Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen faces impeachment over his response to the Tea Party targeting scandal that House Republicans have been investigating since it was first revealed two years ago.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) introduced the impeachment resolution Tuesday, less than a week after the Justice Department announced that Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of the scandal, would not face criminal charges. “This action will demonstrate to the American people that the IRS is under repair, and signal that Executive Branch officials who violate the public trust will be held accountable,” Chaffetz said. The impeachment has been months in the making. GOP sources told National Review in June that Boehner and Chaffetz were discussing the idea.
Koskinen isn’t being faulted for Lerner’s actions, though. Instead, House Republicans are arguing that the man hired to clean up the IRS after the scandal came to light has instead stonewalled congressional investigators. “He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled. Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress,” Chaffetz said.
GOP lawmakers’ distrust for Koskinen deepened in June, when a Treasury Department inspector general reported that the IRS had erased the backup tapes that likely would have held a record of Lerner’s missing e-mails. Three weeks after the destruction of the backups, Koskinen all-but-dared House Republicans to hold him in contempt.
“I think we have a strong case that we have been cooperative, continue to be cooperative, and anybody looking at the systems we have and the time it takes would find that we’ve provided you more cooperation than, in fact, might be expected,” Koskinen said during a hearing in March of 2014. “And I think that, in fact, arguing and threatening contempt in that situation without understanding the circumstances is probably not going to be held up.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.
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