It was no surprise Friday when the current head of the Internal Revenue Service and general mess said he'd offer no apologies about his agency's losing years worth of emails.
What? High-ranking employees--and ex-employees--of the IRS, many of whom reviewed applications for tax-exempt status for thousands of private groups in this country, seem able to keep millions of records intact, detailed files of names and numbers, and pull up any number of them in seconds, but, well, these politically sensitive emails you're looking for, congressman, they just disappeared. And a hard drive was trashed. And, gosh, things like that happen.
"I don't think an apology is owed," the ever cool John Koskinen told the House Ways and Means Committee last week.
The commissioner may even be sincere, which makes his testimony even worse. It's one thing to lose records so conveniently, another to believe he has no reason to apologize for a dereliction on such a massive scale by his outfit. But for argument's sake, let's assume it was an innocent mix-up, like Rose Mary Woods' losing track of those 181/2 minutes of Watergate tape, and even erasing some of it. And nothing more sinister, which is what several lawmakers suspect.
Let's just say it was sheer ineptitude on the IRS' part. And ignore all the suspicious circumstances surrounding this mysterious if convenient disappearance.
But what about the IRS' tardiness in admitting this snafu? It wasn't until some suspicious senators on the other side of the Capitol were about to close their investigation of this case, and the gentleman from Utah--Orrin Hatch--asked Commissioner Koskinen to attest that he'd produced all relevant documents, that the commissioner balked at doing so under oath. Only then did he finally, finally disclose that the emails had gone missing--two months before.
Would this revealing piece of information ever have become public knowledge if the commissioner hadn't been asked to swear that he'd produced all relevant information? (Lying to Congress can be a serious offense.)
So, no, maybe apologies aren't the best way to go in this affair after all.
Let's talk resignations instead.
Editorial on 06/23/2014