Get Your Sirica On

I try not to work blue in this feature, but sometimes it can't be helped, because this is clearly bullshit:

The Internal Revenue Service has lost two years worth of emails to and from embattled former tax official Lois Lerner, the agency told congressional investigators on Friday.

The IRS promised on May 8 to turn over all her emails but now blames a computer crash for huge tranches of missing documents.

Lerner is under investigation for allegedly orchestrating a years-long program that targeted tea party groups and other conservative organizations for unusually intrusive scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status beginning in the year before the 2010 congressional midterm elections.

The House Ways and Means Committee, one of two bodies probing the case, said Friday that the IRS says that for the period of January 2009 through April 2011, the only Lerner emails it can find are those that were sent to or from other IRS employees.

Emails whose sender or recipient was outside the government, or inside other agencies, have mysteriously disappeared.

Those include the White House, the Justice and Treasury Departments, the Federal Elections Commission and Democratic congressional offices.

I bolded the last two paragraphs because those are the crucial ones -- if Lerner was communicating her actions, which we don't particularly understand well, with the White House, we're looking at Nixon-level corruption.

The next move is to subpoena any White House email traffic with the IRS in the relevant time period. Fearless prediction -- such a subpoena will be met with a claim of "executive privilege." We're going to need a modern day Judge Sirica before this is over. At this point, the man sitting in Sirica's old chair is Richard Roberts, a Clinton appointee. For what it's worth, Sirica was an Eisenhower appointee. Not that any of that should matter, but....

Of course, the IRS scandal is just one of many. Is it more important than Benghazi? Or the VA scandal? Or what's happening in Iraq right now? Or the ongoing failure that is Obamacare? Or the brightly flashing warning signals in the economy? Or Solyndra? Or Fast and Furious? Or the NSA spying on journalists? Or the Bergdahl mess?

Frankly, the incompetence and corruption of this administration is so complete that it's difficult to figure out what to talk about next -- it's astonishingly comprehensive. But back to the topic du jour -- did you know this?

In one case Lerner, then in charge of the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, personally signed the approval granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a charity headed by the president’s half-brother.

That approval was granted in less than a month, and back-dated – a highly unusual move – to allow the charity to avoid paying taxes on money it had raised prior to applying.

That's some pretty good constituent service. Meanwhile, Lerner has sent a suitable surrogate to testify on her behalf:

Reflections in the table are intentional

And in the interest of being civic-minded, and being part of the solution, let's offer our best guess as to what happened to the missing emails:

What do you think really happened to Lois Lerner's "lost" emails? (Multiple answers allowed)
	Placed on a secret VA waiting list
	Captured by ISIS/al-Qaeda from an abandoned munitions depot in Mosul
	Malaysian Airlines (CNN's best guess)
	In the possession of the "real killers" of Nicole Brown Simpson
	Irretrievably lost in Benster's messy bedroom
	Why do you even care about this -- we have gay marriage now!
	Don't know, but we should put Leonard Bail Bonds on the case
pollcode.com free polls

Vote early, vote often!

UPDATE: it's too late the change the poll, but I have another theory -- Sandy Berger stuffed them down his pants. If you want to vote for that, put a note in the comments.