in a limited amount of political activity.
Here are her lawyer’s answers to top questions:
The computer crash.
It was an accident, said Taylor, a founding partner of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP: “She didn’t have anything to do with the destruction of her computer.”
Lerner came to work one day in late spring 2011 and was surprised to flick on her computer to find a “blue screen,” he said. He said she tried to get it fixed since her practice of archiving was to simply save things on her computer. Democrats have released emails showing Lerner contacting the IRS IT department to show she tried to resolve the problem.
She never backed them up on a USB or separate hard drive, he said, ruling out a line of questioning posed by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) about whether Lerner could have the emails stored elsewhere on a portable device.
Oversight Republicans this week interrogated Koskinen about whether the agency at the time of the crash reached into its stash of six-month backup tapes to restore the emails. Koskinen said he wasn’t aware if they tried.
Taylor didn’t know about that option either, saying Lerner simply filled out an IT ticket “like any other IRS employee” with a problem, and when they told her they couldn’t salvage the hard drive and mentioned a more “expensive” alternative, she gave them the green light to pursue that option, he said.
“She requested that IT use every possible resource. Unfortunately, the sophisticated alternative was not able to retrieve the contents of her hard drive,” he said.
Responding to recent Ways and Means GOP allegations that Lerner tried to sic an IRS audit on Grassley, Taylor said they were mistaken and Lerner was simply suggesting a referral for the group, not the Iowa lawmaker.
Taylor said Lerner, who is not currently working but filling her free time gardening and volunteering, had nothing against Grassley.
In most of her criticized email correspondence released thus far from GOP investigators, Lerner has referred to scrutinizing conservative groups, like Crossroads GPS, while at the same time joking with colleagues that she wanted to work for the pro-Obama group Organizing for America.
But while Republicans say that shows Lerner was a mouthpiece for the White House, Taylor says it was natural for her division to look at conservative groups in 2010 because their numbers were on the rise.
“After Citizens United, groups identifying themselves with the tea party and other, more conservative causes dramatically increased the number of applications for (c)(4) status,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that significantly loosened restrictions on political spending.
He said it was simply the job of Lerner and the IRS to ensure such tax-exempt organizations follow the law, which bars them from using more than about half of their resources engaging in politics.
For Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp “to say the IRS is looking at political activity is like [Captain Renault] saying he’s shocked there’s gambling going on in ‘Casablanca,’” he said.
When POLITICO asked Taylor if Lerner was able to give an example where she expressed concern over a liberal group or lawmaker, he did not offer one.
‘Cahoots’ with DOJ.
Taylor also responded to Oversight GOP reports that Lerner and Justice officials met in the fall of 2010 when Justice was considering the possibility of prosecuting 501(c)(4)s that may have been breaking rules by overly engaging in political activities — details Republicans found in emails handed over by the Justice Department.
Again, he said she was just doing her job.
“We should hope the two are talking to each other,” he said, because Justice and the IRS both bring tax charges and should be on the same page, he said.
Oversight GOP has also hit Lerner for giving 1.1 million pages of tax return data about 501(c)(4) organizations to the FBI just before the 2010 midterms — 33 tax returns that included unlawfully disclosed private taxpayer information.
Taylor said Lerner didn’t know and sent them because Justice requested the documents: “She [understood] the donor information on Schedule B had been removed. In some cases, we later learned, it may not have been.”
The IRS has acknowledged that the 33 returns were not scrubbed of taxpayer information as required by law.
Printing ‘official’ emails — or not.
Taylor said Lerner did not print out official records she may have sent over email because she didn’t know she had to.
The Federal Records Act requires agencies to back up all “business” correspondence — anything dealing with policy or operations, for instance. And while the IRS says it’s up to employees to print off hard copies of official emails and file them, Taylor said Lerner did not because she “did not think it was required.”
National Archives, which oversees the law, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration are currently probing the lost emails and the backup policies. The Archivist has already said the IRS did not follow the law because it did not alert them to lost emails that could be important, which is required.
“If somebody is supposed to keep archived copies, that’s the IT department’s or her staff’s responsibility,” he said. “If she didn’t [print] something, it wasn’t because she tried to conceal anything. … There should have been [IRS] backup.” |
