WASHINGTON — The IRS commissioner came under intense fire Friday during a tense congressional hearing into how his agency lost thousands of e-mails, including some from tight-lipped agency executive Lois Lerner.
One lawmaker bluntly accused the new IRS chief of lying.
“Sitting here listening to this testimony, I don’t believe it,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told John Koskinen, who took over the tax-collecting agency in January. “That’s your problem. No one believes you.”
“This is the most corrupt and deceitful IRS in history,” added Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas).
Under siege, Koskinen found himself defending his integrity as well as his agency’s.
“Calling this IRS the most corrupt in history ignores a lot of history and seems to me a classic overreaction to a problem that we are dealing with seriously,” he told critics on the Ways and Means Committee.
As for his own credibility, he declared: “I have a long career. That’s the first time that anybody said they don’t believe me.”
“I don’t believe you,” Ryan came back, unmoved.
Koskinen angered GOP lawmakers from the get-go by saying he wouldn’t share additional details about thousands of lost IRS e-mails related to investigations of Tea Party groups until his own review is finished.
He accused Republicans of releasing inaccurate, interim information.
“We’re not going to dribble out the information and have it played out in the press,” Koskinen said.
He added that any e-mails recovered from inside the agency will be shared with lawmakers.
It was a remarkably bold statement for an executive branch official to make to the congressional committee that oversees it.
Koskinen also disclosed that the number of IRS officials whose e-mails had gone missing in computer crashes was up to eight.
Congress has sought documents related to Lerner’s involvement in the Tea Party investigation since 2012. She has invoked her Fifth Amendment privileges nine times to avoid testifying, even as the IRS provided Congress with thousands of documents, including many of Lerner’s.
But it was only in February that the IRS learned some of her e-mails might be unrecoverable. The IRS told Congress a week ago that some of Lerner’s e-mails were lost in a 2011 computer crash.
Koskinen was unapologetic about the crashes and the delay in informing Congress that e-mails it had sought were lost.
“I don’t think an apology is owed,” he said.
Republicans rallied behind Ryan on Twitter.