From me to you, because you know you want some and because I want to up my clicks for the month. IRS Commish John Koskinen, quite possibly the smuggest bureaucrat in the historical pantheon of smug bureaucracy, claimed he hasn’t seen any evidence of lawbreaking in the IRS’s mass deletion of Lois Lerner’s emails. As Gowdy delicately noted, it’s rather difficult to clear anyone of lawbreaking when you don’t know anything about the law:
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That was from yesterday’s hearing, held in the evening because two House committees had been leapfrogging each other in an effort to be the first to scream at Koskinen. Ben Smith will have more later on today’s hearing, which featured an archivist confirming IRS lawbreaking, as well as another round of verbal fury from Gowdy. But it’s unlikely even the most faceless IRS functionary will be able to match Koskinen for sheer worthlessness. Most people think of the IRS as being self-satisfied and arbitrary, a stereotype that the insufferable Koskinen validated with ease. Even Senator Claire McCaskill called him “arrogant” this morning. There’s some value in making a renegade government agency squirm, even if it’s mostly just pyrotechnics, and perhaps the GOP can nail the IRS for violating the Federal Records Act. But beyond that, unless there’s some heretofore unexplored IT option for reproducing the emails (and perhaps there is), Republicans can do little except shout. Maybe it’s time, per another memorable Gowdy moment, to haul Lois Lerner back before the committee and finally force her to testify.
