The Dog Ate Their Accountability

From sea to shining sea, ‘delete, delete, delete’ has become standard operating procedure for government officials seeking to evade public scrutiny.

Item: The January 6 committee wants relevant text messages sent by and to Secret Service officers for its investigation. The Secret Service says Congress can’t have them, because they were accidentally deleted — at least some of them after the committee’s request for them had been made — as part of a “device-replacement program.”

Item: In 2014, congressional investigators demanded that the IRS turn over emails to and from Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the agency’s corrupt program of targeting conservative nonprofits for harassment. From the Washington Post: “Lerner has refused to testify on the subject, meaning that her emails are one of the only records of what happened in her own words. The IRS has 67,000 emails from or to Lerner that it has or will turn over to investigators, but a large number, from 2009 to 2011, are apparently lost — a disappearance that quickly triggered skepticism, particularly from Congressional Republicans trying to figure out whether Lerner was acting on orders from Washington.” Lerner eventually retired with a full pension.