Did you Know the EPA has a SuperFund?

     

EPA’s Superfund program is responsible for cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land and responding to environmental emergencies, oil spills and natural disasters. To protect public health and the environment, the Superfund program focuses on making a visible and lasting difference in communities, ensuring that people can live and work in healthy, vibrant places.

There are well regulations. Since when are they followed?

Superfund Regulations

The National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP) defines the organizational structure and procedures for preparing for and responding to discharges of oil and releases of hazardous substances, pollutants, and contaminants in the United States. The NCP was developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to the congressional enactment of The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of December 11, 1980, as amended by the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA), and by section 311(d) of the Clean Water Act (CWA). This page contains links to other EPA Web pages with simplified explanations of the Superfund regulatory process. Other links access Code of Federal Regulations that document the technical considerations and requirements of CERCLA and the NCP.

Enforcement activities related to the Superfund Division at EPA Headquarters is overseen by the Office of Site Remediation Enforcement (OSRE), a division of the EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

The history of the Superfund: Since 1980, EPA’s Superfund program has helped protect human health and the environment by managing the cleanup of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites and responding to local and nationally significant environmental emergencies. Below you will find a timeline highlighting some of the most notable milestones in the history of the Superfund and other cleanup programs.

So are they going to pay for the spill that contaminated the river or for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan?

There are secret meetings too!

STAR CHAMBER: EPA Holding Secret Meetings to Decide How to Dole out Billions in Illegal Slush Funds

Two internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) committees secretly control how billions of dollars are spent, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.

Congress appropriates about $1 billion annually for EPA’s Superfund program, and the agency has accumulated nearly $6.8 billion in more than 1,300 slush fund-like accounts since 1990.

No mention of that on their website but check this out:

Supplemental Environmental Projects at Ammonia Facilities in Arizona and California

ammonia sign

Ammonia Sign

Two ammonia refrigeration facilities have volunteered to complete Supplementary Environmental Projects (SEPs), that will benefit their surrounding communities, as part of enforcement settlements with EPA. The SEPs will enhance the emergency response capabilities of local fire and hazardous materials response teams in the immediate areas of the facilities and will also include compliance outreach in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Dole Packaged Foods in Atwater, California (map) and Rousseau Farming Company in Tolleson, Arizona (map) both had releases of ammonia in 2006 and failed to immediately notify the proper authorities, violations of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Know Act (EPCRA), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). In addition to the release reporting violations, Dole failed to develop standard operating procedures for the ammonia system where the release occurred, constituting a violation of the Clean Air Act (CAA).

“We are pleased that both Dole and Rousseau have acknowledged their violations and recognized their responsibility to improve safety practices in their communities. Supplemental environmental projects are an excellent mechanism for companies to demonstrate good corporate citizenship and to fulfill their responsibilities under the law” -Daniel A. Meer, EPA Region 9’s Response, Planning and Assessment Branch Chief

As part of the SEP, Rousseau will spend $15,000 on 14 suits for the Tolleson Fire Department to use when responding to chemical fires. This is in addition to a $65,045 penalty. Dole will spend a total of $86,930 for the penalty and $12,000 on a compliance training and $53,000 on emergency response equipment for Merced County.

IG Report on Hillary Not Following Guidelines

Only today the report was given to members of Congress for review. So maybe that ‘security review’ thing Hillary continued to mention was the IG’s report. Well hee hee, if so, Hillary flunked that review.

Would you like to read the report? Here is the 83 page Inspector General summary for your convenience. The Inspector General is a neutral position and the report does make recommendations. The report does become part of the FBI two track investigation. Consider the timing of all of this, the hearings in Congress, the interrogatories by Judicial Watch, the extradition of the hacker Guccifer who appeared in court today and pled guilty, the leak of the Terry McAuliffe donations and now this. Hummmm….

 

 

OIG makes eight recommendations. They include issuing enhanced and more frequent guidance on the permissible use of personal email accounts to conduct official business, amending Departmental policies to provide for administrative penalties for failure to comply with records preservation and cybersecurity requirements, and developing a quality assurance plan to address vulnerabilities in records management and preservation. The Department concurred with all of OIG’s recommendations.

The title:

Office of the Secretary: Evaluation of Email Records Management and Cybersecurity Requirements

State Dept. watchdog: Clinton violated email rules

The inspector general report is the latest headache for Clinton in the scandal over her exclusive use of private email for State business.

Politico: A State Department watchdog concluded that Hillary Clinton failed to comply with the agency’s policies on records while using a personal email server that was not approved by agency officials even though it should have been, according to a report released to lawmakers on Wednesday.

The long-awaited findings from the agency’s inspector general, which also revealed Clinton expressing reluctance about using an official email account and apparent hacking attempts on her private server, were shared with Capitol Hill Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO. It’s the latest turn in the headache-inducing saga that has dogged Clinton’s campaign.

While the report concludes that the agency suffers from “longstanding, systemic weaknesses” with records that “go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State,” it specifically dings Clinton for her exclusive use of private email during her four years at the agency.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” the report states. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

The report also notes that she had an “obligation to discuss using her personal email account” but did not get permission from the people who would have needed to approve the technology.

“According to the current [chief information officer] and assistant secretary for diplomatic security, Secretary Clinton had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with their offices, who in turn would have attempted to provide her with approved and secured means that met her business needs,” the report reads. “However, according to these officials, [the relevant people] did not — and would not — approve her exclusive reliance on a personal email.”

The watchdog also “found no evidence that the Secretary requested or obtained guidance or approval to conduct official business via a personal email account on her private server.”

The report also included a revealing November 2011 exchange in which Clinton’s right-hand staffer Huma Abedin discussed with her the possibility of putting her on a State Department email because her messages were not being received by State staff.

Clinton responded with concerns of privacy issues.

“We should talk about putting you on [S]tate email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam,” she wrote.

Clinton responded: “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”

The watchdog’s findings could exact further damage to Clinton’s campaign, and they provide fresh fodder for Trump, who has already said he will go after Clinton for the email scandal “bigly.” The Democratic frontrunner’s bid for the White House has already been hindered by high unfavorability ratings, with people saying they don’t trust her.

The report represents the latest pushback — in this case by a nonpartisan government entity — against her campaign’s claim that she did not break any rules and that her use of a private server was completely allowed.

The report also details how some technology staff said they were instructed to not talk of Clinton’s email set-up after they raised concerns about the unusual arrangement. It also includes conflicting information about whether the private email server had been approved by the State Department’s legal staff.

“In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements,” the document states. “According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. As previously noted, OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary Clinton’s personal system.”

The watchdog report goes on to say that a staff member from the office that handles information technology for the Office of the Secretary recounted the hush nature of the email arrangement.

“According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns about the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again,” the report states.

The report further gets into security concerns about the private email server, including some fears that the server was vulnerable to hackers.

It states that a non-State adviser to Bill Clinton, who was the original user of the server later taken over by Hillary Clinton, shut down the server in early 2011 because of hacking concerns.

“On January 9, 2011, the non-Departmental advisor to President Clinton who provided technical support to the Clinton email system notified the Secretary’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations that he had to shut down the server because he believed ‘someone was trying to hack us and while they did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to,’” the report says. “Later that day, the advisor again wrote to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, ‘We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few min.’”

The report goes on to detail another incident in May and says that Clinton and her staff did not appropriate report the matters.

“Notification is required when a user suspects compromise of, among other things, a personally owned device containing personally identifiable information,” it says. “However, OIG found no evidence that the Secretary or her staff reported these incidents to computer security personnel or anyone else within the Department.”

State has since deemed more than 2,000 of her messages as classified, including several that were upgraded to the most sensitive national security classification, “top secret.” And the FBI is still probing whether any laws were broken laws by putting classified information at risk — or whether her staff improperly sent sensitive information knowing it wasn’t on a classified system.

At the very least, State’s inspector general says she didn’t do what she was supposed to, though it also notes widespread email issues across the tenures of five secretaries of state, not just Clinton.

“OIG recognizes that technology and Department policy have evolved considerably since Secretary Albright’s tenure began in 1997. Nevertheless, the Department generally and the Office of the Secretary in particular have been slow to recognize and to manage effectively the legal requirements and cybersecurity risks associated with electronic data communications, particularly as those risks pertain to its most senior leadership,” the report concluded. “OIG expects that its recommendations will move the Department steps closer to meaningfully addressing these risks.”

The report states that its findings are based on interviews with current Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessors Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

Clinton and her deputies, however, declined the IG’s requests for interviews. Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and top deputies Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin are among those who did not cooperate with the probe.

Clinton and her allies have contended she did nothing illegal by choosing to set up a private email server and account at her Chappaqua, New York, home, and that she was not trying to evade public records requests. Instead, Clinton has said she was motivated by the desire for convenience, though she has conceded it was not the best choice.

The State Department has released roughly 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to her former agency at its request in December 2014. While there were no apparent bombshells in the content of the messages, the number of emails later deemed classified has raised questions about the security and wisdom of the set-up.

Clinton has also faced scrutiny for instructing her staff to delete about 32,000 messages deemed personal by her team. It’s unclear how many of those emails the FBI may have been able to recover from her server — which was turned over to authorities last August — or whether those messages will eventually be made public.

The report gives more details of the under-the-radar work of Clinton’s top technology staffer, Bryan Pagliano, who she paid to maintain her private email server. State’s chief information officer and deputy chief information officers, Pagliano’s direct bosses, told investigators that he never informed them of his side duties. They “believed that Pagliano’s job functions were limited to supporting mobile computing issues across the entire Department.”

“They told OIG that while they were aware that the Senior Advisor had provided IT support to the Clinton Presidential campaign, they did not know he was providing ongoing support to the Secretary’s email system during working hours,” the report reads.

The top technology officers also told investigators they “questioned whether he could support a private client during work hours, given his capacity as a full-time government employee.”

Pagliano took the Fifth and refused to answer questions on the matter before Congress but received immunity from the FBI to talk about the email arrangement. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been eager to question him on whether Clinton intentionally used private email because she didn’t want anyone getting access to her messages.

 

 

 

So, the Reason is Angry over the Zika Funding is?

NewYorkTimes: Mr. Obama chided lawmakers last week, saying they should not leave town at the end of this week unless they reconcile their differences over a Zika prevention funding bill and send him public health legislation he is willing to sign.

“They should not be going off on recess before this is done,” Mr. Obama said about putting resources behind an effort to stop the spread of the mosquito-borne virus. “To the extent that we’re not handling this thing on the front end, we’re going to have bigger problems on the back end.”

But chances of a quick compromise on the legislation seem dim. The House has provided only about half as much as the $1.1 billion approved by the Senate — both well short of the $1.9 billion sought by the White House. And the House bill would shift money to fight Zika from efforts to combat Ebola, which Mr. Obama compared to robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The president also archly referred to aggressive Republican efforts in fall 2014 to make the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak a major campaign issue.

“Given that I have, at least, pretty vivid memories of how concerned people were about Ebola, the notion that we would stop monitoring as effectively and dealing with Ebola in order to deal with Zika doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said.

Obama Raided $500M for Zika to Finance UN’s Green Climate Fund

Senator James Lankford 

DailySignal: Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus. However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion “emergency” spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year.

While congressional inattention to the budget crisis is inexcusable, it is even more disturbing that the Obama administration already has the authority to pay for a Zika response from existing agency budgets, but chose not to.

I’ve said several times on the Senate floor, over the last two weeks, that the Zika virus is a serious threat and should be dealt with responsibly by funding immediate vaccine research and aggressive mosquito population control.

The threat to adults from Zika is relatively small, but the threat to pre-born children is very high. Our national priority rightly focuses on protecting the life of these young children in the womb, since each child has value, no matter their age or size.

But an international medical emergency has now become a U.S. budget emergency, a major debt crisis that will impact our children as well.

If there was a way to both respond to Zika and prevent new debt spending, wouldn’t it be reasonable to do that? The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, and International Assistance Programs currently have about $80 billion in unobligated funds.

A small fraction of this could be reprogrammed and redirected to respond to the Zika emergency and not add any additional debt to our nation’s children. This is exactly the type of authority the Obama administration asked for in 2009 during the height of the H1N1 virus scare.

This is not a partisan idea, it is a reasonable one in light of the medical emergency and the financial reality of our nation.

In a floor speech last week, I also shed light on the fact that Congress last December provided the Obama administration with authority to pull money from bilateral economic assistance to foreign countries.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year? You guessed it… climate change.

They can use those funds to combat infectious diseases, if the administration believed there is an infectious disease emergency. In the middle of the Zika epidemic, the administration did use their authority to pull money from foreign aid and spend it, but they didn’t use it for Zika.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year?

You guessed it… climate change.

In March, President Obama gave the United Nations $500 million out of an account under bilateral economic assistance to fund the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

Congress refused to allocate funding for the U.N. Climate Change Fund last year, so the president used this account designated for international infectious diseases to pay for his priority.

While I understand that intelligent people can disagree on the human effects on the global climate, it is hard to imagine a reason why the administration would prioritize the U.N. Green Climate Fund over protecting the American people, especially pregnant women, from the Zika virus.

Unfortunately, it gets worse.

So, the administration found a way to offend our ally Israel, delay the Zika response and, if Congress allows him, add another billion dollars to our national debt.

The U.N. Green Climate Fund is connected to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an affiliated organization of the United Nations.

The UNFCCC recently accepted the “State of Palestine” as a signatory, which should trigger a U.S. funding prohibition. U.S. law forbids any taxpayer dollars to fund international organizations that recognize “Palestine” as a sovereign state.

So, the administration found a way to offend our ally Israel, delay the Zika response and, if Congress allows him, add another billion dollars to our national debt. That is a busy month.

The White House should not throw money at the U.N. while a vaccine for a virus known to cause severe, debilitating neurological birth defects is put on the back burner.

Zika is an important international crisis, but every crisis does not demand new “emergency funding” that is all debt. If there is a way to avoid more debt, we should take that option, it is what every family and every business does every day.

That Iran Propaganda Strategy Thing Began in 2011

Amazing what details can be uncovered and how dates and people all seem to tell a much different story when facts are compiled.

A deeper look is required into Ploughshares and the deep relationship with the White House, as the world has been punked by some well placed organizations and some money…imagine that.

Related: White House Makes the Case for Iran Diplomacy (lots of details here)

Related: Ploughshares at the White House in 2011

Related: Where did Ploughshares get the Money? (Whoa on this one)

Related: Commitments, Verification and Next Steps (Ploughshares going to do the work?)

The Secret History of the Iran-Deal ‘Echo Chamber’

By

Bloomberg: A network of advocates, experts and messaging specialists the White House says helped it sell the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 actually began to campaign for such an accord four years earlier, before the real negotiations started.

Last week I was leaked e-mails and documents from an internal listserv operated by the arms control nonprofit Ploughshares Fund. That foundation has come under scrutiny after the New York Times Magazine quoted top White House foreign policy aide Ben Rhodes boasting how the foundation amplified the White House message in 2015 on the Iran deal. Rhodes told the magazine that supporters of the deal comprised an “echo chamber,” suggesting the independent experts were tools of a White House media campaign.

But the messaging work from Ploughshares on Iran began long before there was any Iran deal and long before Rhodes convened his regular meetings with progressive groups on shaping the Iran narrative.

Beginning in August 2011, Ploughshares and its grantees formed the Iran Strategy Group. Over time this group created a sophisticated campaign to reshape the national narrative on Iran. That campaign sought to portray skeptics of diplomacy as “pro-war,” and to play down the dangers of the Iranian nuclear program before formal negotiations started in 2013 only to emphasize those dangers after there was an agreement in 2015.

The strategy group, which included representatives of the Arms Control Association, the National Security Network, the National Iranian American Council, the Federation of American Scientists, the Atlantic Council and others, sought to “develop process and mechanism to implement Iran campaign strategies, tactics and narrative,” according to an agenda for the first meeting of the group on Aug. 17, 2011.

As a nonprofit, Ploughshares discloses annually the organizations that receive its grants. But until now, the way this network of nonprofits, advocacy organizations and policy experts coordinated its media campaign has been shrouded from the public.

The members of that network had two things in common. They all received substantial grants from Ploughshares and they all sought to prevent a war with Iran. But at the time, the progressives assessed the situation was bleak. An August 2, 2011 memo from Heather Hurlburt, then executive director of the National Security Network, and Peter Ferenbach, a co-founder of ReThink Media, shared with the group an assessment of the “media environment” on Iran and concluded it was “extremely difficult.”

The problem, according to Hurlburt and Ferenbach, was that in 2011 a succession of news stories on Iran, ranging from reports of progress on the country’s nuclear program to the Treasury Department’s designations that accused Iran of colluding with al Qaeda, had put progressives on defense. “We are left in the position of responding to the news headlines and parrying the negative commentary that follows,” they wrote.

Among the authors’ recommendations was that the Iran Strategy Group attack conservatives who advocated military strikes. “On a messaging note, it would be best to describe them as ‘pro-war,’ and leave it to them to back off that characterization of their position,” they wrote.

This approach became a centerpiece of the White House’s own message four years later when Obama was selling his deal to Congress. In a speech at American University that summer he said, “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war.”

And yet while the Iran Strategy Group’s message about critics of the deal was echoed by the White House, the group’s initial messaging on Iran itself was much different between 2011 and 2013 than what Ploughshares and its grantees ending up saying in 2015. When the White House and its surrogates were campaigning for the deal in 2015, they emphasized how close Iran was to producing the fissile material needed for a nuclear weapon. Joe Cirincione, the president of Ploughshares, made this point in a piece for Slate after the deal was announced when he wrote, “without the deal, Iran could use its centrifuges to purify enough uranium for one or more bombs within weeks.”

 

This is not an accident. As I reported last year the White House declassified its estimate that Iran was three months away from producing enough fuel for a weapon in April 2015, after a framework for the Iran deal was agreed in Vienna, even though the intelligence community had assessed for more than two years that Iran was three months away from weapons-grade fuel.

Back in 2011, the Iran Strategy Group drafted a set of talking points called “Key Points on Iran and Nuclear Weapons.” Joel Rubin, the director of policy and government affairs for Ploughshares between 2011 and 2014, wrote in an e-mail to the strategy group, “We believe that this paper will help each of you to clearly enunciate, with confidence, a consensus view on how to argue for a sound U.S. policy towards Iran.”

The talking points — drafted by Paul Pillar, the intelligence analyst who was the lead author on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate shared with Congress before the Iraq war — stressed that diplomacy was the best way to decrease the likelihood Iran went nuclear and that bombing Iran’s facilities would be counterproductive. But the talking points also included “An Iranian nuclear program is not imminent”; “An Iranian nuclear weapon is not inevitable”; and most controversial “If Iran develops a nuclear weapon, the United States and the West could live with it, without important compromise to U.S. interests.” Obama himself has contradicted that last line for years, arguing that he would be prepared to use military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear program if diplomacy did not work.

The Iran Strategy Group sought to play down Iran’s nuclear program as late as 2013. E-mails between strategy group members in August of that year in anticipation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s nuclear program that was released at the end of that month show that the network was already in campaign mode.  In an Aug. 20, 2013, e-mail to the Iran Strategy Group, Cirincione encouraged the Ploughshares grantees to “create a social media, web, expert push that carries our main points into the media and policy discussions in the first 12-24 hours.” He recommended that the points the group pushed in the media should include the argument that making enough highly enriched uranium for a single bomb “is just one step in a long weaponization process,” and that while Iran’s decision to start the Arak plutonium reactor was not good, it was “also just one step in a long alternative path to nuclear material for a weapon.”

The timing here is important. In September 2013, Iran and six other great powers including the U.S. announced the beginning of nuclear talks that ultimately produced the agreement in 2015.

Rubin, who is now president of the Washington Strategy Group, told me that the difference in talking points for the Ploughshares network between 2011 and 2013 and then in 2015 reflected the state of diplomacy with Iran and the real concern for progressives that Israel or the U.S. would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The difference between 2011 and 2015 was that there was a different reality of what was taking place on the ground in terms of the negotiations and the process,” he said. “Ahmadinejad was the president in Iran, there was no negotiation process, and much of the chattering class was talking about when will Israel or the U.S. drop the bomb on Iran in 2011.”

When asked for comment on the story, Ploughshares communications director Jennifer Abrahamson said, “As a nonpartisan public foundation dedicated to reducing nuclear threats, Ploughshares Fund is proud to have supported a network of longstanding experts that helped stop Iran from building a bomb without starting another war in the Middle East.”

That pride is apparent. After a critical story from the AP last week on Ploughshares grants to National Public Radio, Cirincione went on the attack. In a column for Huffington Post suggesting the AP story was part of a campaign from opponents of the Iran deal to discredit him and his organization, he wrote, “Neoconservatives are furious that their efforts to trick the country into another unnecessary war in the Middle East failed.”

Don’t be surprised if you hear Ploughshares grantees repeating that. It sounds like a talking point.

IRS Comish Refused to Show up to Proceedings

The IRS Commissioner refused to show up stating he was busy as he just returned from China. What?

Committee Resolution for Censure

Congress produces film chronicling IRS scandal at John Koskinen impeachment hearing DailyWorldwideNews

‘Koskinen has misled us’: House weighs impeaching IRS chief

Westwood/Examiner: Members of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday weighed evidence against Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen, who faces an impeachment resolution in the House.

“On his watch, volumes of information crucial to the investigation into the IRS targeting scandal were destroyed,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “Before the tapes were destroyed, congressional demands, including subpoenas, for information about the IRS targeting scandal went unanswered.”

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said the seven-month-old impeachment measure had “virtually no chance of success” in the Senate and argued the charges against Koskinen have been “debunked” by previous probes.

Koskinen has faced opposition from Republican lawmakers for what they see as an insufficient response to congressional investigations into allegations that the IRS targeted conservative groups.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, served as a witness at Tuesday’s hearing alongside Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., also a member of the oversight panel.

The pair of Republican lawmakers presented evidence from their committee’s investigation, which began under former Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Issa objected to Democrats’ attempts to include Koskinen’s nine-page testimony, which he released ahead of the hearing along with a letter declining an invitation to appear, in the official record.

To be candid … this is sort of Lois Lerner revisited,” Issa said, calling Koskinen’s letter a “self-serving statement.” “The opportunity to say what you want to say and not be cross-examined would seem to be inappropriate.”

Lerner, former head of the tax agency’s nonprofit arm, drew fire when, in an appearance before Congress, she made an opening statement in her defense and then invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer any additional questions.

Although House Republicans first voted to impeach Koskinen in October, they did not introduce a censure measure until last week.

Koskinen wrote in a letter to the committee Monday that he could not attend the hearing because his schedule is too “crowded” and he was not given sufficient notice that the hearing was taking place.

Chaffetz highlighted Koskinen’s failure to provide documents to his committee. Republican lawmakers have accused the IRS commissioner of intentionally misleading investigators by promising to hand over records he knew to be missing.

“Over the course of our investigation, Mr. Koskinen has misled us about the efforts taken to locate and preserve Lois Lerner’s emails,” Chaffetz said. “His actions are in contradiction of the initial promises he made during his Senate confirmation hearings.”

Chaffetz noted that, one month after discovering Lerner’s emails, IRS employees magnetically erased 422 backup tapes that contained thousands of the ousted official’s records. Congress had already requested copies of those emails.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew issued a statement to the committee Tuesday in defense of Koskinen.

“John Koskinen is an outstanding public servant of the highest integrity with decades of experience leading both public and private institutions,” Lew said. “From the day he began his leadership of the IRS, John and his staff have cooperated with Congress.‎ And despite facing massive budget cuts, the IRS continues to carry out its mission of enforcing our nation’s tax laws while striving to provide quality service to taxpayers.”