Thousands of emails connected to a key figure in the alleged IRS harassment of conservative organizations have been found but the IRS refuses to release them, and now a target of those IRS tactics is firing back.
Last year, the IRS reported that many thousands of emails connected to former director of exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, were lost due to hard drive failures. The Treasury Department’s inspector general found some 6,400 Lerner emails. However, the IRS says it will not release them now and it may be months before lawmakers or lawyers for conservative activists can see them.
“It is outrageous. It needs to be brought to an end immediately. Emails in whatever form that they have need to be released. The word games need to stop,” said True the Vote President Catherine Englebrecht. “I think the fact that we pay our taxes to this agency and they are in charge of health care should keep us awake at night.”
Despite the frustration, Englebrecht says this latest example of stalling comes as no surprise.
“It should come as no great shock at this point that the bobbing and weaving continues,” said Englebrecht. “For them to tell the American people that, yet again, they must stall for something that has no basis suggests that, left to their own devices, they would just as soon never give up those emails.”
The IRS says the emails might be available by September. The hold up is the assertion that employees must physically sift through the emails page by page.
“I am amazed yet again though at the attempt of the IRS to use complete nonsense in their attempt to validate the reason that they won’t release these emails,” she said.
“What they’ve said is that they’re willing to release them but first they must get rid of all of the duplicate emails and they’re doing this manually.” said Englebrecht, who points out there are plenty of computer programs that can sift out duplicate emails in short order.
She says the litany of excuses and delays makes her wonder if we’ll ever get to the bottom of the scandal.
“It’s more of the same and there’s no end in sight,” she said.
Englebrecht isn’t making any promises about what the 6,400 emails might contain, but she says the investigation should be much broader.
“It’s been troubling to me from the outset that we’ve put so much focus and attention on Lois Lerner. There are many other people, many other assistants of key people who are in play in all this. Our (Freedom of Information requests) have always sought to include much more than Lois Lerner and company, but rather a host of people who were in that circle at the time,” said Englebrecht.
She says one of the biggest problems is that IRS leaders feel no pressure to come clean to the American people.
“They seem to have no fear of the repercussions that Congress may exact upon them. They have sort of positioned themselves as being untouchable. That’s got to change,” said Englebrecht.
Congress has a major role to play in crushing that sense of invincibility. Englebrecht admits she doesn’t know exactly where the power of lawmakers ends in this matter. She appreciates the hearings devoted to the scandal thus far, but she says there is a long way to go.
“We are at a point now where we need prosecutions. We need perp walks an we need people to go to jail,” she said.
True the Vote was founded to ensure fair and accurate elections nationwide. Englebrecht’s group strongly advocates for photo identification at the polls and cleaning up voter rolls to remove people who are dead or who have moved, among other steps.
She says Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Texas to scold Republicans over the issue of voting rights shows this will be a major issue in 2016.
“I think we are in for a voters’ rights roller coaster in this election,” said Englebrecht, noting Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers are already challenging voter ID laws in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. She says President Obama’s call for mandatory voting suggests an even more aggressive agenda could be afoot.
As for the IRS fight, Englebrecht says she is never going away.
“We will fight it with our last breath,” she said. “This is an absolute attack on the essence of free speech.”
