RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nothing to see here. Literally. Because the IRS keeps losing stuff.

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

The federal government swooped into Gibson Guitar’s Tennessee headquarters in August 2011, with armed agents, and shut the company down temporarily. The suspected crime was using illegally imported wood. Not a particularly important crime, yet the government treated it as if it was a clear and present danger to the republic. No charges have even been filed in that case.

In the case of the IRS, the suspected crime is weaponizing government against citizens who exercised their rights as such. That is a clear and present threat to the republic. There is an active cover-up happening right now in the very heart of the IRS. It’s time for a raid, a round-up, and trials.