House Republicans kept up their attacks against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen during an impeachment hearing Wednesday, but the conservative coalition that wants him out of a job still faces real obstacles to impeaching him.
The embattled IRS chief admitted he had inadvertently delivered false testimony in 2014, expressing “regret” about his statements for the first time.
During a hearing before the House Oversight Committee in March of that year, Koskinen had vowed to hand over all emails belonging to Lois Lerner, former head of the agency’s tax-exempt unit. Congress later learned the emails had already been destroyed at the time of his testimony.
“Some of my testimony later proved mistaken,” Koskinen said during the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday. “We clearly failed in areas of preservation of documents, and I’ve said that was a mistake.”
But the IRS chief stopped short of owning all the failures Republicans have attributed to his leadership, which Republicans say are justification for his removal.
“I believe that impeachment would be improper,” Koskinen said. “It would create disincentives for many good people to serve, and it would slow the pace of reform and progress at the IRS.”
Despite his admission of mistakes, some Republican lawmakers are still nervous about voting to remove the IRS chief by advancing virtually unprecedented articles of impeachment. The hearing itself was the result of a compromise that allowed House GOP leaders avoid a vote on Koskinen’s impeachment until after the election, sparing GOP lawmakers from the possibility of an embarrassing defeat if the measure failed.
Conservative lawmakers, however, don’t seem ready to give up. They’ve argued for nearly a year that his removal is necessary to serve as a check on the executive branch, and would send a message to other administration officials that stonewalling Congress is unacceptable.
In early 2014, a pair of employees at an IRS office in Martinsburg, W.Va., wiped 422 backup tapes that housed Lerner’s emails in violation of a congressional subpoena for the documents. The House, at the time, was still looking into allegations of discrimination against Tea Party groups.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday highlighted the “coincidence” that occurred when those documents, which had sat untouched for two years, disappeared off the tapes shortly after investigators requested copies.
Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus have also warned leadership against shelving their impeachment effort amid signs that many Republicans favored a less-dramatic censure for the IRS commissioner.
A majority vote of the entire House is needed to impeach any official, and a two-thirds majority of the Senate is required to remove that individual from office following a formal trial. No appointed official has been impeached successfully in more than 140 years.
