Michael Gaynor
Ominous news for Obama administration: Judge Sullivan may be its Judge Sirica
By Michael Gaynor
"It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble."
When President Obama declared last Super Bowl Sunday that there was "not even a smidgeon of corruption" at the Internal Revenue Service, he gave his personal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to it and especially vouched for Lois Lerner, the key figure in the IRS scandal over the treatment of tax exemption applications.
To vouch is "to give personal assurances; give a guarantee" (www.thefreedictionary.com/vouching).
Team Obama predictably blamed conspiracy theorists for the idea that something was amiss at the IRS.
To date, no evidence has surfaced that President Obama personally ordered discriminatory treatment of tax exemption applications to promote his reelection and punish perceived political enemies.
But, as the late Howard Baker put it, "It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble."
Will President Obama's sweeping assurance cause him trouble now?
Not only is it now known that the assertion that the Lerner email was lost is false, but also that her Blackberry was wiped clean AFTER Congressional investigation began.
New York Observer's Sidney Powell (http://observer.com/2014/08/irs-shocker-filing-reveals-lerner-blackberry-destroyed/):
"The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan's court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner's Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner's hard drive."
Powell continued:
"Judge Sullivan has had to pry information from the IRS to learn anything about Ms. Lerner's Blackberry. Now, with these latest revelations, I'm confident he's not finished.
"In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her 'Outlook' and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.
"With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry 'was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.' This is a year after her hard drive 'crash' and months after the Congressional inquiry began.
"The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: 'There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,' according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.
"Lerner was issued another Blackberry for Valentine's Day 2012 – also after she came under fire for her targeting of conservative groups. The IRS still has that Blackberry. It's now in the possession of the Inspector General of the Treasury, but the new device would not have the data from the prior three years. That was most likely the point of getting the new device."
Powell opined:
"This most recent revelation of destruction of evidence and refusal to retain data and documents despite a Congressional inquiry is beyond outrageous. It screams of guilt and creates a presumption in the law that the evidence would prove what those who were targeted and harassed claim. Judge Sullivan, like most Americans, wants the 'missing' emails that we all know are there somewhere.
"Aside from the fact the IRS was required to keep hard copies, we now know they should exist on Blackberry servers as well as Google and perhaps others. Indeed, the Department of Justice has disclosed that they all should be on a government server – as we suspected."
As for possible "ghost" email accounts, Powell explained:
"The IRS should be able to determine, or Judge Sullivan can, whether any of the officials whose emails are missing used personal accounts or other names for business emails they didn't want going through the federal system even though they were required to do so."
Powell concluded:
"One thing is clear: the IRS has no interest in recovering the emails. It has deliberately destroyed evidence and another direct source of the emails it claims were 'lost.' It has been blatantly negligent if not criminal in failing to preserve evidence and destroying it instead.
"Don't be surprised if Judge Sullivan decides it's time to order production of everything on that Blackberry, issue subpoenas to third party servers including Blackberry for the dates covered by the Blackberry the IRS destroyed, unleash Judge Facciola, allow Judicial Watch more discovery, prohibit the IRS from destroying anything else, and start a list of lawyers who would make a good special prosecutor."
Noah Rothman, in "IRS now claims Lois Lerner's emails not really missing, just really hard to find" (http://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/26/irs-now-claims-lois-lerners-emails-not-really-missing-just-really-hard-to-find/):
"In June, the White House suggested that the Republican-backed probes into the IRS's behavior amounted to little more than the servicing of their paranoid 'conspiracy theories.' Increasingly, though, tax agency officials appear to have been involved in a something closer to a genuine plot to hide evidence of wrongdoing from the public.
"And those Democrats who continue to defend this agency out of some misguided sense of loyalty toward the president will find themselves in an increasingly untenable position. Those smart enough to read the writing on the wall see that. The dam is about to burst."
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sirica):
"John Joseph Sirica (March 19, 1904 – August 14, 1992) was the Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, where he became famous for his role in the Watergate scandal. He rose to national prominence during the Watergate scandal when he ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over his recordings of White House conversations.
"Sirica's involvement in the case began when he presided over the trial of the Watergate burglars. He did not believe the claim that they had acted alone, and persuaded or coerced most of them to implicate the men who had arranged the break-in (G. Gordon Liddy remained silent). For his role in Watergate the judge was named TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1973."
Judge Sullivan may turn out to be the Obama administration's Judge Sirica.
© Michael Gaynor
August 28, 2014
"It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble."
When President Obama declared last Super Bowl Sunday that there was "not even a smidgeon of corruption" at the Internal Revenue Service, he gave his personal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to it and especially vouched for Lois Lerner, the key figure in the IRS scandal over the treatment of tax exemption applications.
To vouch is "to give personal assurances; give a guarantee" (www.thefreedictionary.com/vouching).
Team Obama predictably blamed conspiracy theorists for the idea that something was amiss at the IRS.
To date, no evidence has surfaced that President Obama personally ordered discriminatory treatment of tax exemption applications to promote his reelection and punish perceived political enemies.
But, as the late Howard Baker put it, "It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble."
Will President Obama's sweeping assurance cause him trouble now?
Not only is it now known that the assertion that the Lerner email was lost is false, but also that her Blackberry was wiped clean AFTER Congressional investigation began.
New York Observer's Sidney Powell (http://observer.com/2014/08/irs-shocker-filing-reveals-lerner-blackberry-destroyed/):
"The IRS filing in federal Judge Emmet Sullivan's court reveals shocking new information. The IRS destroyed Lerner's Blackberry AFTER it knew her computer had crashed and after a Congressional inquiry was well underway. As an IRS official declared under the penalty of perjury, the destroyed Blackberry would have contained the same emails (both sent and received) as Lois Lerner's hard drive."
Powell continued:
"Judge Sullivan has had to pry information from the IRS to learn anything about Ms. Lerner's Blackberry. Now, with these latest revelations, I'm confident he's not finished.
"In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her 'Outlook' and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.
"With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry 'was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.' This is a year after her hard drive 'crash' and months after the Congressional inquiry began.
"The IRS did not even attempt to retrieve that data. It cavalierly recites: 'There is no record of any attempt by any IRS IT employee to recover data from any Blackberry device assigned to Lois Lerner in response to the Congressional investigations or this investigation,' according to Stephen Manning, Deputy Chief Information Officer for Strategy & Modernization.
"Lerner was issued another Blackberry for Valentine's Day 2012 – also after she came under fire for her targeting of conservative groups. The IRS still has that Blackberry. It's now in the possession of the Inspector General of the Treasury, but the new device would not have the data from the prior three years. That was most likely the point of getting the new device."
Powell opined:
"This most recent revelation of destruction of evidence and refusal to retain data and documents despite a Congressional inquiry is beyond outrageous. It screams of guilt and creates a presumption in the law that the evidence would prove what those who were targeted and harassed claim. Judge Sullivan, like most Americans, wants the 'missing' emails that we all know are there somewhere.
"Aside from the fact the IRS was required to keep hard copies, we now know they should exist on Blackberry servers as well as Google and perhaps others. Indeed, the Department of Justice has disclosed that they all should be on a government server – as we suspected."
As for possible "ghost" email accounts, Powell explained:
"The IRS should be able to determine, or Judge Sullivan can, whether any of the officials whose emails are missing used personal accounts or other names for business emails they didn't want going through the federal system even though they were required to do so."
Powell concluded:
"One thing is clear: the IRS has no interest in recovering the emails. It has deliberately destroyed evidence and another direct source of the emails it claims were 'lost.' It has been blatantly negligent if not criminal in failing to preserve evidence and destroying it instead.
"Don't be surprised if Judge Sullivan decides it's time to order production of everything on that Blackberry, issue subpoenas to third party servers including Blackberry for the dates covered by the Blackberry the IRS destroyed, unleash Judge Facciola, allow Judicial Watch more discovery, prohibit the IRS from destroying anything else, and start a list of lawyers who would make a good special prosecutor."
Noah Rothman, in "IRS now claims Lois Lerner's emails not really missing, just really hard to find" (http://hotair.com/archives/2014/08/26/irs-now-claims-lois-lerners-emails-not-really-missing-just-really-hard-to-find/):
"In June, the White House suggested that the Republican-backed probes into the IRS's behavior amounted to little more than the servicing of their paranoid 'conspiracy theories.' Increasingly, though, tax agency officials appear to have been involved in a something closer to a genuine plot to hide evidence of wrongdoing from the public.
"And those Democrats who continue to defend this agency out of some misguided sense of loyalty toward the president will find themselves in an increasingly untenable position. Those smart enough to read the writing on the wall see that. The dam is about to burst."
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sirica):
"John Joseph Sirica (March 19, 1904 – August 14, 1992) was the Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, where he became famous for his role in the Watergate scandal. He rose to national prominence during the Watergate scandal when he ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over his recordings of White House conversations.
"Sirica's involvement in the case began when he presided over the trial of the Watergate burglars. He did not believe the claim that they had acted alone, and persuaded or coerced most of them to implicate the men who had arranged the break-in (G. Gordon Liddy remained silent). For his role in Watergate the judge was named TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1973."
Judge Sullivan may turn out to be the Obama administration's Judge Sirica.
© Michael Gaynor
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