One of the first direct results of the departure of Speaker of the House John Boehner is that Representative Jim Jordan now predicts that the House of Representatives will impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in this session. According to a story in the Washington Examiner, Jordan – the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, recently told members of the Young Americans Foundation: “It is something that has to be done. If we don’t hold some people accountable in the executive branch … they’ll never get the message.” Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution gives the House the authority to impeach: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The only officer of the United States who has been impeached other than the president was President Grant’s Secretary of War, William Belknap. He was impeached for corruption, and that forced his resignation. Last month Congress learned that under Koskinen’s watch at the IRS, despite an internal IRS preservation order and a Congressional subpoena for all of Lois Lerner’s emails, IRS officials deliberately erased 422 backup tapes containing some 24,000 emails. The IRS attorney in charge of these emails was Kate Duval. She has since left the IRS and moved on to the State Department where she has been put in charge of delivering Hillary Clinton’s emails to Congressional investigators. However, as our reports on Lois Lerner’s emails stated; emails – especially in large organizations - are forever. They are preserved on redundant tape backup systems spread across government as well as commercial IT security firms. Sure enough, within 15 days of the IRS informing Congress that Lois Lerner’s emails were unrecoverable, employees from the IRS Inspector Generals office simply drove out to one tape backup facility in Martinsburg, West Virginia and found 700 backup tapes that Ms. Duval’s evidence eradication crew had missed. In May of 2013, President Obama promised to: “…put in place new safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again.” However, last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report that essentially says that nothing has been done and that the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS may be continuing. I’m still reporting from Washington. Good day.

• published: 07 Oct 2015
• views: 210