Hard to muster any empathy for Lois Lerner

She was, you'll recall, the head of the IRS department at its Cincinnati office in charge of monitoring filings by nonprofit organizations. In that capacity, she knew some of her staff were harassing and intimidating conservative groups. Now she's trying to keep the records of her communications from those days sealed.

The LITD position: Make 'em public.

Get this: she and her assistant, Holly Paz, want to make the harassed groups the threatening party in this scenario:

During the course of the Ohio case, the tea party groups filed thousands of pages of documents, but testimony from Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz was left out of the public record because of their earlier request for privacy.

Now Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz say that since the case has been settled, there is no reason for their testimony to ever become public.

“The voluminous record of harassment and physical threats to Mss. Lerner and Paz and their families during the pendency of this litigation provides a compelling reason to seal the materials,” the women’s attorneys said.

They particularly blamed Mark Meckler, a tea party leader whose organization helped fund the class-action lawsuit, saying he helped stoke the threats against them by calling IRS agents “criminal thugs.”

“These words matter. They have created a fertile environment where threats and harassment against Mss. Lerner and Paz have flourished,” the lawyers said.

Mr. Meckler laughed when he learned about the filing.

“Four years of harassing innocent American citizens for their political beliefs, and she’s scared of a guy in a cowboy hat talking to a bunch of little old ladies at a tea party event?” he said, recounting the speech where he called IRSagents “thugs.”

He said if the depositions didn’t show any bad action on her part, then Ms. Lerner should have nothing to fear from their release to the public.

“The reality is because she knows she is guilty as the day is long and she doesn’t want people to know what she actually did,” he said.

“It’s hard to have any sympathy for the women. And frankly, I don’t believe she’s genuinely scared,” Mr. Meckler said.

I suppose comparisons to Elena Ceaucescu pleading, "We loved you like our own children!" are a bit strong, but there is certainly a whiff of the irony that accompanies any comeuppance of fallen and cornered totalitarians. And that's what Lerner, Paz and the anti-free-market-and-low-tax thugs on their staff really are.

Everything about a shameful episode like this needs to be public knowledge. It's the only way to prevent a possible recurrence.

The agency that, among all federal-government bodies, is the encapsulation of government's role as the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the agency charged with using that force to take the money of citizens using a variety of means (income tax, capital-gains tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, etc.) had in its employ a number of people who held in utter contempt those who, quite civilly, argued for Madisonian restraint in the exercise of that power.

That is chilling.

Making the records public would be a significant step in eradicating this kind of mindset from the leviathan state.

Once in a while, a federal judge does something really cool

Emmett Sullivan, has had it with the IRS not delivering the goods:

The IRS is in hot water once again with no-nonsense federal district court judge Emmet Sullivan over Lois Lerner’s emails. A year ago, Judge Sullivan ordered the IRS to explain in writing and under oath how some of Lerner’s emails went missing, and to detail any potential methods for recovering them. 

The IRS managed to recover 1,800 emails that it previously claimed “inadvertently” were destroyed. Now, it has again incurred Judge Sullivan’s wrath.

Today, he threatened to hold the Commissioner of the IRS and Justice Department attorneys representing the government in contempt of court because they failed to produce status reports and newly recovered emails of Lois Lerner, as the judge had ordered on July 1, 2015.

Sullivan told the government that its excuses for not following his July 1 order were “indefensible, ridiculous, and absurd.” He reminded Justice Department lawyer Geoffrey Klimas that he had the ability to detain him for contempt. And he added, “I will haul into court the IRS Commissioner to hold him personally into contempt” if there is any more non-compliance with the July 1 order.

In that order, Sullivan directed the IRS to begin producing, every week, the nearly 1,800 newly recovered Lerner emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The IRS did not produce any Lerner emails until July 15. It also failed to provide Judicial Watch the status report regarding the Lerner email production that Sullivan had ordered.

Judge Sullivan was not amused. And he was as scathing in his written order as he was from the bench.

When President Cruz signs the bill a solidly conservative Congress sends him dismantling the IRS, we won't have to worry about further acts of persecution and sleaze from this agency that ought never to have existed.  Cleanup will be about the last bit of business regarding this horrid instrument of  tyranny.

Once in a while, you still find a principled judge in post-America

 . . . such as US District Court Judge Reggie Walton:

Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.

The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.

But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.

“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.

“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.

"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other PDAs.”

IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA request for the Lerner emails.

The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True the Vote for exempt status.

Makes sense to moi.  Since nobody's swallowing the line that the e-mails went poof and are gone forever, the IRS certainly ought to have to be subject to the assessment of an independent expert that its preposterous claim is indeed true.

Trey Gowdy is so good

If you want to corner a Freedom-Hater and leave him no way to conceal his foulness, sic Trey on him!