IRS Chief Reiterates That the White House Had No Role in Lois Lerner Document Review

Internal Revenue Commissioner John Koskinen has rebutted suggestions from House Republicans on the Oversight and Government Reform panel that his agency had a “special project team” that bypassed normal procedures in reviewing document production for various investigations into alleged political targeting.

In a June 11 letter to Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, Koskinen corrected what he considered three misimpressions behind the June 5 letter he received from Chaffetz and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. The letter posed a dozen questions about a team “established outside the normal agency process” to respond to queries from Congress, the Justice Department and citizens using the Freedom of Information Act concerning the mishandling of applications from largely conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status managed by retired IRS executive Lois Lerner.

“All this has been explained to your committee before,” Koskinen wrote, providing dates of hearings in which he had updated Congress on the cost, progress and scope of document production by a team of IRS attorneys who review the emails and other documents to redact for information protected under privacy laws.

“There seemed to be some confusion at the committee’s hearing of June 3, 2015, about the role of the IRS’s Privacy, Governmental Liaison and Disclosure Office, the group headed by Mary Howard,” he said. “PGLD is not ordinarily involved in responding to the congressional inquiries our Legislative Affairs office handles, nor does PGLD typically deal with law enforcement inquiries, which often involve various components of the Office of Chief Counsel.”

Koskinen then addressed the larger political context of the inquiries by Republican lawmakers and some legal groups looking for White House manipulation of the Lerner investigation.

”I will reiterate, however, that the White House had absolutely no role in determining what documents were produced, or were not produced, to the committee or other investigators,” he wrote. “No document was withheld from production by the IRS at the White House’s request; and no member of the aforementioned project team consulted with the White House on the matter.”

Finally, Koskinen concluded, “I must note that any confusion as to the above issues or misinformation to the public might have been avoided if you had accepted my offer to testify before the committee.”