There are some genuinely fact-challenged dumb deluded ideas running around without a walker and a leash like the Creationist Museum where they depict Jesus riding a Dinosaur, and then there's real Utra-Mega Derp like this...
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Two House Republicans proposed legislation this week that would offer a whopping $1 million reward to anyone who could track down missing emails that may shed light on the IRS' scrutiny of political groups.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) introduced the "Identify and Recover Sent E-Mails Act" with a promise to dole out $1 million to any individual or group who can locate emails that disappeared from former IRS official Lois Lerner’s hard drive when it crashed in 2011. They would also award $500,000 for information about the potential destruction of those emails that could be used to prosecute any individuals involved. Those funds would come out of the IRS' budget.
Now the current head of the IRS had already testified before Congress -
under oath - that Lois Lerner's hard drive crashed taking the majority of her emails with it, and the Inspector General's report shows that this occurred 9 months before there was any investigation of this issue and even
a couple weeks before she was even informed that "Tea Party" Groups had been added to the list of those to be scrutinized after filing for 501(c)(3) status.
According to further testimony the Server backups of the Exchange mail at that time only went back six months - ending 3 month before anyone was really even looking for this information - so exactly who is this mysterious person that Gohmert thinks is keeping a flash drive of Lerner's emails in his back pocket?
Is this supposed to be a bounty or is it a Bribe for someone to make some shit up?
Let's be honest with ourselves and admit that the reason the GOP has to resort to offering a bounty for something that the IG and the DOJ should already be looking for is the fact that there simply isn't anything to find. It's already been shown that the IRS was doing it's job by adding conservative groups to their already existing lists which included "progressive", 'blue" and "post-ACORN" groups to the screening process.
This is who the IRS Targeted by political affiliation according to documents discovered by Media Matters via FOIA.
The IRS provided the heavily-redacted lists to ThinkProgress, after nearly a year-long search. From the earliest lists through 2012, the “historical” section of the lists encouraged reviewers to watch out for “progressive” groups with names like “blue,” as their requests for 501(c)(3) charitable status might be inappropriate. Their inclusion in this section suggests that the concern predates the initial 2010 list.
Explicit references to “Tea Party,” included in the “emerging issues” section of the lists, also began in August 2010 — but stopped appearing after the May 10, 2011 list. From that point on, the lists instructed agents to flag all political advocacy groups of any stripe. The documents instructed the agents to forward any “organization involved with political, lobbying, or advocacy” applying for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status be forwarded to “group 7822″ for additional review. Groups under both categories are limited in the amount of of lobbying and political activity each can undertake.
The Wingnuts have to offer to
Pay Somebody Off to get their smoking gun because as Candy Crowley displayed this week with Darryl Issa, they Don't. Have. One.
http://thinkprogress.org/...
“You don’t have that direct link,” Crowley continued. “You have the frontline agents going, yeah, we figured it was from Washington or I believe it was, but as of yet you don’t have that definitive, yeah, this guy called me and said, people, go look for tea party and patriot applications.” Issa claimed his investigation would eventually turn up direct evidence of his charges and described White House Press Secretary Jay Carney as a “paid liar” for claiming that Washington officials did not direct IRS agents.
The Inspector General’s report into the matter concluded that the IRS relied on “inappropriate criteria” while vetting groups applying for nonprofit status by using a BOLO—”Be On the Look Out”—list and blamed IRS officials in Washington, DC, for “insufficient oversight” of lower-level staffers. However, it specifically concluded that “All of these officials stated that the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS.”
This is all because the GOP is trying to prove a conspiracy that only exists in their dark fevered paranoid imaginations. And of course if they can take a pound a flesh out of the IRS in the meantime - why not?
"Well, you can do it one of two ways. You can have a Justice Department that's actually involved in justice and they will use pressure and they'll get it done," Gohmert said on "America's Newsroom." "We don't have a Justice Department. We have a 'just us' department, or an injustice department. So the only other way is to use the carrot method."
He added that the bill had a "stick" in addition to the carrot -- it would reduce the salaries of IRS employees by 20 percent until the lost emails were recovered.
But as it turns out - like so many other things the GOP is flat-out wrong about - they're also wrong about how much it would cost to actually re-constitute Lerner's email trail - something that the IRS has been already working on by looking at the email inboxes of
other IRS Employees.
This is a fact that was reported by Fox News -> http://www.foxnews.com/...
The IRS was able to find copies of 24,000 Lerner emails from between 2009 and 2011 because Lerner had sent copies to other IRS employees. Overall, the IRS said it was producing 67,000 emails to and from Lerner, covering 2009 to 2013. The agency said it searched for emails of 83 people and spent nearly $10 million to produce hundreds of thousands of documents.
When this is all over, their little ransom won't even cover 1/10th of what it really costs to compile all this data - data which will in the end
Prove Nothing since we already know that Lois Lerner didn't even have any information about this issue until
later in the first place and that it's simply
false that "Tea Party" and "Patriot" groups alone were targeted for investigation, because they weren't.
Vyan