John Koskinen

On August 1, 2013, the White House announced President Obama would nominate Koskinen as commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.[7]

On December 20, 2013, Senate Democrats voted 56–39 for cloture on the nomination, cutting off a Republican-led filibuster.[8] Senators then confirmed Koskinen in a 59–36 vote, along party lines. On December 23, 2013, he was sworn in as the 48th IRS Commissioner.

Koskinen took office following the IRS scandal in which conservative political groups were targeted for extensive scrutiny by the IRS. The Washington Post awarded Koskinen "Three Pinocchios" for stating during congressional testimony on March 26, 2014, that "the inspector general found inappropriate criteria were used to select organizations for further review—he did not refer to it as targeting."[9]

In June 2014, Koskinen informed Congress that 30,000 emails from the account of a central figure in the scandal, Lois Lerner, had been lost. It later came to light that Koskinen had known about the lost emails in April and had waited until the information was disclosed in a court case to notify Congress. Koskinen stated: "We confirmed that backup tapes from 2011 no longer existed because they have been recycled, pursuant to the IRS normal policy." In September 2014, however, the Treasury Department inspector general reported that it had found 760 tapes from which it later recovered Lerner's emails.[10]

On November 24, 2015, Koskinen signed a memorandum that commits the IRS to fostering a model workplace free of conduct that negatively impacts employee engagement and productivity.[11]

After the Justice Department notified Congress in October 2015 that there would be no charges against Lois Lerner or anyone else in the IRS, 19 Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee led by the committee's chairman, Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), filed a resolution to impeach Koskinen.[12][13]

Those sponsoring the impeachment resolution to remove Koskinen from office accused him of failing to prevent the destruction of evidence in allowing the erasure of backup tapes containing thousands of e-mails written by Lerner, and of making false statements under oath to Congress.[12][13] In a statement released by the committee, Chaffetz said Koskinen "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."[12][13]

The IRS declared on October 27 that it did not have an immediate comment on the impeachment resolution.[13] Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), the committee's top Democrat, said in a statement: "This ridiculous resolution will demonstrate nothing but the Republican obsession with diving into investigative rabbit holes that waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars while having absolutely no positive impact on a single American. Calling this resolution a 'stunt' or a 'joke' would be insulting to stunts and jokes."[13]

The resolution was referred to the House Judiciary committee, which held hearings on the matter on May 23[14][15][16] and June 22, 2016.[17][18][19]

The House leadership decided not to proceed further which led to threats to offer a privileged resolution for impeachment.[20][21] On December 6, 2016, such a privileged resolution was offered, but the House voted to send the question back to the Judiciary Committee.[22]