Here's the biggest recurring theme in the IRS controversy — the one about alleged targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Throughout the year-long investigation, congressional Republicans and Democrats not only highlight their own evidence, they also take the same evidence and draw diametrically opposed conclusions.
The latest example came Wednesday afternoon, at a subcommittee hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Officially, the subject was a separate IRS issue. But lawmakers couldn't help veering off into a row over Lois Lerner's missing emails.
Lerner was head of the IRS exempt organizations division, overseeing the tax-exempt applications. Her computer hard drive crashed in 2011, destroying many months of archived emails. The committee members all seem convinced Lerner is culpable for something. Democrats and a Treasury Department inspector general call it gross mismanagement. Republicans say it's political scheming and destroying evidence.
On Wednesday, committee Republicans asked IRS Commissioner John Koskinen about a new discovery: It turns out the IRS has an internal messaging system, called OCS.
In a chain of emails, shown to Koskinen at the hearing, Lois Lerner asks if OCS messages are searchable, and she gets an answer.
To Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the emails show Lerner was trying to cover her tracks. He pointed to sentence 1 of the second email, that "OCS messages are not set to automatically save."
Jordan's interpretation: "Miss Lerner says, 'Wow. I know I've gotten rid of the emails, when the computer crashed two years earlier. But I better double-check on this intra-office, instant messaging capability we have here at the Internal Revenue Service.' And she says 'Perfect' when she learns that it's not traceable, not trackable, not stored."
But Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.,said Lerner's "Perfect" comment concerned the third paragraph, where she was advised to treat OCS messages as potentially searchable.
Jordan burst out, "That is the most ridiculous interpretation – there is no one with any common sense that would reach that conclusion my colleague reached. No one."
A long way to a short question.
Read the emails. What do you think?
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/
