...the Internal Revenue Service; that office of the United States government that collects taxes and persecutes the regime's political enemies...
, which can seem to keep track of mortgage interest payments, mileage reimbursement allowances and tractor depreciation schedules for millions of American families and businesses, can't seem to find its own archives with a flashlight.
First the agency lost whole troves of emails from disgraced former apparatchik Lois Lerner
...the former head of the IRS Exempt Unit. She is a past president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws and a member of the Massachussetts bar. She was held in contempt of Congress for her role in the IRS targeting of regime political enemies and refusing to testify. The dog ate her computer's hard drive with all her emails on it...-- emails that would have shed light on her role in the ongoing scandal over the targeting of conservative groups by the agency. Then, on a recent Friday afternoon (of course), the agency admitted it also could not find emails from several others connected to the scandal.
The disappearances are extremely convenient -- especially because the IRS is being treated under a different standard than the one it uses to treats taxpayers. Lerner and others will face no serious legal consequences without hard evidence of guilt -- evidence that has now vanished into the ether. But taxpayers who find themselves in a dispute with the IRS are presumed to be in the wrong until they can produce hard evidence to prove otherwise.
The IRS saga fits a disturbing pattern in which Democratic- and liberal-leaning authorities have abused ostensibly neutral laws and procedures to harass, intimidate and silence conservatives and Republicans. Other recent examples include the trumped-up charges against Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the gross misuse of campaign-finance laws to keep an independent conservative group in Wisconsin from exercising its First Amendment right to speak about politics.
It's not unusual to see Third World autocrats perverting the machinery of the administrative state to criminalize differences of political viewpoint, then trying lamely to cover their tracks. Over the past six or so years the American public has seen a lot of that nefarious behavior as well. It's a dismaying trend -- and one that has to stop.