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9/22/2014

What Politico’s Puff Piece Interview with Lois Lerner Won’t Tell You

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:12 am



Politico has an interview with Lois Lerner (cached version here; no links for thugs). It’s the type of soft-soap puff piece you would expect from Politico, complete with any truly tough questions being off-limits (i.e. don’t ask her about her political opinions!). This bit of rank dishonesty jumped out at me:

Lerner scoffed at the notion that she would crash her own computer to hide emails: “How would I know two years ahead of time that it would be important for me to destroy emails, and if I did know that, why wouldn’t I have destroyed the other ones they keep releasing?”

Oooh! Oooh! Call on me! I can answer that!

I think it’s time to remind you of something I quoted for you in June, from the Daily Caller, explicating the timing of all this:

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups. Two months later, Sonasoft’s contract ended and the IRS gave its email-archiving contractor the boot.

So it wasn’t “two years ahead of time” that your emails were destroyed, Ms. Lerner. It was ten days after you were told Congress was sniffing around. Then your hard drive crashed and your Blackberry was wiped. And the IRS archiver’s multi-year contract suddenly ended.

These facts are not noted, of course, in the Politico piece. You have to come here, to Patterico.com, for that particular bit of analysis.

29 Responses to “What Politico’s Puff Piece Interview with Lois Lerner Won’t Tell You”

  1. Lerner, for her part, assumes she is at the center of the storm because “I was the person who announced it.

    The Internal Revenue Service, apparently determined to get out ahead of an inspector general report critical of its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups, came up with a plan: Lois Lerner, the official responsible for the tax-exempt division, would publicly apologize in response to a question at the American Bar Association conference in Washington.

    Details of the now-infamous planted question emerged Friday after acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller admitted the gambit under questioning from members of the House Ways and Means Committee.

    sleazy fascist whore is sleazy?

    happyfeet (a785d5)

  2. Well they say that Lois Lerner is a savvy lawyer. I say she’s a delusional twit. They say she “lost control of her division” so the division went on its merry way harassing conservative organizations. The corollary of that is that it was “someone else’s fault”. Well she was in charge. And I say that the Navy tradition–if the ship runs aground, it’s the captain’s fault, and his or her career is over–should be applied to Ms. Lerner.

    I’m sending a note to Satan, saying he should order another load of coal when he hears that Ms. Lerner is coming.

    Skeptical Voter (12e67d)

  3. She’s giving sophistical arguments, but most people don’t know the answer.

    And she didn’t crash her computer to hide e-mails, because they probably weren’t on there * – she crashed her computer to hide the contents of deleted files.

    But her computer wasn’t seized till almost two years later.

    * There was no reason or requirement for her to have privately backed up any incriminating e-mails deleted from the central server.

    Also, she’s just saying e-mails because everybody else is, and the IRS mixed people up
    about that, although files on her hard disk could also be e-mails or drafts, true.

    Sammy Finkelman (cb098f)

  4. She’s been berated with epithets like “dirty Jew.”

    there’s a lot of that going around these days judging by this pic at National Soros Radio

    happyfeet (a785d5)

  5. It’s just that she had such good cover and she went and behaved so obviously. She could have developed a protocol with the repeated mantra of “look out for loony tax truthers and people registering political action groups as 501(c)(4)s” as tough as she wanted and all she would have gotten would have been “cold-hearted tax-collector” jokes. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

    nk (dbc370)

  6. nk, you the saying about “pride goeth before the fall”?

    This is much more “narcissism goeth before the fall.”

    Stupid, but I promise you: she thinks she is very smart. All of her friends tell her so.

    Simon Jester (c8876d)

  7. The hard drive and email thing is a wild goose chase. Her misbehavior in conjunction with 5 or 6 specific employees will be clear when it is all over. One more thing, the archiving contrat was not with the IRS email domain, it was with the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, completely seprate email system.

    Robert (d30dd8)

  8. “The hard drive and email thing is a wild goose chase.”

    It is now since the IRS destroyed what they thought was all the evidence. Lerner has more of a history. She hasn’t been at the IRS forever.

    joining the Federal Election Commission as an assistant general counsel in 1981. She spent 20 years at the FEC, where she was appointed head of the Enforcement Division in 1986 and then acting general counsel for six months in 2001.

    Her time at the FEC taught her how to go after those nasty conservatives who (Horrors) want to reduce the size of government. She has been a typical Washington bureaucrat all along. It’s just that Obama and company gave her free rein at the IRS.

    Mike K (90dfdc)

  9. Nothing says “Democracy” like a weaponized tax code. Did I say Democracy? Whoops, I meant Chicago Democratic Administration.

    Dejectedhead (a094a6)

  10. Did politico let her attorney(s) write this article?

    JD (38d44a)

  11. For a good year after the Watergate break-in GOP-friendly newspapers (yes, I know) published pieces like this about how stupid it would be for the WH to actually plant bugs in the Democrat headquarters, and why would they when they were leading by 20 points? Nixon every state but Massachusetts. Blah blah blah.

    Then John Sirica sentenced the Watergate burglars to 20 years and people started talking. It will take something like that, but it will happen. Assuming that the folks on the Right can hang together rather than hang each other separately, of course.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  12. The hard drive and email thing is a wild goose chase

    Wrong. The coverup is what will put them all in jail. Very few were involved in the actual IRS targeting, but the coverup is administration-wide.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  13. “look out for … people registering political action groups as 501(c)(4)s” as tough as she wanted …”

    All the local chapters of ACORN reformed as 501(c)(4)s during this period. These were groups so partisan that they stuffed ballot boxes.

    Kevin M (b357ee)

  14. Leave it to poor, pitiful, put upon Lerner to pull the “Jew Card”. The Left does not embarrass easy.

    Colonel Haiku (86020d)

  15. When being conservative’s a crime, we’ll hang side by side
    at the Swingin’ Party down the line

    Colonel Haiku (86020d)

  16. Lost in the back and forth flirtation of the Dow and S&P with record tops, the Russell is in free fall.

    If you got ’em sell.

    gary gulrud (46ca75)

  17. Say, wasn’t she the one that sought advice from an IT guy and an IRS atorney about whether or not IM’s were immune to the federal records act archiving requirement? And didn’t she express happiness upon learning they’d be a private communications tool?

    in_awe (7c859a)

  18. R.I.P. Polly Bergen

    Icy (fec6f2)

  19. Useful info. Lucky me I found your website by accident, and I’m
    stunned why this twist of fate did not took place earlier!
    I bookmarked it.

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  20. IRS infected, pus-filled boil won’t be lanced and cleansed until wrongdoers like Lois Lerner are put in prison.

    Colonel Haiku (86020d)

  21. I don’t know why Lois would be concerned about finding a job. She’s got a nice fat Government pension, Thrift Savings, and health care benefits that will support her quite well.

    PatAZ (094578)

  22. she could sell the house and get a sweet double-wide outside boca and just live the life you know

    happyfeet (a785d5)

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  24. 2211. Kevin M (b357ee) — 9/22/2014 @ 9:06 am

    pieces like this about how stupid it would be for the WH to actually plant bugs in the Democrat headquarters, and why would they when they were leading by 20 points?

    It was stuoid, if the purpose was helping the campaign.

    The DNC (in June) was not where campaign strategy was being planned.

    Neither Nixon nor his campaign manager, John Mitchell, thought of the idea, and Mitchell if anything was afraid to say no to Gordon Liddy (for fear he’d be overruled?) so he was noncommittal.

    The campaign intelligence operation itself was approved by Nixon at a time when he didn’t know or anticipate that his opponent would be McGovern.

    It looked like a piece of stupidity on the part of Gordon Liddy, but it looks like really, he was told to go into the DNC by Jeb Stuart Magruder. Why?

    I now suspect the purpose was to get the burglars caught before they could plant a bug in the McGovern campaign headquarters. The Nixon campaign had had a spy in the McGovern campaign headquarters, named Tom Gregory, recruited by the Robert F. Bennett, later Senator from Utahuntil he was defeated by the Tea Party in 2010.

    Liddy had tried to get him to plant a bug there, but somehow all attempts failed (of course he probably had been turned or was a double agent from the start. (He quit right before the Watergate break-in) So Liddy was finally going to send a team in himself to plant the bugs.

    Then Dean and Magruder tell him to go first into the DNC.

    Dean and some Democrats were probably conspiring to make Spiro Agnew president.

    That’s my theory right now.

    Sammy Finkelman (50ab1c)

  25. 21. PatAZ (094578) — 9/22/2014 @ 4:53 pm

    I don’t know why Lois would be concerned about finding a job. She’s got a nice fat Government pension, Thrift Savings, and health care benefits that will support her quite well

    She wants sympathy. And she may actually have an employer lined up, for when this is over, if she doesn’t get convicted of anything serious. (it still would be true many employers woukdn’t hire her)

    Her real worry is staying out of jail, or maybe legal fees.

    Sammy Finkelman (50ab1c)

  26. Paul Streckfus, editor of the EO Tax Journal [said] “To the average person, that [taking the 5th amendment] sounds like, ‘Oh my God, she must be hiding something!’”

    But that’s not true?

    Sammy Finkelman (50ab1c)

  27. she’s contemptible and i hate her

    i hate what she’s done on our sad little country

    i hate her stupid ugly face

    happyfeet (a785d5)

  28. If the US military, among other public entities, is devoted to protecting our rights, privileges and freedoms, and crud like Lerner and renegade, corrupt bureaucratizes like the IRS ultimately will be the main beneficiaries of such protection, I don’t know if the fight is worth it any longer.

    Okay, that comment is dripping with sarcasm—but not as much as before.

    I used to wonder how ethical, down-to-earth (ie, right leaning), patriotic-oriented people born and raised in countries like Mexico or Argentina deal with the slopfests that are their home turf. We in the US are inching a wee bit closer to the reality of such people.

    Mark (c160ec)

  29. ”(cached version here; no links for thugs)”….I absolutely this! Brilliant. Just brilliant.

    spazz (0d8dae)


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