Lois Lerner won't face charges in IRS scandal

Former IRS official Lois Lerner will not face any charges for her role in the scandal of her agency's decision to slow-walk decisions about the tax-exempt status of conservative groups, the Justice Department announced in a letter. --Snip-- The federal government is thus closing its nearly two-year inquiry into the matter without charging anyone. The investigation found "substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints." --"But poor management is not a crime."

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Emails: Lois Lerner Is Longtime Friends With Regulator Who Targeted Scott Walker

Lois Lerner, the former IRS official accused of targeting conservative non-profit groups, is longtime friends with a Wisconsin state regulator who helped local prosecutors investigate aides and conservative allies of Gov. Scott Walker.
The Wall Street Journal reports in an editorial ["Wisconsin's Friends at the IRS"] that Lerner and Kevin Kennedy, the director of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), were in routine contact via email between 2011 and 2013.
Emails viewed by The Journal show that the two regulators discussed issues ranging from the personal to political. They shared news articles about campaign finance and also discussed dinner plans. The pair have known each other for more than 20 years, Kennedy told The Journal.


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IRS official: ‘Lois Lerner was the tip of the iceberg’

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure division testified Wednesday that the tax agency set up a special team with hundreds of lawyers to handle the probe into whether Tea Party groups were targeted, but repeatedly said she had no idea how it operated.
Mary Howard, who also works as the head Freedom of Information Act officer in the IRS, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that once the “special project team” was created and operational, she never saw requests for information.
Asked who was on the team, she said: “My first hand knowledge of that is none.” But she did say the Chief Council of the IRS — one of only two political appointees in the IRS; the other is the commissioner — was on the “special project team,” as were “hundreds of attorneys.”


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DOJ: No contempt charges for former IRS official Lois Lerner

The Justice Department will not seek criminal contempt charges against former IRS official Lois Lerner, the central figure in a scandal that erupted over whether the tax agency improperly targeted conservative political groups.  Ronald Machen, the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in a seven-page letter this week that he would not bring a criminal case to a grand jury over Lerner’s refusal to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in March 2014. The House approved a criminal contempt resolution against Lerner in May 2014, and Machen’s office has been reviewing the issue since then.

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Lois Lerner Received $129K in Bonuses

Former IRS official Lois Lerner received $129,300 in bonuses between 2010 and 2013, records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show.

Over a three-year period, Lerner, the head of the tax-exempt division at the heart of the IRS targeting scandal, received a 25 percent retention bonus—averaging $43,000 a year—on top of her regular salary.

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IRS Admits to Court it Hasn’t Searched for Missing Lerner Emails

Judicial Watch announced today that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) admitted to the court that it failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lois Lerner and other IRS officials. The admission appears in an IRS legal brief opposing the Judicial Watch request that a federal court judge allow discovery into how “lost and/or destroyed” IRS records relating to the targeting of conservative groups may be retrieved.

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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.

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Judicial Watch: DOJ Admits Lois Lerner’s Emails Exist

A Justice Department official admitted that former IRS official Lois Lerner’s apparently missing emails actually exist on a backup server, but the government doesn’t plan to retrieve them.  “A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there’s a catastrophe, so the government can continue operating,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News’ Shannon Bream.

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Judge orders IRS to come up with better explanation of missing Lerner e-mails

The dog-ate-my-homework – er, excuse me, hard-drive-ate-our-emails excuse did just about as well in federal court as it would during an IRS audit. Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected the IRS’ response to the Judicial Watch complaint about missing e-mails from Lois Lerner and other IRS employees involved in the targeting scandal yesterday. Sullivan in effect took steps to conduct his own independent probe, issuing an order demanding specific answers — and demanding them by one week from today:

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New Emails: Lois Lerner Referred to Conservatives As ´***holes´ and ´TeRrorists´

A newly discovered email exchange from Lois Lerner´s official IRS email account "directly demonstrates Ms. Lerner´s deep animus towards conservatives, which she refers to as ´---holes,´" House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday. In that Nov. 9, 2012 email, Lerner further suggests that conservatives will ruin the country: "So we don´t need to worry about alien teRrorists (sic). It´s our own crazies that will take us down," she wrote.

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EXCLUSIVE: Lerner intrigue goes back to '96 Durbin/Salvi U.S. Senate race

CHICAGO - The IRS scandal may have its roots in Illinois politics. Specifically, the 1996 U.S. Senate race between Democrat Congressman Dick Durbin and conservative Republican State Rep. Al Salvi.
More than a decade before his 2010 letter to IRS officials urging the agency to target conservative organizations, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's political career crossed paths with Ms. Lerner when she was head of the Enforcement Division of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and directly involved in the 1996 Illinois U.S. Senate race.

Soon after the IRS story broke, Al Salvi told Illinois Review that it was IRS official Lois Lerner who represented the FEC in the 1996 Democrat complaint against him. According to Salvi, Lerner was, without question, politically motivated, and went so far as to make him an offer: "Promise me you will never run for office again, and we'll drop this case."

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