IRS Finds 30,000 Lois Lerner Emails, Enraging Conservatives

By Todd Beamon / NEWSMAX

Five months after the Internal Revenue Service deemed that emails sent by former official Lois Lerner had been lost forever, the Treasury Department's inspector general told Congress on Friday that as many as 30,000 might have been found — and conservatives were outraged.

"Nothing they do surprises me," Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell told Newsmax of the latest development in the agency's targeting scandal of tea party groups. "Nothing they fail to do surprises me.

"I have no reason to think that this is everything," she added. "Now, what I would like to see them do is for the IRS to actually respond to all the subpoenas that have been issued to them by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the last year and a half.

"That would be the best thing they could do: just go ahead and answer all the subpoenas and do what you're supposed to do," Mitchell said.

Two top members of the Senate Finance Committee, Democratic Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, said on Friday that the Treasury's Inspector General for Tax Administration told them that it had had located data that might have included the Lerner emails.

The inspector general "has been able to recover some forensic data which may include documents the IRS believed were missing," they said in a statement. "This data may include emails to and/or from Lois Lerner which could be material to the investigation."

A Republican congressional aide told The Washington Examiner that the recovered data included as many as 30,000 emails that Lerner sent or received between 2009 and 2011.

The emails were found among hundreds of "disaster recovery tapes" used to back up the IRS' email system, according to the Examiner. The tapes contain at least 250 million emails.

"They just said it took them several weeks and some forensic effort to get these emails off these tapes," the aide told the newspaper.

Lerner, who retired in September 2013 because of the scandal, headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status from the groups. She was held in contempt for refusing to testify before Congress about the debacle.

In June, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified to Congress that the agency could not locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer had crashed that summer. They probably were lost for good because the disaster recovery tapes store data for only six months, he said.

Koskinen testified that they could only find 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. The agency had pieced together those emails from the computers of 83 other workers, he said.

Emails of others Lerner supervised during that period also were lost, Koskinen said — and in a July federal court deposition, the IRS said that Lerner's hard drive was destroyed and recycled three years ago.

That ended any chance of retrieving the lost emails, officials said.

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Losing Streak: WH Admits Improperly Inflating Obamacare Enrollment Figures

Guy Benson / Townhall Columnist  

Last spring, Obamacare supporters were ebullient when the Obama administration announced a milestone "victory:" Despite a truly disastrous roll-out, they'd enrolled eight million Americans in the program. The Obamacare debate, the president said, was officially over. We expressed skepticism over the White House's stats almost immediately, noting that the official numbers didn't account for duplicates, non-paying "customers," and consumer attrition -- not to mention the high percentage of "new" enrollees who previously had insurance, but were forced to use Obamacare's exchanges to obtain plans after their existing arrangements were cancelled under the new law.

The last two weeks have witnessed two more blows for the "it's working!" crowd.  First came the sharply revised 2015 enrollment projections

Fewer than 10 million people are expected to enroll in "Obamacare 2.0" for 2015, the Obama administration said Monday. That's a significant drop from the original goal. The Congressional Budget Office had projected 13 million, but officials said they expect the ramp up to be slower than the CBO originally thought. The revised goal is 9 to 9.9 million. It raises questions about whether Obamacare enrollment will reach projections down the road. The CBO had projected enrollment would hit 25 million by 2017, but now the administration says it will probably take at least one or two more years to reach that threshold. Officials are realizing it will find it tougher to convince the remaining uninsured to enroll. Many who opted not to sign up this year said the cost was too high.

It's almost as if many people aren't too excited about purchasing less-than-affordable coverage that saddles them with high out-of-pocket costs and sparse provider networks.  One thing the administration has going for it this year is that the individual mandate tax designed to punish shirkers is rising considerably, although those penalties are still much lower than the costs associated with buying Obamacare health plans.  Now we have this embarrassing admission from administration officials, who've been forced to reveal how Team Obama inflated its top line enrollment figure:

What Should The GOP Do About Obamacare?

John C. Goodman / Townhall Columnist

 

It should come as no surprise to Townhall readers that the new Republican congress has no plan to deal intelligently with Obamacare. That’s unfortunate. The worst thing that can happen over the next two years is for president Obama to appear to take the high road – insuring the uninsured and fighting the mean insurance companies – while Republicans rail about the small and trivial parts of health reform.

And the worst thing that can happen is the very thing that is about to happen. So here is some unsolicited advice.

To begin with, Republicans in Congress have created their own internal gridlock on Obamacare. Even if the Democrats all abstained and let Republican legislators do whatever they wanted, the Republicans still could not agree on what to do next.

From the base there is the incessant cry for “repeal.” But as just about every Republican candidate in this last election acknowledged, there can be no “repeal” without “replace.” Otherwise, from 10 to 15 million people will lose their health insurance. However, “repeal and replace” means transitioning from Obamacare to a new system. And no matter how radically different the new system is, it will run the risk of being called “Obamacare lite.”

In fact, there isn’t a single Republican replace plan that hasn’t already been called “Obamacare lite.”

And that’s before any negotiation with the other side takes place. Any repeal and replace agreement that has been negotiated with Democrats in Congress and with the White House will almost certainly be viewed with suspicious mistrust by the Republican rank and file.

Fortunately, there is a way out. In going forward, the GOP needs to make clear to its own base and to the Democrats that in any negotiation they will follow five simple rules.

Rule 1: No deviation from a simple vision. The Republican objective for the voting public should be: Keep your job; keep your health insurance; and keep your doctor. The most direct way to get rid of all the anti-job of Obamacare is to repeal the employer mandate. The most direct way to insure that people can keep insurance they like is to repeal the individual mandate. And the most direct way of insuring people can keep their doctor is to deregulate and denationalize the health insurance exchanges.