Emails Reveal Coordination Between IRS and White House

2,500 new documents in IRS / W.H. harassment cases

In a shocking revelation, the Treasury Inspector General has identified some 2,500 documents that “potentially” show taxpayer information held by the Internal Revenue Service being shared with President Obama’s White House.

The discovery was revealed to the group Cause of Action, which has sued for access to any of the documents. It charges that the IRS and White House have harassed taxpayers.

In an email from the Justice Department’s tax office, an official revealed the high number of documents, suggesting that the White House was hip deep in probes of taxpayers, likely including conservatives and Tea Party groups associated with the IRS scandal.

Incidentally, it is illegal for the IRS to reveal private tax payer information to any other agency, including the White House. The issue first came to light when Austin Goolesby, head of the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers casually revealed some of the Koch brothers confidential tax information.

Of the 2,500 emails, I expect most will be rather trivial; meetings being arranged, notes being compared. But a few might be pretty interesting; people at the White House requesting dirt on political opponents, orders to audit some Faux News figures, and the like.  This may explain why they need a few more weeks to clean the remaining 500 emails:

Below is the full email from Treasury:

My client wants to know if you would consent to a motion pushing back (in part) TIGTA’s response date by two weeks to December 15, 2014. The agency has located 2,500 potentially responsive documents and anticipates being able to finish processing 2,000 of these pages by the December 1 date. It needs the additional two weeks to deal with the last 500 pages to determine if they are responsive and make any necessary withholdings. We would therefore like to ask the court to permit the agency to issue a response (including production) on December 1 as to any documents it has completed processing by that date, and do the same as to the remaining documents by December 15. I note that the court’s remand was for a “determin[ation],” which the D.C. Circuit has recently explained can precede actual production by “days or a few weeks,” but we would prefer to simply agree on a date for turning over any of the remaining 500 documents that may be responsive.

Meanwhile, IRS High Commissar Koskinen has awarded the whole IRS (more or less), a 1% salary bonus for keeping the dirt hidden good perfomance.

Commissioner John Koskinen informed IRS employees in an email that they'll get a bonus next March of 1 percent of their base salary. The performance awards go to most employees.

"I believe that rewarding our high-performing employees is a vital investment for our nation's tax system," Koskinen said in the Monday email that was obtained by The Associated Press.

I thought the government already spent more than they took in. Where did he get the extra money?