IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) who started the investigation of the targeting of conservative groups (EPA/Michael Reynolds) 
 
 This post has been updated: 
 
 A group of House Republicans led by the chairman of a powerful committee moved Tuesday to impeach the head of the Internal Revenue Service, saying he violated the public trust and lied to Congress as it investigated the treatment of conservative groups. 
 
 The announcement by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel, came four days after the Justice Department formally closed its investigation of the targeting scandal without filing criminal charges. 
 
 The last-ditch effort to remove IRS Commissioner John Koskinen follows through on a threat Chaffetz made over the summer after he called on President Obama to fire the commissioner, whom he accused of erasing back-up tapes containing thousands of e-mails written by Lois Lerner, the central IRS official in the scandal. 
 
 Koskinen took over the agency in late 2013 after the scandal broke. But Chaffetz said Koskinen had told lawmakers his agency had turned over all e-mails that were relevant to the investigation, and when e-mails were found to be missing, said they were unrecoverable. 
 
 “These statements were false,” Chaffetz said in a statement Tuesday. 
 
 “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust,” Chaffetz said. “He 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.” 
 
 A statement issued Wednesday morning by the IRS says the agency ”vigorously disputes” the allegations. 
 
 ”We have fully cooperated with all of the investigations,” the IRS said. 
 
 The oversight committee has been investigating the IRS for more than two years, since agents were discovered to have subjected conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status to additional scrutiny. 
 
 Chaffetz was joined by 18 committee Republicans in sponsoring an impeachment resolution, which now goes to the House Judiciary Committee. 
 
 House Democrats quickly denounced the move as political grandstanding. 
 
 “Calling this resolution a ‘stunt’ or a ‘joke’ would be insulting to stunts and jokes,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.) the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. He said the impeachment resolution was “ridiculous” and a waste of taxpayer money. 
 
 “Instead of squandering millions of taxpayer dollars on baseless partisan attacks,” Cumming said, “the committee should focus on issues that matter to all Americans, like bringing down the costs of prescription drugs, as I have requested for the past year with no success.” 
 
 Cummings added that there is no evidence Koskinen did what Chaffetz is accusing him of and said IRS has spent $20 million and 160,000 employee hours cooperating with investigations. 
 
 Pursuing impeachment against an agency leader is highly unusual, and a step beyond contempt charges, the mechanism House Republicans tried to use against both Lerner and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. in past disputes. 
 
 More than a century ago, Congress brought articles of impeachment against War Secretary William Belknap in 1876, after the House of Representatives uncovered evidence supporting a pattern of corruption. 
 
 He resigned during the proceedings. ||||| House Republicans have moved to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, arguing he violated the public trust. 
 
 Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz Jason ChaffetzGOP Rep. Gowdy slams Trump team for 'amnesia' on Russia meetings California Dem sworn in as House member after delay Chaffetz: Comey's silence on memos 'raised a lot of eyebrows' MORE (R-Utah) introduced an impeachment resolution Tuesday, days after the Justice Department concluded its investigation into IRS targeting of Tea Party groups with no charges filed. 
 
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 “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust. He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.” 
 
 Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, compared GOP efforts to the Benghazi and Planned Parenthood investigations. 
 
 "It appears that facts simply don't matter to Republicans," Cummings 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," he said. 
 
 Much of the committee’s impeachment charge centers around the destruction of several backup tapes that could have contained missing emails sent by Lois Lerner, the former official at the center of the IRS’s improper scrutiny of conservative groups. 
 
 Chaffetz’s resolution charges that Koskinen, who took over the IRS after the controversy emerged, failed to preserve 422 backup tapes that could have contained Lerner emails. 
 
 Republicans have argued Koskinen was not truthful when he told lawmakers he would hand over all her documents, given the destruction of the backups. Chaffetz also charged that Koskinen failed to notify Congress the evidence was missing. 
 
 But, in the past, the IRS has said it has fully complied with all investigations. 
 
 In July, Chaffetz’s panel indicated it could pursue action against Koskinen, after arguing he had misled the committee and impeded its investigation into the improper scrutiny. The committee had previously called for Koskinen to be fired. 
 
 —Vicki Needham contributed. ||||| 645X363 - No Companion - Full Sharing - Additional videos are suggested - Policy/Regulation/Blogs 
 
 IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on Friday denied that his agency is covering up Lois Lerner’s emails, at one point flatly refusing to apologize to Republicans who accused him of stonewalling their investigation. 
 
 “I don’t think an apology is owed,” Koskinen said at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee. 
 
 The hearing quickly grew heated, with Republicans audibly gasping when Koskinen said that Lerner’s crashed hard drive — which kept her archived emails — had been “recycled and destroyed,” something the commissioner said was standard procedure. 
 
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 Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) told Koskinen he found it too convenient that an unknowable number of emails from the central figure in the agency’s targeting controversy can't be found during a time span, from 2009 to 2011, that Republicans believe is crucial to their investigation. 
 
 Camp also tried to directly tie the ongoing investigation into the IRS’s improper scrutiny of Tea Party groups to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. 
 
 “It is no wonder I have heard the word ‘cover-up’ thrown about a lot this week,” Camp said at what was Koskinen’s first public comments about the lost emails. 
 
 The IRS’s claim late last week that it couldn’t reproduce an untold number of Lerner’s emails gave a new jolt to a controversy that had receded from the public eye. Congressional investigations into the IRS heated up more than a year ago, shortly after Lerner apologized in May 2013 for the agency’s treatment of Tea Party groups. 
 
 Camp angrily asked why the Treasury Department had told the White House that there had been an issue with Lerner’s emails in April, weeks before the IRS informed Congress. 
 
 Rep. Charles Boustany (R-La.) added that he was “damned angry,” while Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) dubbed Koskinen’s IRS the “most corrupt and deceitful” of all time. 
 
 Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) told Koskinen that Obama was trading on his good name and that he believed the commissioner would be out the door within a year, like some of his predecessors. 
 
 "That’s your problem — nobody believes you," Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012, told Koskinen. 
 
 The commissioner said the agency went above and beyond to try to restore Lerner’s hard drive in 2011 and noted that email conversations show Lerner herself had very badly wanted her hard drive restored. 
 
 At the time, the IRS took the added step of sending Lerner’s hard drive to the forensic lab at the agency’s criminal investigations division — an “extraordinary step,” Koskinen said, that was still to no avail. 
 
 Koskinen said the IRS first figured out there was an issue with Lerner’s emails in February but didn’t know then the problem was a computer crash. He told lawmakers that the IRS didn’t tell Congress immediately because it wanted to further investigate and give them a full report. 
 
 “There’s been no attempt to keep it secret,” he said. 
 
 Democrats struck back at Camp and his fellow Republicans, accusing the of badgering Koskinen as the chairman asked whether a special prosecutor was required to investigate the IRS and on a range of other issues. 
 
 "This is less a hearing than an inquisition," said Rep. Xavier Becerra (Calif.), the No. 4 Democrat in the House. 
 
 Several Democrats made a point to go back to questions that they said Koskinen had not been allowed to answer, due to repeated Republican interruptions. 
 
 Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) mocked the GOP inquiry by asking Koskinen whether the commissioner or Lerner had anything to do with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, or covering up aliens at Area 51. 
 
 “The only thing it’s missing is Oliver Stone,” Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said about what he called GOP “conspiracy theories.” 
 
 Rep. Sandy Levin (Mich.), the panel’s top Democrat, noted that Republicans have pushed to cut the IRS’s budget year after year, which he says has left the agency’s “email system entirely underfunded and wholly deficient.” 
 
 Levin added that the George W. Bush administration lost almost 5 million emails dealing with the firings of U.S. attorneys, and accused Republicans of desperately searching for signs of political motivation or White House involvement. 
 
 The White House said this week that it found no direct emails between Lerner and their officials between 2009 and May 2011. On three occasions, somebody else emailed Lerner and a White House staffer; two of those times, the person emailing was seeking tax assistance, and the third was spam. 
 
 Until last year, the IRS says that it recycled the digital tapes that stored back-up copies of emails after six months. 
 
 Without those tapes or the hard drive, computer experts say it would be difficult to recover Lerner’s emails from 2009 to when her computer crashed more than two years later. 
 
 The IRS told lawmakers last week that it was able to reproduce 24,000 of Lerner’s emails from that time period through other employee accounts. 
 
 The agency and Democrats also note that the agency has already turned over more than 750,000 documents to congressional investigators. 
 
 Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee say the agency’s email issues go far beyond Lerner, and the IRS is having problems handing over documents from six other IRS staffers — including the chief of staff to the acting commissioner. 
 
 Koskinen said that it doesn't appear that any of the emails from the chief of staff, Nikole Flax, have been lost, because it was the not the hard drive on Flax’s main office computer that had crashed. 
 
 Under fire from Republicans, he also accused GOP lawmakers of rushing to judgment on the IRS, releasing information on Flax’s emails before it was verified. Koskinen, confirmed by the Senate just last December, also told the panel that he planned on serving out his entire term. 
 
 House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is also investigating the IRS and has further questions about the IRS’s records-keeping practices. 
 
 This story was updated at 2:17 p.m.
– Now that the Justice Department has decided not to file criminal charges in the IRS scandal over the scrutiny of conservative groups, House Republicans have moved to take action of their own: impeachment. A powerful House committee has advanced a measure to impeach IRS chief John Koskinen, reports the Washington Post. Koskinen took over after the scandal broke, but Republicans say he lied to Congress in the subsequent investigation. "Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform panel. "He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled." At issue are 422 backup tapes that might have contained emails from the IRS figure at the center of the scandal, Lois Lerner, explains the Hill. Koskinen not only failed to preserve them, he didn't notify Congress they were missing, says Chaffetz. Democrats say it's all political theater. "Calling this resolution a ‘stunt’ or a ‘joke’ would be insulting to stunts and jokes," says Elijah Cummings. Still, the long-shot bid now moves on to the House Judiciary Committee.