Give the Obama administration credit. The way they reveal the extent and depth of their utter contempt for the law is a combination of impeccable timing and confident arrogance. Thus, they are almost certain that latest shoe to drop in the IRS scandal will likely be lost in the cacophony surrounding the Berghdal prisoner swap, the administration-endorsed invasion at our southern border, and the fall of Iraq. In yet another oh-so-familiar Friday news dump, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revealed to Congress that they have “lost” more than two years worth of emails to and from former tax official Lois Lerner.

That assertion, quite simply, is a baldfaced lie. The IRS claims that they are lost because Lerner’s computer crashed. As Powerline’s John Hinderaker so deftly explains, users like Lerner have accounts on email servers that transcend individual computers. Furthermore, every government entity backs up its servers with some form of long-term storage. Thus the notion that Lerner’s emails were lost is preposterous.

A subpoena demanding those emails and other documents was issued over a year ago, and on May 8 the IRS had promised to turn them over. Instead, they’re sticking with their story, blaming a 2011 computer crash for the 28 month period that Lerner’s communications with people either outside the government, or in agencies other than the IRS have evaporated.

Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) offered up a combination of predictable outrage and disquieting naiveté in response. “The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” he said. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.”

Camp is kidding himself. Back in April, when Judicial Watch released documents obtained in a successful Freedom of Information Lawsuit (FOIA) filed against the IRS, it was revealed that Lerner and other IRS officials were looking to bring criminal charges against conservatives entities for political activity, with one document showing that Lerner wanted the IRS to make an example of someone so “they wouldn’t feel so comfortable doing the stuff.”

And who did they want to help them do it? It was subsequently revealed by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) that Lerner sent a database of tax-exempt organizations that included legally protected taxpayer information to the FBI, just before the 2010 elections. Emails between Lerner and DOJ Election Crimes Branch official Richard Pilger even discussed in what format Pilger preferred those files be sent. “Thanks Lois – FBI says Raw format is best because they can put it into their systems like excel,” he wrote in an email to Lerner dated October 6, 2010.

Issa and Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) have sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. They’re demanding to know more about that database, which includes 21 disks – and a staggering 1.1 million pages of information on tax-exempt entities.

“We were astonished to learn days ago from the Justice Department that these 21 disks contained confidential taxpayer information protected by federal law,” the letter states. “We ask that you immediately produce all material explaining how these disks were prepared and transmitted to the FBI. The IRS’s transmittal of this information to the FBI shows that the IRS took affirmative steps to provide sensitive evidentiary material to law-enforcement officials about the political speech of nonprofits. At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials. The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information.”

The letter further notes that even as IRS was illegally assisting the FBI, they were withholding the information, despite the issuance of two subpoenas by the Committee that “created a legal requirement on you, as the Commissioner of the IRS, to identify and produce all subpoenaed material in an expeditious manner.”

Who’s kidding whom? No one enmeshed in this scandal is acting in an expeditious manner. As time goes on, it has become clear that Attorney General Eric Holder has no interest whatsoever in pursuing a timely investigation, a reality that was emphasized in an astonishing exchange last month between Jordan and David O'Neil, the acting deputy U.S. attorney general in charge of overseeing public integrity prosecutions. Under questioning from Jordan, O'Neil admitted he had no idea how many prosecutors have been assigned to the case, or how many attorneys from his division are working on it. Richard Pilger was worse. In a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last month he refused 34 different opportunities to answer critical questions about the case, forcing Issa, who believes the effort was aimed at keeping his exchanges with Lois Lerner off limits, to issue another subpoena to the DOJ.

The pattern here is becoming tiresomely predictable. Government officials, including the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, drag their feet or outright stonewall the Congressional investigations. Subpoenas are issued, and the government responds by saying how hard they’re working to comply, much like the IRS just did when they issued a statement saying that they’ve spent $10 million and put 250 IRS employees at work to assist congressional investigations, producing more than 750,000 documents, including 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering the period from 2009 to 2013.

But in the final analysis, Holder’s investigation remains in a calculated limbo. And genuinely critical communications between Lerner and anyone outside the IRS that might have revealed how wide – and how far up – this scandal goes, turn up missing, with no acknowledgement of that reality until a year after the subpoena for them was issued.

Camp's office noted that the missing emails are those between Lerner and government officials in places “such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.” That would be emails in addition to this one involving the Federal Elections Commission, that Lerner mailed to a top staffer at the IRS:

As I mentioned yesterday – there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down.

It would also be emails between Lerner and Democrat offices in addition to the ones already revealing that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013. That would be the same Elijah Cummings who in February insisted that any notion that he put the conservative group True the Vote “on the radar screen” of the IRS was “absolutely incorrect and untrue” and who continues to insist the IRS case “is solved. And if it were me, I would wrap this case up and move on.”

No doubt he would, despite a plethora of additional emails and other documents secured by Judicial Watch. And despite testimony by IRS lawyer Carter Hull, who has put the “involvement” in scrutinizing conservative groups into the Chief Counsel’s office of the IRS, headed by Obama appointee William Wilkins, one of only two political appointees in the entire agency made by the president.

I could go on listing the cast of characters, the plethora of testimony, the documents, the emails and every other piece of this gigantic puzzle, but therein lies the problem: the scope of potential corruption here is so vast, that even Americans dedicated to the news can’t possibly keep track. Simplification of this scandal isn’t easy, but there are over-arching realities that cannot be denied. The two most important are these: one, it has been admitted by the IRS that conservative groups were singled out for unwarranted scrutiny by one of the most powerful government entities in the nation; and two, despite every press release to the contrary, federal officials supposedly working for the American people are doing whatever they can to withhold critical information.

Why? A 2010 speech Lerner made at Duke University provides critical insight. She revealed that “everybody is screaming at us right now ‘Fix it now before the election.” The “fix” to which she was referring was the flood of money from tax-exempt entities flowing into the 2010 election, courtesy of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The Court ruled that political spending equates to free speech protected by the First Amendment. And while the government can prohibit corporations and unions from giving money directly to campaigns, the government may not keep corporations or unions from spending money to support or denounce individual candidates in elections. A few days after Lerner’s speech, Obama also railed against the decision, saying it will “open the floodgates to special interests…”

In other words, the bet here is progressives, using the IRS as their vehicle in this particular case, were doing what they always do: attempting to undermine a law with which they disagreed. And since their usually reliable vehicle for doing so, aka the courts, had already ruled against them at the highest level, they were forced to become more “creative” in pursuit of their ideological agenda. An agenda that is always pursued “by any means necessary.”

Thus, if it take a few “lost” emails to ring fence what might to the absolute worst abuse of power perpetrated by this administration, so be it.

© 2014 The Patriot Post