IRS lies getting so embarrassing, media can't ignore them anymore

You can usually count on certain things from the MSM when a scandal emerges within a Democrat administration. One is that they will avoid covering the story for as long as they possibly can, especially if they can label it a right-wing narrative. The very fact that sites like ours are talking about it is, in their minds, proof that it's not really a legitimate news story.

Another thing they'll do is wait for any conservative to compare the scandal to Watergate, then howl at the ridiculousness of the comparison. Why, Watergate was serious! Of course, one of the reasons the media hold Watergate above other scandals is that two liberal journalists were the heroes of the story. Now this brings us to the IRS scandal, which becomes more serious by the day. Not only do we know the IRS targeted conservative organizations for harassment and denial of tax-exempt status, we also know who was leading the effort, even to the point that Lois Lerner was attempting to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department against some of them. When asked about this by Congress, Ms. Lerner invoked the Fifth Amendment, whose only purpose is to protect you from giving testimony by which you would incriminate yourself. And we know that those under greatest suspicion here coincidentally experienced hard drive crashes just at the time when such a crash would happen to eliminate the e-mails incriminating all of them Now one thing I've always told you about the media is, yes, they're in the tank for the Democrats. But even more so, they're in the tank for themselves. And when White House lies and excuses become so ridiculously absurd, the media will endanger their own credibility if they continue covering for them, they will have no choice but to start covering the story. That is happening now precisely because the excuses are getting so insanely implausible:

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The thing about dogs eating homework is, it could actually happen. This can’t. This is “the dog ate my hard drive, broke into another building, ate the backup of the hard drive, then broke into six other top officials’ offices and ate their hard drives also.” What we learned about the IRS this week is that there is an obvious criminal coverup that comes in addition to the possible underlying crimes. Prosecutions need to be brought against all of those involved. Why isn’t this happening already? Remember the O.J. Simpson trial, the one that consumed seemingly the entire mid-’90s? From crime to verdict, the whole thing took 16 months. The IRS scandal? It’s already been 13 months, and no one has even been charged. And no one will be charged. Congress has called the cops — the Justice Department — and the cops simply don’t care.

As crazy as it seems, the White House appears to be banking at this point on the notion that the IRS was sloppy about keeping e-mail backups rather than criminally intentional about destroying them. But we now learn that's highly unlikely, because as early as 2009, the IRS contracted with a company specifically assigned to back up its servers:

The IRS had a contract with email-achiever Sonasoft in effect at least through 2009, according to the website FedSpending.org. That same year, the company tweeted: “The IRS uses Sonasoft to back up their servers, why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?” And a document on the company website suggests its system "archives all email content and so reduces the risk of non-compliance with legal, regulatory and other obligations to preserve critical business content." However, whether Sonasoft’s government contract extended through 2011 or if the company had the capacity to save every email from such a large agency remains unclear.

So now they're hoping we'll believe that the IRS contracted with Sonasoft for awhile, then let the contract lapse and decided to no longer back up its e-mail servers. If they actually did that, it's one of the most egregious examples of governmental incompetence anyone has ever seen. But of course they didn't. The IRS absolutely backs up its servers, and if the e-mails of Lerner and others have been destroyed, it can only be because the IRS did it intentionally to cover up the political intention behind its harassment of conservatives. The similarities to Watergate are getting to be pretty hard to ignore, up to and including comparisons to the 18-and-a-half-minute gap in audio tapes of Nixon's White House conversations, which were supposedly erased accidentally by his personal assistant, Rosemary Woods. As implausible as that story was, the IRS story concerning Lois Lerner's e-mails is even more so because the advance of modern technology has made it almost impossible to actually lose a person's e-mails such that they are completely unretrievable. It is to the eternal shame of the U.S. media that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into covering such an egregious abuse of power by a presidential administration. But at least it shows there is still some accountability in this country to the demands of the people. The media cannot long survive if people figure out in mass numbers that they are merely shills for the state, and that is what will happen if they keep ignoring this story. Julian Epstein is usually one of the more reasonable and honest liberals you will see on cable news, but as you can see here, even he can't muster anything but eye-rolling partisan excuses to try to cover this one up. Keep the pressure on.