Let’s have another slow clap of appreciation for the Obama Administration’s slow-walking scandal control protocols.
By dragging historic scandals out for years, the Administration has time and again slipped devastating revelations past the short attention spans of the public… and the even shorter attention spans of media loyalists who can’t wait to declare each damaging story “old news.”
Thanks to this tactic, revelations that would have been bombshells a few months ago become footnotes, ground into dust by the relentless turning of the news-cycle millstone. For example, the latest revelations in the IRS scandal give us abundant cause to doubt the veracity of statements made to Congress by Internal Revenue Service officials, notably including the current commissioner, John Koskinen.
A trove of emails from former Tax Exempt Organizations chief Lois Lerner, the key figure in the jaw-dropping abuse of power against political opponents of the Democrat Party, has suddenly been discovered, months after Koskinen assured us they were lost forever in one of the many computer crashes that mysteriously befell Lerner and other IRS officials. From The Hill:
The Treasury inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner sent between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the panels said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, according to Capitol Hill aides.
The IRS said last year that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, losing an unknown number of her emails over the prior two years.
Of the emails the inspector general found, about 650 were from 2010 and 2011, and most were from 2012. The inspector general found about 35,000 emails in all as it sought to recover data from recycled back-up tapes.