More on the IRS: the timeline, and some questions

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been difficult getting clear on the IRS timeline, but here are some salient facts that have come out recently, from Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ:

As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.

Some “coincidences” are just too coincidental.

It’s also been hard to get much information on the emails of the people I call the IRS Six—those other IRS employees who figure in the investigation and whose emails, just like Lois Lerner’s, have “coincidentally” disappeared off the face of the earth. Most articles I’ve read so far mention the Six but fail to indicate whether the IRS is claiming their email difficulties occurred in separate incidents, or whether it all happened in a single huge kaboom. Also, I haven’t read whether other IRS employees were affected or just these Six plus Lerner.

In addition, I’d love to know how often such crashes happen at the IRS. Are they a routine matter? If not, the crash becomes even more suspicious, if such a thing were possible. And if so, why on earth wouldn’t the IRS have fixed the problem—or at least, its backup system—long long ago? Is it possible that the IRS doesn’t want its emails saved for very long? And why, pray tell, would that be?

I’ve also had some difficulty finding the exact date range of the missing emails. I know that information is out there, because I’ve seen it before, but I don’t recall where and I can’t seem to find it now.

However, I did find this Seattle Times article purporting to give the timeline for the IRS scandal. But its timeline is incomplete, to say the least. For example, it leaves out the Camp letter that Strassel at the WSJ indicates Lerner received 10 days before her computer crash, and it doesn’t tell us the dates of the missing emails. It does add this, though:

Dcember 2011: The computer of Lerner’s boss’ chief of staff, Nikole Flax, crashes.

So at least we know that one of the Six had a separate crash; I suppose it stands to reason they all did. What are the chances of that being a coincidence (again, it would help to know whether the IRS system was so bad that computers were crashing constantly everywhere)? And what was the timeline on each crash for the Six?

Flax is the person who has since been reported as having visited the White House “35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.” Flax is listed as having spoken with a top Obama aide during some of those meetings.

So I’ve got another question: what was Flax’s timeline for these White House visits? Had she been going to the White House at the same rate in 2009, for example? Or did her meetings suddenly begin at a certain point, and if so, when? What about her predecessor? Did that person go to the White House much, if at all?

Strassel lists some of the other smoke surrounding this smoldering fire:

But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive””and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS””has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.

There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?

Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.

I’ve been puzzled by something else in connection with the IRS scandal and the emails in particular: why would the emails show anything that implicated the senders, even if they are guilty? Why would people plotting something like this leave incriminating evidence in emails, which tend to be hard to eradicate (that is, if you’re not in the IRS, in which case it’s apparently easy)? Don’t conspirators usually employ other means? Carrier pigeon or some such?

[ADDENDUM: One reason I wanted the timeline for the missing emails is that I suspect that even after Lerner’s computer crashed in June 2011, the emails for the previous six-months were still on the server and could easily have been recovered. Why were they not? Lerner’s email to the IT guy after the crash inquires about missing “documents” rather than emails. Would she, or someone else, not have ordinarily tried to recover the emails as well? Was no attempt made to do so at the time? And if so, why not?:

It was unclear why the IRS did not attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, “There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.”

Shawn Henry, the FBI’s former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.

“If they knew there was a problem in 2011,” said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, “they could have or should have been able to recover it.”

We also have an IRS policy change in May of 2013:

At the time that Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees’ email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today.

The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.

Gee, I guess the IRS could have done that in the first place. But we can’t expect the IRS to know anything about financial regulations or computer storage, can we?

As for what else occurred in May of 2013 in the IRS scandal that might have prompted the agency to finally change its email-saving policy, plenty. Checking back, I see that I was writing about the topic pretty much on a daily basis during that month, which reflects how enormously the story had heated up during that time. On May 22, Lerner took the Fifth, for example. Interesting that it was that month that the IRS finally decided to keep emails a bit longer than six months.]

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Bot of the creative compliment:

What a data of un-ambiguity and preserveness of precious experience regarding unpredicted emotions.

That’s what I strive for. Nice that someone finally notices, even if it’s only a bot.

How bad must it be in Iraq…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if Obama sends 300 advisors there?

Think about it. As James Oliphant points out—in a piece which indicates that the writer would answer “fool” to the knave vs. fool question—“the move is a tacit acknowledgment that many of the assumptions that Obama and his foreign policy team made about the world have proven to be incorrect.”

Obama doesn’t like to backtrack or admit he was wrong about anything. He’s certainly not explicitly doing the latter, but he is explicitly doing the former, and it implies the latter. It is particularly significant that he’s doing it in an arena where, as Oliphant observes, “Iraq was a box that his administration had checked.”

Oliphant is assuming that Obama wanted things to stay stable and peaceful in Iraq. And although, unlike Oliphant, I would answer that “knave vs. fool” question “both,” I agree with him. Whatever Obama’s long-term strategic goals around the world (and I think we can agree that one thing they involve is taking America down a peg or two), he cannot have wanted to face intense public pressure to do something about an Iraq that’s collapsing despite his having declared it relatively peaceful and promising under his watch just a couple of short years ago.

And it’s ironic that he might have prevented this had he been more serious about negotiating a SOFA and leaving several thousand troops there. He still could have taken credit for taking most of the troops out, and for leaving an Iraq that was at least somewhat stable. My guess is that in this case he really believed that Iraq would not blow up under his watch, and that he could have his withdrawal cake and eat it too. I wonder if any of his advisors warned him against thinking that way, and if so which ones.

The laughing Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

And what of the audio tape of Hillary Clinton giving an interview in the 1980s about a criminal case she took on in 1975? The one where Hillary slams the 12-year-old victim and says proudly how she got the probable rapist off, while laughing about his likely guilt? After all the things Hillary’s been through, including Benghazi, is this the one that might actually cause a significant number of people to turn against her?

Maybe. And if it does, one reason will be that it contradicts her strongest campaign selling point and image: that she is a champion of women.

Now, it’s not beyond the reach of her supporters to justify her actions in the case. After all, defendants need defending or our legal system could not function properly. Also, this was a long, long, long time ago (although the antiquity of Romney’s dog on the car roof story didn’t seem to stop them).

But while both things are manifestly true, it’s still a chilling and revealing experience to listen to the audio, and it’s not just because of what Hillary says, it’s how she says it. At the time of the interview Hillary was no child; she had to have been in her mid-thirties or even a bit older. So she was a fully-formed adult, and yet she sounds very different from the fully-formed adult we have come to know—or to think we know.

First of all, there’s the Southern accent. Where did that come from, and where did it go? It was briefly in evidence during Bill’s 1992 campaign when Hillary made her famous “standin’ by my man” remark (and for those of you who think Hillary is unattractive, watching that tape might remind you of how very attractive she actually was in her younger days). But at that time she was channeling Tammy Wynette in mockery, and the accent was obviously meant to be a put-on. The real question, the more relevant one for now, is how much of a shape-shifter is Clinton, and do we know the real Hillary at all?

The newly-surfaced tape also features a far more natural-seeming Clinton. On her recent book tour her control has been so iron that nothing about her seems to be the least bit spontaneous, even (or maybe especially) her laughter. So her relative ease and flow on the tape makes a person think that might just be the real, the inner Hillary, who doesn’t just get a probable child-rapist off (which after all is what defense lawyers do, and what they must try to do), but who seems not to have a qualm or regret or a care in the world about it.

That might give a lot of people pause, and not just women either.

Much of this resonates with today. Despite Hillary’s fame and prominence, I’ve seen and heard more of her on that book tour than I’ve listened to in the previous twenty-five years put together, and I’m surprised at how deeply off-putting her manner is—particularly her laugh, which seems forced, grating, and nervous. Now, if I were her supporter that probably wouldn’t stop me from voting for her, but it also would probably make me wonder about her, and this newly-unearthed tape would feed into that doubt: why is this woman laughing?

One last thing—when this tape came out, it struck me that uncovering it and publishing it was one of those things Democrats seem to do against Republican candidates, never vice-versa. Or at least, I can’t remember the last time it was done by Republicans rather than to Republicans, and even then I’m almost sure it had to do with someone on the late Andrew Breitbart’s gang (tapes about ACORN don’t count; it’s not a candidate), or involved small fish. This tape reminds me more of the secret “47%” recording which IMHO sunk Romney in 2012 more than anything else that happened.

I applaud the Washington Free Beacon, which broke the story by going to the archives at the University of Arkansas and locating the tape. That’s taking a leaf out of the leftist activist book, and it didn’t involve a single dirty trick, lie, or even distortion. Merely a determination to uncover the truth.

Polls are only bad for Obama…

The New Neo Posted on by

…if you think he still cares about public opinion.

I, for one, think he has o’erleaped public opinion. His vaulting ambition is to fundamentally change America, and that means a lot of people—maybe even a majority—will be expected to whine about it and even to stop thinking he’s such a likeable guy. But why would that matter to him, if he is intent on shoring up his and his party’s support with new immigrants, new ways to make people dependent on the federal government, and new ways to intimidate and silence the opposition? He can even do it without the help of Congress, if he continues to have the support of enough of his party members and the MSM.

And perhaps, if he’s audacious enough, he could even do it without the support of many in his party and the MSM. Not that those two entities are likely to turn on him. This crocodile would never eat them, right?

So unfortunately I disagree with Philip Klein’s evaluation of a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll:

But going into the sixth year of his presidency, Obama still hasn’t sold Americans on his view of the role of government, which could have significant ramifications for the liberal agenda in the future…

According to the poll, just 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that, “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” compared with 50 percent who agreed with the view that, “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” In February 2009, right after he was sworn into office, the same poll found 51 percent thought government should do more and just 40 percent who thought it was doing too much…

…[I]f Obama-era failures make Americans more skeptical about federal bureaucracy in general, it makes things that much more difficult.

But I suspect that Klein has a fundamental misunderstanding—shared by many politicians and pundits on the right—of what is being attempted here. Those polls are already way too close, given what’s been happening lately. But if the current plans of those who advocate the “liberal agenda” go as they hope, even that slim margin of smaller-government advocates will evaporate, and permanently. It’s not a question of convincing the population, it’s a question of changing it. And to further that goal, it not only helps if illegal immigrants from Latin America flood the country expecting the federal government to take care of them (and perhaps voting illegally, too), it helps if the federal government fosters the increasing financial dependency of more and more citizens on the feds.

Just look at Obamacare, for example. Besides everything else it does and doesn’t do, it makes a hugely increased number of people dependent on government for their health insurance premiums, and therefore for their health care and even their lives in some cases. How could that largesse, once given, be relinquished?

So why would Obama care about today’s polls? I can’t imagine a single reason. He’s not even the sort of person who basks in the glow of being liked (Bill Clinton comes to mind). Being liked is just a means to an ends to Obama, a tool for getting elected. He has bigger goals in mind than being liked, and anyway he already likes himself well enough to make up for all the rest of us combined.

Texas defends itself against the tide of illegal immigrants—and against Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The United States has jurisdiction over the border problem but is doing nothing to stop it and might in fact be encouraging it. So the state of Texas announces that it will take action:

Texas’ top three leaders, Governor Rick Perry, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Joe Straus directed the Department of Public Safety to immediately begin law enforcement surge operations along the Texas-Mexico border…

The surge operations will cost $1.3 million each week, and DPS is authorized to continue the operations for the rest of the year…

In a statement, Governor Perry said, “Texas can’t afford to wait for Washington to act on this crisis and we will not sit idly by while the safety and security of our citizens are threatened.”

State officials worry that while the federal government scrambles to house thousands of unaccompanied children crossing the border, there are fewer federal agents to keep up with criminals and gangs trying to get into the U.S.

The state says last year, when DPS conducted Operation Strong Safety, crime rates related to drug cartels, gangs, and other illegal border activity dropped sharply.

Note what’s being said here. My understanding is that the state can only help prevent entry by increasing patrols; they can’t deport people if Obama won’t do so.

So the huge number of families and kids illegally coming to this country is not even the issue on which Texas is focusing here. Rather, it’s that their entry is flooding the border and distracting the guards’ time and energy while the drug cartels climb aboard.

Now, we don’t know how families are getting the money to come here, and your conspiracy theory is probably as good as mine—and I do have some. But even if the majority of families/kids are coming for their own reasons (because they think they will be allowed to stay and get services, and/or to flee the violence in their home countries) rather than purposely as decoys for the cartels, they are serving as de facto decoys for them nonetheless. So if fleeing the danger posed by murderous drug cartels in their countries of origin is one of their motivations, then it’s highly ironic that escaping in this manner will serve to facilitate the entry of those very same dangerous people into the US, while the border guards are busy being babysitters.

And our president, whose duty it is to protect the US as a sovereign country, defend its borders, and follow the rule of law—including its immigration laws—encourages the first (the illegal entry of kids and families) and winks at the second (the illegal entry of criminals). Incidentally (or not so incidentally), both will help turn Texas blue and at the same time harm it financially. This DPS money doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from Texans.

The IRS and its email backup system

The New Neo Posted on by

Not only is the loss of the emails of Lois Lerner and the IRS Six not credible, but the failure of the agency to back them up properly in some centralized fashion is a separate outrage.

Here’s the way the IRS system supposedly worked (although “worked” is hardly the applicable term):

Not only is there no automatic permanent storage of all e-mail, the simple act of archiving a message would remove it from the IRS’s system entirely, including the “back-up system” that preserves messages for six months before deleting them. That’s a ridiculously decentralized system for an age when storage is cheaper than it’s ever been. In fact, the former IRS IT expert whom Bryan Preston interviewed claimed that the IRS has plenty of “back-up tapes” that could be used to preserve e-mails for much longer than six months if need be. What you’ve got here, in other words, is an agency stressing record-keeping in its own regulations and then doing everything it can to undermine that redundancy, first by trusting employees to diligently file “federal records” that might incriminate them and then allowing them to remove evidence from the system altogether, which naturally led to a spate of mysterious “computer crashes” in this case. It’s goofy. But it sure came in handy, didn’t it?

So, just to make it clear: this is the equivalent of relying on employees to save all of their emails that might incriminate them in wrongdoing, without any way for the agency or anyone else to independently check on those emails that have been “disappeared” by not being purposely saved by the sender. Nifty! Does anyone believe that anyone engaged in nefarious or even suspicious activity would be saving the evidence if that person had a chance to destroy it instead and leave no trace?

This is separate from the question of whether there really was no trace left in terms of whether the emails were stored on some other server somewhere outside the IRS’ system. I’ll leave that to the computer experts of the world, of which I am most decidedly not one. But it doesn’t take an expert to know that the emails should exist somewhere, if not with the IRS or some outside server, then with the recipients of those emails.

That, of course, is assuming they don’t have the same clever “system” of email record-keeping that the IRS has. And of course the irony of this being the IRS we’re talking about—you know, that agency that requires us to keep everything that passes though our hands for biblical amounts of time or face their terrible swift sword—should not be lost on the American people.

Did I say “lost”? It might as well be lost, for all the coverage the MSM is giving it. That’s another scandal, but the MSM has learned that it’s an effective way to deal with the situation. If a press has lost all integrity, the republic cannot continue. Somehow the press has decided the triumph of the left is more important than the continuation of the republic.

And let’s just say for the sake of argument that Lois Lerner and the Six are all completely innocent of wrongdoing. That’s highly unlikely to be the case, but even if it were true, learning the way the IRS handles its emails is a revelation about how the system itself constitutes an engraved invitation to abuse and coverup. This should send a chill through every single American, although it almost certainly won’t.

And that may be the most important outrage of all in the entire story.

[NOTE: You might want to read this letter send by Cleta Mitchell, attorney for the plaintiffs in lawsuits against the IRS, sent to attorneys for the defendants.]

[ADDENDUM: On the changing MSM treament of the IRS story.]

[ADDENDUM II: More on the tech details of the IRS system, from Andy at Ace’s.]

Surprise, surprise [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

The only surprise, perhaps, is that the LA Times is covering it:

The large subsidies for health insurance that helped fuel the successful drive to sign up some 8 million Americans for coverage under the Affordable Care Act may push the cost of the law considerably above current projections, a new federal report indicates.

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans who bought health coverage on the federal government’s healthcare marketplaces received government assistance to offset their premiums…

Premiums that normally would have cost $346 a month on average instead cost consumers just $82, with the federal government picking up the balance of the bill.

While the generous subsidies helped consumers, they also risk inflating the new health law’s price tag in its first year.

“The federal government picking up the balance of the bill”—wonder where that money will come from?

Who could have predicted such a thing?

[UPDATE 6/19: I see that the LA Times has changed the headline of the story to “Obamacare subsidies on track to cost billions this year, report says,” as well as some of the text, and issued a correction which reads as follows:

Because of an error in calculations, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated that a new federal report indicates that the cost of insurance subsidies under President Obama’s healthcare law may be running above current projections. The figures in the report actually suggest that the cost of the subsidies is roughly in line with current projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

So, in the first version of the piece the Times apparently did the math wrong, or got the projection numbers wrong, or made some other error (which is also no surprise). I can’t independently verify whether the Times was correct before, correct now, or correct neither time (it’s unlikely they were correct both times, so I’ll leave out that choice, but certainly the entire incident does not engender increased faith in the abilities of the Times to report on a story).

I also note the careful wording of the correction: “may be running,” “suggest,” and “roughly,” as well as that phrase “current projections,” which occurs twice in the correction. How do “current projections” compare to the projections made at the time the ACA was passed?

At any rate, although it’s certainly worse if subsidies are higher than expected versus the same as expected, by far the most important point is whether they are too high. The article says:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the annual cost of subsidies will rise to $23 billion next year and $95 billion in 2024, although the budget office continued to project that all the law’s costs will be offset by additional revenue it raises and by cuts in other federal healthcare spending.

Embedded in that sentence is quite a tale. That’s a lot of money any way you slice it, plus a projection about the offset that is still unknown—and of course those other unspecified “cuts” will come from somewhere, almost certainly Medicare.

And although I knew that Obamacare subsidies would be widespread in the exchanges, I find it pretty shocking that it’s at the rate of 9 in 10 (assuming, of course, that the Times is reporting that figure correctly). An incredible rate of government dependence, and purposeful.]

Losing trust

The New Neo Posted on by

In the end, will anything much be done about all these suspiciously lost IRS emails and the larger IRS scandal? Will the buck stop somewhere, and if so where? And how?

It certainly won’t be easy to get at the truth and some accountability, because of the high probability that they’re all in on the corruption: not just Lerner and the IRS, but the DOJ, Obama, perhaps the FBI, and of course the MSM, which has barely been covering the story at all, as opposed to its furor over the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes.

Poor Nixon. If only he’d had the MSM on his side (which would only have happened had he been a Democrat), he—as a commenter here wrote—probably could have “burned the tapes, and then accused the other party of arson” and gotten away with it.

The depth and breadth of the government corruption in the IRS scandal makes me think of a memorable moment in the 1985 film “Witness”. It’s when the Harrison Ford character, who’s been fighting an enormous web of police corruption and has been reporting back to his trusted supervisor about it, has the dawning and horrific realization that the supervisor is also part of the conspiracy. It’s a searing scene as I recall it (I can’t locate a video clip, though, to check my memory), conveyed through Ford’s facial expression as he’s talking on the phone to the guy.

Although I saw the movie long before my political change, I think that sort of feeling of deep betrayal by a person or people you once trusted can be an integral part of the process of change. How many people in America are feeling that way now—and how many would be feeling that way if the MSM were to properly report the story?

[NOTE: Although I can’t find a clip of the scene, “Witness” is an excellent movie, in case you haven’t seen it. Here’s a different clip that deals with a different—but also fascinating—topic. Harrison Ford has been hiding out with the Amish after the Amish child Samuel has witnessed a violent murder while in the city. The gun here is Ford’s gun.

I’ve written about pacifism many times. The summary version of my viewpoint: too bad the bad guys won’t agree to be pacifists, too.

Another cinematic treatment of the same question occurs towards the end of another wonderful movie, “High Noon.” Grace Kelly, Will Kane’s Quaker wife, has to make a similar decision. She decides that she knows who the bad guys are.]

The dangers in the Middle East as a whole

The New Neo Posted on by

One dire prognostication that might come true:

The fall of Mosul and the advance of ISIS””the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida offshoot””toward Baghdad last week prompted headlines warning that Islamist militants aim to redraw the map of the Middle East and establish a new state: a modern-day Islamic Caliphate spanning parts of Syria and Iraq.

They are well on their way…

…[I]t now seems the Middle East created by Sykes-Picot is going to collapse because of what National Review Online’s Mario Loyola last week called the Obama administration’s “criminal negligence” in Iraq. If so, then we should at least pause to consider what it is that we’re allowing to slip away, and why it has held together for so long.

Read the whole thing, and see what you think.

Snarky and bleeding heart liberals

The New Neo Posted on by

First we have Jen Psaki, State Department spokesperson and former spokesperson for President Obama, “answering” some questions from James Rosen, Fox News correspondent and recent Justice Department investigatee, about the capture of the Benghazi suspect:

“There are a range of factors that are taken into account”—yes, indeed. And “in terms of the right timing for operations along these lines, the President made the decision with the support of the National Security Team about the timing.” Yes indeed, again. Timing is everything, I hear.

I wonder why there is that slight smile on Psaki’s face, considering what extremely serious business this is. It is characteristic of what I referred to as “the sophomoric administration” in this post, where I described another State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, in this way:

There’s something much more profoundly disturbing about her, as though she’s a bad actress miscast in a role for which she’s learned only some of the lines. The director has given her poor advice on how to play it,…what voice quality would be suitable. To say that she lacks gravitas it to say the obvious. But she lacks even the appearance of gravitas; there’s no attempt at gravitas, except perhaps the glasses.

Psaki lacks even the glasses.

Let’s move to the second clip. Now we have Kirsten Powers, Democratic pundit on Fox, explaining to Bill O’Reilly that our Judeo-Christian tradition requires that we must take in and provide for all the children that might come here illegally:

I wonder how common Powers’ attitude is.