The nefarious Homework-Eating Dog lunged from the shadows and gobbled up the email accounts of five more employees involved in the Tax Exempt Organizations voter-suppression scandal, including two of the famed “low level employees from the Cincinnati office,” according to a report from the Associated Press on Friday.
If memory serves, the agency has already claimed at least ten other officials had their emails mysteriously annihilated, plus of course a batch of correspondence from the winsome Lois Lerner, the head of the operation. Except it turns out Lerner’s emails weren’t totally vaporized after all. The Administration finally admitted they’re probably still parked on a backup tape somewhere, but it would be too “onerous” to recover them. I’m not sure if the five new employees’ emails are Disintegrated, or merely Onerous.
In other banana republic news, we learned this week that Frau Lerner was running some kind of “secret research project” that involved donor lists improperly obtained from the groups she was targeting. According to a report at the Daily Caller, the technical adviser for the Tax Exempt Organizations Division was “quite agitated” about this little project and thought it was something that should have required authorization from Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller. You remember him, don’t you? He’s the guy Barack Obama pretended to fire, back when he was pretending to be angry about the abuse of IRS power to target his political enemies.
To date, no one has actually been fired over the IRS scandal. Lerner got to enjoy a nice paid vacation, then retire with benefits and take the Fifth when asked to testify about the scandal Barack Obama now claims is a figment of Republican imaginations, devoid of so much as a “smidgen” of corruption.
Update: It’s not just subpoenaed email disappearing over at the IRS. They’ve done up and lost an entire person. Fox News reports on the House Oversight Committee’s search for one Andrew Strelka, who was until recently an attorney at the Justice Department’s tax division who represented the IRS in civil suits over the Tea Party targeting scandal… but before that, golly gee wow, what an amazing coincidence, he worked for Lois Lerner in the Tax Exempt Organizations division, and according to some (surviving) IRS emails, was directly involved in targeting conservative groups.
And now he’s gone, poof, blammo, bamf, say hi to D.B. Cooper if you see him. Attorney General Eric “Stonewall” Holder has been refusing to help the House Oversight Committee get in touch with Strelka. “The [Justice Department’s] efforts to prevent the committee from learning Mr. Strelka’s whereabouts suggest the department has cause for keeping him from speaking with the committee,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) growled in a letter to Holder earlier this week.
Enjoy your Third World government, America! Not a smidgen of corruption at the IRS. Or a smidgen of incriminating emails. Or a smidgen of Andrew Strelka.