House Republicans are preparing to take what may be their final shot at the Obama administration’s Internal Revenue Service next week after three years of attempting to clean out the agency.
Days before the House Judiciary Committee is set to hold hearings on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen’s alleged misconduct, Rep. Jason Chaffetz introduced a censure measure aimed at forcing Koskinen’s resignation.
But the White House stood by Koskinen Wednesday, just as it did in October when Chaffetz led 18 other Republicans in introducing a formal impeachment resolution against the embattled commissioner.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of both the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has led the congressional crusade against the IRS, said he is concerned Koskinen will not attend the hearing Tuesday.
“Part of me says he probably won’t, but who knows?” Jordan told the Washington Examiner. “If he comes, we’ll have questions for him. If he doesn’t, we’ll make the case that [his removal] is an action that needs to happen.”
House Republicans began calling for Koskinen’s head after more than a year of setbacks in their investigation of the IRS targeting controversy that emerged in 2013. The tax agency was accused of singling out conservative groups that were applying for tax-exempt status by subjecting them to unnecessary scrutiny.
“We think he [committed] dereliction of duty, breach of the public trust, and breach of every duty he had,” Jordan said of Koskinen.
While he did not preside over the IRS during the time Tea Party-linked groups were targeted, Koskinen drew congressional ire by providing false testimony and allowing staffers to destroy documents in the wake of the scandal.
For example, eight months after the Oversight Committee served Koskinen a subpoena for records related to the controversy, agency officials magnetically erased 422 backup tapes that contained many of the documents Congress had requested.
Republicans were outraged after they discovered emails sent to and from Lois Lerner, the ousted former head of the IRS’ tax-exempt office, had disappeared in February 2014 due to a hard drive crash. A month later, Koskinen vowed to provide Lerner’s emails to lawmakers despite knowing for weeks that the documents had vanished.
Koskinen did not inform Congress the emails were missing until June 2014, at which time he told lawmakers the records were permanently lost.
That statement was proven false in November 2014 when the IRS inspector general recovered thousands of Lerner’s emails from backup tapes. The IRS watchdog would later testify that Koskinen’s officials “did not put forth an effort” to preserve the emails.
“When you have something this egregious, I always say, never forget the underlying offense,” Jordan said. “Remember what these folks did. They used an agency with the power that the Internal Revenue Service has to systematically, and for a sustained period of time, target people for their political beliefs.”
Allegations of IRS bias against conservatives sparked mass outrage when they emerged in the first half of 2013. Right-leaning groups came forward with anecdotes of invasive questionnaires and long delays in attaining nonprofit status as Congress and, eventually, the Justice Department investigated the accusations.
Lawmakers uncovered lists of keywords, such as “patriot,” that IRS officials had used to select groups for extra scrutiny.
But Democrats quickly tired of the raucous congressional hearings. President Obama proclaimed there was “not even a smidgen” of corruption at the IRS long before the Justice Department had completed its investigation.
Neither Lerner nor any other official involved in the targeting scheme was charged with a crime when the probe concluded in October 2015.
Jordan highlighted the fact that the Justice Department’s investigation of the IRS was led by Barbara Bosserman, a maxed-out contributor to President Obama’s reelection campaign, as evidence that the law enforcement agency’s handling of the matter was politicized.
The congressional hearings slated for Tuesday and later in June could serve as the GOP’s final chance to revisit the IRS scandal before a new administration takes control of the agency.
For some, the Judiciary Committee proceedings could present one last opportunity to combat the perception that Obama’s IRS was not held accountable for its actions, although House Republicans have raided the tax agency’s budget in the years since news of the scandal broke.
Koskinen’s term ends in November 2017.
