Lois Lerner Fights Back--Through Her Lawyer --Give her immunity

Lois G. Lerner / AP

By Rachel Bade, Jun. 27, 2014, Politico.com

Lois Lerner has no records of two years of missing emails and Republican claims that she’s hiding something are “silly,” her lawyer said in his first interview since the controversy around the former IRS official erupted two weeks ago.

“She doesn’t know what happened,” lawyer William Taylor III said of the 2011 computer crash that erased two years worth of Lerner’s correspondence. “It’s a little brazen to think she did this on purpose.”

The IRS two weeks ago told congressional investigators probing the tea party targeting that the former head of the tax-exempt division’s emails from 2009 through mid-2011 were lost when her hard drive buckled. The time period encompasses the first year IRS agents in Cincinnati began pulling tea party applicants for a closer look.

That news revived a firestorm among Republicans in Congress, who are incredulous that technology cannot bring the emails back and accuse IRS Commissioner John Koskinen of lying. Democrats point out that no evidence suggests the computer crash was intentional and accuse Republicans of fanning flames of a dying controversy.

Lerner has been silent for more than a year, pleading the Fifth on Capitol Hill and speaking only through her lawyer episodically. The interview marks their first detailed response since the scandal was reignited and suggests Lerner’s camp is going to keep fighting.

“This is a so-called congressional investigation with no pretense of objectivity or bipartisanship,” Taylor said. “Critics of Ms. Lerner and the IRS seize indiscriminately on small pieces of fact to claim they prove scandal.”

The interview covered a number of questions raised in recent weeks, from claims that Lerner targeted GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley to accusations she was in cahoots with the Justice Department. Taylor also revealed that Lerner did not print official emails or have any saved on a backup computer — the former being something Republicans will seize on to say she broke record-keeping law.

Lerner’s admission at a May 2013 tax conference that the IRS had been singling out applications for tax-exempt status using terms such as “tea party,” followed by a critical inspector general report days later, set off the original storm. The groups in question were seeking status as a social welfare organization, or a 501(c)(4) that is allowed to engage in a limited amount of political activity.

Here are her lawyer’s answers to top questions:

The computer crash.

It was an accident, said Taylor, a founding partner of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP: “She didn’t have anything to do with the destruction of her computer.”

Lerner came to work one day in late spring 2011 and was surprised to flick on her computer to find a “blue screen,” he said. He said she tried to get it fixed since her practice of archiving was to simply save things on her computer. Democrats have released emails showing Lerner contacting the IRS IT department to show she tried to resolve the problem.

She never backed them up on a USB or separate hard drive, he said, ruling out a line of questioning posed by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) about whether Lerner could have the emails stored elsewhere on a portable device.

Republicans say it’s no coincidence that just 10 days before the crash, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) had sent his first letter to the IRS about 501(c)(4) political activities and donors.

Oversight Republicans this week interrogated Koskinen about whether the agency at the time of the crash reached into its stash of six-month backup tapes to restore the emails. Koskinen said he wasn’t aware if they tried.

Taylor didn’t know about that option either, saying Lerner simply filled out an IT ticket “like any other IRS employee” with a problem, and when they told her they couldn’t salvage the hard drive and mentioned a more “expensive” alternative, she gave them the green light to pursue that option, he said.

“She requested that IT use every possible resource. Unfortunately, the sophisticated alternative was not able to retrieve the contents of her hard drive,” he said.

Koskinen this week said that the IRS even sent Lerner’s computer to its criminal investigators, who were also unable to get anything back.

The Grassley invite referral...

Read the full story:  www.politico.com