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Congressman Asks NSA To Provide Metadata For "Lost" IRS Emails
An anonymous reader writes in with news that the IRS lost email scandal is far from over. Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over "all its metadata" on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service. "Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment," Stockman wrote on Friday. The request came hours after the IRS told a congressional committee that it had "lost" all of the former IRS Exempt Organizations division director's e-mails between January 2009 and April 2011.
Quickly! Use your fourth amendment violation to help us with this first amendment violation! No, that's not a joke. Why are you laughing?!
It is very difficult not to reach this conclusion, unless you believe that the IRS just lost all relevant information by accident...
Earlier testimony by the IRS indicated that it would take years to fulfil the current request to get the emails from the email server. Now they are saying a workstation crashed so the emails were lost....... Time to start charging people with obstruction of congress/justice.
For all their mouth-breathing bullshit, nobody should make the mistake of thinking that the GOP is stupid. This is a lose-lose for the President on its face: if the NSA doesn't come back with the data that it's asserted they have, then they're in cahoots with Obama; if they somehow do come back with it, then it proves the GOP right. Either way, they win. It's a slimy, empty, political victory, but a victory all the same.
NSA is the National Backup Service
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"Take a real scandal (NSA) and link it to a fake one (IRS)"
Translation: "Take government malfeasance that I imagine affects me personally and link it government malfeasance that I don't think impacts me personally...yet"
You (and so many others) fail to appreciate what's obvious to others of us: that while the NSA behavior is egregious, it's now out in the open, and you can take steps to protect yourself. And if you already assume the worst--that the NSA is scanning/saving *everything*, then that can't get any worse.
But the extent of the IRS behavior *isn't* out in the open. It *can* get much worse. If there's *any* politically motivated behavior going on the the IRS, then that is tacit approval and groundwork for more. And you won't think it's a "fake" scandal in a decade when, left unchecked, you find yourself the subject of a tax audit because you donated to the political party not in power. They can put a lien on your house. They can garnish your wages. In terms of practically achievable damage to the average citizen's life, the IRS is far more dangerous. The power to tax is the power to destroy.
You can stymie the NSA. You can't stymie the IRS.
This is hilarious. If they CAN get the info, it makes everyone in government VERY nervous, if they can't get it, then the next thing this congressman should bring up is "why the heck are we funding the NSA if they don't actually seem to do anything?" Ok, the NSA's answer to that is "we do lots of stuff, but we can't tell you about it, it's secret".
Waiting for an amusing sig.
National Storage Archives.
signature is pants
We've got politically motivated BOLO lists, a political appointee hatchet-person taking the fifth, a government agency bullshitting the nation about "crashed" computers and "lost" emails....
There is a turd in here somewhere. Let a special prosecutor to sift through the IRS back up tapes, and subpoena all the other agencies for Lerner's mail. Let's find out why all these motherfuckers are stonewalling and lying.
It's personally offensive to me; to be told they can't recover the mail. I know that's bullshit. It's not even vaguely plausible. It's an insult to my intelligence and it deserves to be persecuted if only to expose and humiliate the fuckwits that have the temerity to make such a stupid claim. Letting that one slide just isn't tolerable. Let's kick open the door and find out what in the hell is going on here.
lost the emails............ I know that's bullshit and so do you.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Amazing how you have made this into the GOP being slimy when the whole issue is due to the Democrat controlled IRS (during that time-period) losing all relevant emails from a large period of time. That is what is slimy here.
Do you have ANY comprehension of what you seem to be supporting????? Consider:
Person A pays his taxes. Person B pays his taxes. Person C pays his taxes.
Persons A,B, and C form a club, and each tosses-in a few dollars to fund club activities.
WHY ON EARTH is the government automatically entitled to apply a new tax to the already taxed money the three people chipped-in????
Now let's extend this a bit...
The club has functions of general benefit to society. Anything from providing medicine to needy kids, or food to hungry families, or teaching English to immigrants, helping drunks get sober, you name it ... and wealthy person D decides to donate to the cause. For a wide variety of historical and cultural reasons, in the US it has long been policy to not tax the money that person D donates to help the club. The general reason is that the US was never intended to be socialist - it had a small government and left "social welfare" to a huge array of voluntary and charitable organizations. Money already flowing to such organizations was already deemed to be in the public good, and it was therefore redundant and counter-productive to tax it "for the public good".
do-gooders on the left long-ago declared that actions in the political realm were in this very nature of being "beneficial to society" and in that vein, the labor unions were enabled to become hugely involved in politics by disguising their Democrat-aligned election activities as "voter outreach", "volunteer training" and so-on and were able to do it under the 501(c4) section of the US code (which covers labor unions). For DECADES all the people on the left DEPENDED on this and defended it with lofty rhetoric about "civic responsibility" and so on. Only recently, as people on the right started to try using the same parts of US law in a similar way, have Democrats become critics - and ALL their proposals to remove the tax exemption have included the 501(c3) section of IRS code (which is where the non-union charities all are) while carefully and deliberately letting the 501(c4) section (which conveniently only applies to labor unions) stand. Any proposal to kill-off tax exemption for the 501(c3) groups in a partisan attempt to "get" the Koch Brothers or the TEA Party, will also hit things like the Shriners, Alcoholics Anon, Food Banks, etc while protecting the thugs at the UAW and the SEIU - an obnoxious result for something pretending to be "reform".
IF you are going to remove ABSOLUTELY ALL tax exemptions from US Law, you'd at least be more fair than any proposal the Democrats have ever supported BUT you are still stuck with the problem of a group where all the members are contributing after-tax dollars: Should THAT money be re-taxed? I ask because many such proposals remove that tax exemption by declareing a gathering of people to be a new entity and the money chipped-in to be "income". Under that scheme there is no such thing as "freedom of assembly" because nearly every gathering costs money and as such would be taxed and regulated and subject to harassment and arbitrary suppression.
The sad thing about this political firestorm is that not one person in a hundred can actually explain what it is about. It's amazing how many people think that the IRS was seeking to prevent the Tea Party from getting tax exempt status; that was never the issue, their tax exempt status was never in doubt. The issue was they were applying for 501(c)(4) status which is reserved for social welfare groups like civic leagues and volunteer fire departments. Social welfare groups are allowed to engage in political activity but it cannot be their primary activity. Wondering why the Tea Party wanted that 501(c)(4) designation? Such groups do not have to reveal who is donating money to them. There has been a large run up in the number of groups applying for the 501(c)(4) designation.
I happen to know for a fact that all of my email sent & received is backed up for 7 years, because those are the retention requirements imposed on my company by the federal government.
So my emails from 2009 - 2011 are archived happily along with all of the other email from the 2nd half of 2007 through the present day. If a private corporation can be held to this level of competency (and it's really not THAT hard), why shouldn't the motherfucking IRS, which literally owns the fucking finances of the government?
All they needed was some marketing. If only they had called themselves SkyDrive, or OneDrive, or iCloud...
John
These people are just trying to avoid paying taxes. Kill this 501(c) bullshit now.
The problem isn't that the Tea Party folks wanted to avoid paying taxes. The problem is that the IRS, which has vast powers so that it can extract tax revenue from the people, abused those powers for political ends. And what is worse, it abused those powers unequally, harassing one group while leaving another group alone.
For 27 months, not one single Tea Party group was approved for 501(c) status, while dozens of liberal groups were approved. And since you will automatically call me a liar if I link Fox News, here's a USA Today story about this.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/14/irs-tea-party-progressive-groups/2158831/
I view this as tampering with an election, and it is very much NOT OKAY. I'm pissed about this and you should be.
Or are you going to try to tell me that would violates everybody's "rights"?
Are you going to try to tell me that nobody's rights have been violated? Or is it just that you think it's okay to violate the rights of "Tea Party" groups since you don't approve of them?
If you think it's okay to violate the rights of those with whom you disagree, just be honest about it and say so.
If you think it's not okay for the IRS to abuse its powers for political ends, regardless of whom they were abusing, then wake up and start reading the news.
I want to see dozens of people from the IRS fired, tried in court, and go to jail if convicted. But if I can't have that, then I will look forward to the day when some conservative President gets elected and the IRS starts doing this stuff to liberal groups. Perhaps then you will take it seriously.
Wrong. What we've been seeing lately is that they'll just tell you they don't have it. They'll confirm they don't have it. Especially if they do actually have it.
They're on record lying to congress already. So they're not going to have any trouble looking you right in the eye and saying "nope"...
Keep in mind, we're talking about investigating an IRS scandal in which the IRS is now claiming the requested emails were lost in a hard drive crash.
They expect us to believe that the emails were only stored on an end user laptop and that there were no back ups and that the server retained no records... of official IRS email.
Do you believe that? No one does. Even the people saying they believe it don't actually believe it... its just part of the political game going on right now.
Apparently the IRS was taken over by some political factions that wanted to limit speech... and when they got caught at it the whole IRS is now trying to cover it up.
None of which is being made easier by the white house which wants everyone to believe their shit doesn't stink... and the "justice" department which so far as I've seen has made a point of not investigating anything.
I could respect the "neither confirm nor deny" line because it wasn't a lie. It was a refusal to answer. But they're not doing that anymore. They're just lying now. And they're not just doing it to casual requests for information. They're lying on court documents, lying in response to FOIA orders, and they're lying directly to congress.
Which means they're lying to everyone we have access to... they could be lying to the president as well for all we know.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I'm just telling you the reality of the situation. It's never going to happen where everyone plays fairly. Each side will find workarounds. Liberal groups like Unions and MoveOn.org get around campaign finance laws.
Eventually the Republicans/Tea Party Groups wizened up and started their own groups to get around tax exempt laws, but when they did so, the Liberals didn't like it. The Liberals tried to squash the conservatives in the courts, but were defeated by the Supreme Court, so the liberal senators and federal officials in the IRS and other federal agencies put pressure on conservative groups in order to minimize the conservatives' community organizing effectiveness. This is not right and it's hypocritical.
So one way to solve this is to revoke tax exempt status to any group that is political which would include Unions, Media Matters, MoveOn.Org - as well as Tea Party and conservative groups. However, as I stated before, that's never going to happen in this political environment.
So another solution is to allow tax exempt groups to say what ever they want politically. Why should the federal government be able to squash a group's 1st amendment rights? Heck, let's abolish the IRS and make April 15th just another day of the year. Let's get rid of the income tax and just have use/sales tax: i.e. Fair Tax. The IRS is way too powerful.
But of course, that's never going to happen either, but we can only dream.
Take a real scandal (NSA) and link it to a fake one (IRS)
Can we please stop referring to this as a "fake scandal"? It's real.
Richard Nixon could only dream of using the IRS like this. By now, only the willfully blind can consider this a "fake" scandal.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
They cannot explain OFA getting status, seeing how the supposed 501(4)(c) uses the Presidents Twitter account to make announcements.
There is no way that the Tea Party applicants can be scrutinized when OFA was not, given the regulations. OFA is the proverbial camel that passed through the eye of a needle, while conservative organizations are being examined in detail.
501(c)(4) organizations may inform the public on controversial subjects and attempt to influence legislation relevant to its program[44] and, unlike 501(c)(3) organizations, they may also participate in political campaigns and elections, as long as their primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.[45] The tax exemption for 501(c)(4) organizations applies to most of their operations, but contributions may be subject to gift tax, and income spent on political activities – generally the advocacy of a particular candidate in an election – is taxable.[46] An "action" organization generally qualifies as a 501(c)(4) organization.[47] An "action" organization is one whose activities substantially include, or are exclusively,[48] direct lobbying or grass roots lobbying related to advocacy for or against legislation or proposing, supporting, or opposing legislation that is related to its purpose.[49] A 501(c)(4) organization may directly or indirectly support or oppose a candidate for public office as long as such activities are not a substantial amount of its activities.[37][50]
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra