WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (UPI) — Republicans on a House committee investigating the Internal Revenue Service moved Tuesday to impeach the agency’s commissioner.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, made the announcement just four days after the Justice Department closed its investigation of the IRS, concluding “poor management is not a crime.”
The House Oversight and Government Reform panel, led by Chaffetz, has spent two years investigating the IRS after discovering the agency was giving greater scrutiny to conservative groups after they applied for tax-exempt status.
Chaffetz made the last ditch effort after calling on President Barack Obama to fire Commissioner John Koskinen last summer. Chaffetz said Koskinen violated public trust and “failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.”
The impeachment resolution now goes to the House Judiciary Committee.
Koskinen took over the IRS in 2013 after discovery of the scandal, but Chaffetz accuses him of erasing important emails sent by Lois Lerner, the main IRS official in the scandal, before turning the rest over to Congress. Learner was suspended before eventually retiring.
“The IRS vigorously disputes the allegations in the resolution,” the agency said in an email to NBC News. “We have fully cooperated with all of the investigations.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the resolution is “ridiculous,” showing “nothing but the Republican obsession with diving into investigative rabbit holes that waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.”
