Eliana Johnson
The Corner
Nation Review Online
5/28/2013
The Internal Revenue Service is in the process of locking down all computer data across the agency, a sign that investigations into the scandal-plagued agency may be taking a broader sweep than initially anticipated.
Agency employees last Thursday received an e-mail alerting them, “This is a late breaking top priority and things could change in the future,” according to an IRS employee who asked not to be named.
Employees were directed not to “wipe, re-image or otherwise destroy any hard drives” on any machine currently in use or in stock. During this time, the IRS will not discard any laptop and desktop computers that are replaced, and it is “working on securing a location” where they will be kept, according to the e-mail.
National Review Online previously reported that data on computer hard drives in the Tax Exempt and Government Entity division in Cincinnati was being preserved and uploaded to a restricted server where investigators can access it.
Four government probes are currently investigating the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups; they are being led by the House Oversight Committee, the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and the IRS itself.
H/T The Jawa Report where readers can watch a video, “Demand Answers,” from Senator McConnell’s team.
Related: Gibson CEO revives complaints over government raids in wake of IRS scandal
The CEO of Gibson Guitars is reviving a claim that his company was unfairly targeted by the government, on the heels of the scandal over the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups.Gibson boss Henry Juszkiewicz, who has donated in the past to Republicans, told Fox News on Wednesday he doesn’t know whether a series of raids on his company were tied at all to his political leanings. But he said “I clearly believe that someone targeted our company inappropriately.”
Update: The VanderSlooting of America. The President, the Left, the IRS and a timeline of tyranny.
A timeline of tyranny.
Amid the ongoing cascade of stories focusing on abuses by the Internal Revenue Service, a simple historical truth is lost.
At its very core, the Left is about tyranny. Intimidation. The mailed fist.
One can spend endless hours recalling the bloody tyrannies of the French Revolution, or Communism or the Nazis (aka the National Socialists) or, in America, the violence visited by leftist groups from the Ku Klux Klan to this or that labor union to all those 60s radicals who raced around the country in a murderous rage with bombs and bullets.
But what the massive abuse of the IRS illustrates is a tyranny of a different sort. A bloodless yet still quite decided tyranny. A tyranny of the American Left designed not just to chill free speech — although that is a primary goal. What has evidenced itself in the Obama era is a tyranny designed not just to silence dissent, but to deliberately, willfully damage if not ruin outright the reputations and businesses of Americans across the land.
To scare the living hell out of people.
To send the message: do what we say — or else…
Read the whole thing.
