Not so honorable.
(AP photo)
Some House Republicans are considering impeaching IRS commissioner John Koskinen after this incident in the Lois Lerner investigation:
According to inspector general J. Russell George, IRS officials literally put Lerner’s hard drive through a shredder, destroying it without exhausting every means of attempting to recover her data. “IRS IT management determined the extra effort to recover data from Ms. Lerner’s hard drive was not worth the expense,” George says in his prepared testimony.
That decision was made even though a technician in the criminal investigations division of the agency had “noted some scoring on the top platter of the drive” while trying to assist the IT division in recovering the data. “He believed there were additional steps that could have been taken to attempt to recover data,” George says. That was in July of 2011, before Koskinen led the agency. The hard drive was destroyed in April of 2012, according to the inspector general’s best estimate.
George goes on to note that IRS employees also erased the backup tapes of the server that housed Lerner’s e-mails in 2010 and 2011, though he says he “did not uncover evidence” of any conspiracy to obstruct the investigation.
Don’t expect much to come of this, since the Supreme Court ruled today that the IRS doesn’t have to do what Congress tells it to do.
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