That isolated bases in cincinnati was unacceptable. He charged that we would get to the bottom of it. We have gotten to the fact that it is not isolated to cincinnati as was said. It is not isolated to washington. It goes to your chief consuls office. Discovery, do our that is where the rub is. You promised us full cooperation and yet the office of chief consul apparently has 70 attorneys delivering for documents a day per attorney, and they look like this. Print, 6103. Inute documentss working on , four pages a day or lawyer her lawyer. Per lawyer. This minimal reduction is required by law . I have a couple statements. Take take lisi to redact information specific to taxpayers. All information, bottom line, whether redacted or unredacted is delivered to this congress. You have delivered less than one percent six use me for standing but i have to get over your stack. You have delivered less than one percent of the documents to the committee. I disagree with that conclusion. That is what chairman cap put out. I disagree with that. If i am allowed to explain i can provide here is my question. Terms. Uced 63 search you added some search terms. I am not disagreeing with your adding. That is fine. I want more, not less. You came up with this. It added up to about 80 search terms and unilaterally, your people, the office of chief consul, reduced that down to a dozen. They are not searching on the terms we have asked for. Our request is for all information related to this. When you eliminate search terms, you are obstructing us i limiting the scope of discovery. Do you understand that . I do, but i disagree with the premise of your question. Did your people that the search terms below the search terms that were delivered . We are prioritizing searches in order to get you more documents more quickly. The amount ofe, document production that we have been able to produce has increased traumatically. That doesnt mean we have eliminated search terms permanently. A m modif that is not your c. Lets go into detail. What is interesting is, i understand why you have removed taxpayer specific. This information is being delivered without headers. If the names were there, i was still wouldnt know what those numbers are. Somebody deliberately printed out information in which they stripped out the meaningful data. Thismr. Connolly would say doesnt look like a spreadsheet he has normally had. Spreadsheets say what is on top of them. Additionally, we asked you for information. We set the priority if youre going to slow roll us. You are. That is not true. Mr. Werfel, you frustrated this committee. You promised to do things and you are not. The office of chief consul as theas we know has made decision to limit search terms. Is that correct, or did you . I am working together with the office. We are not limiting search terms in a permanent way. We are prioritizing. If i can make a point. Consent foror additional four minutes to explore this. I will grant that provided the democratic side will he allowed to respond given that we are now ontopic. I respect the wish and prerogative of the chairman to use this opportunity to query mr. Werfel on a different matter and i respect that but i would like you will equal opportunity to respond. I will grant the full Committee Chair that time. We grant additional time to the minority. I think the chair for his graciousness. Mr. Werfel, lets go through the numbers. The democrats seem to be carrying your water. Forrtant facts might me to get out. You are obstructing them. That is not true. Werfel, apparently you were put in by the administration to run cover. It is now my time and i am going to explain to you what this committee has found. Months, outin two of 64 million pages, you have delivered 12,100. This is over 2500 of them, completely useless. 6103 iserpretation of so broad that you deliver no meaningful information. We have prioritized a number of discoveries. Who took the fifth before our community, we have asked for all correspondence. It has not been forthcoming. We asked for correspondence with the white house. Correspondence with the white house by definition had darn well better not include 6103. Reduction is not appropriate. We are not covered by the privacy act. Even if it includes names of , quite frankly, it would not be 6103. It would be communication with the outside. Your people have unilaterally chosen to redact private information. Mr. Werfel, you dont have the right to have private communications. On government time and government equipment. If lois lerner or others had private communications, they are not subject to 6103 because we expect them to be referred for from a prosecution. You can have private press conversations and released 6103. That would be wrong. As we go through this discovery , slownd excess redacting rolling discovery, limiting search terms you may call it prioritizing but you are not prioritizing as we need them, is my expectation that we should have received communications to and from the white house. Anyone whoon between is conducting on 6103 business. We should have received lois lerners entire packet. These are not my expectations. These are the American Peoples expectations. Your speed of delivery is such that you will be long gone. The president will be long gone. Lois lerner will have retired before we receive a sufficient amount of information to be meaningful. You are leaving me no choice. I asked you for information. You are not forthcoming. Your own chief consuls Office Appears to be clearly compromised. Lawyers there are included in this investigation. Communications to and from those office clearly mean the of chief consul, a politically appointed office, has been compromised. You leave me no choice. I will be preparing and sending a subpoena for these documents to the secretary of the treasury who will remain on. Our expectation is that the Treasury Department will take over the delivery of documents in a timely fashion, use attorneys such as they see fit that they believe are not compromised, and i would ask you to immediately instruct chief not anyhat they may longer be part of the decision making. Only attorneys who are not part of our investigation. I am deeply disappointed. Ouras my expectation with past relationship that you would come in not just wanting to be a caretaker, but to get to the bottom of this. As cincinnati turned to washington, washington turned to , andical appointee offices the president began calling this scandal phony. Understand is how you can think the American People would accept this as phony. This is a real investigation. We need real discovery. If these documents need to be redacted, then by definition you have no reason to deliver them. If you can only deliver me blank pages, deliver them to the other committee. I will tell you one thing. As these pages, which are almost impossible to figure out where they came from, youd better hope. Youd better really hope that we dont find something there that should not have been redacted, which we expect we will. Moreover, i am sad to see you go because i thought you could do something. I am said to issue a subpoena because that is not what i thought we were going to have. We did not enter this investigation thinking that this was some grand conspiracy. We entered this thinking this was something fundamentally wrong. My democratic friends are convinced that progressives were targeted even though your own Inspector General said he found no evidence. He did find evidence of other groups generally called Tea Party Groups having been targeted. We dont want to find only one side. We want to find anyone that is targeted. We want to hold people responsible. Today, lois lerner is being given full pay and not held accountable. Our job is to find out everyone that should be held accountable and make sure the American People can trust this will not happen again. Move forward in this investigation, this will become a pattern of behavior. By the chief executive of the United States or by individuals who have power within bureaucracies such as the irs, epa, osha and the like. Mr. Chairman, i now 06 minutes to the democrats. Duly noted. This point the Ranking Member of the full committee i counted seven. I will make that determination. At 4 00. D you werent here, sir. Thank you for recognizing me, mr. Chairman. You are recognized for five minutes. I will consult with the Ranking Member to see how we distribute the balance of the time. Mr. Werfel, thank you for your service. I have listened to what was said to you and i again thank you for your service. Week, chairman issa accused you of obstructing the committees investigation because you were not producing documents fast enough in his opinion. You have produced to Congress Tens of thousands of documents. We have interviewed 18 irs witnesses. Today is the third time you have testified before our committee and the last two months in the last two months. 6103 of a law, section the Internal Revenue code that prohibits you from revealing information to our committee that identifies specific taxpayer information. Is that right . That is correct. You need to review all the documents you are producing to our committee to first make sure they comply with the law. Is that correct . Yes. I am not concerned with your compliance. I have seen it. My concern is the actions of the ig blocking you from providing information about regressive groups to this committee. Two weeks ago, you testified thate ceived treatment similar to tea party applicants and the irs denied at least one category of applicants after a threeyear review. Is that right . That is correct. In this instance, your career experts review these documents and told you this information was ok to share with the committee. That it did not reveal specific taxpayer information, did not violate section 6103, but just as you are about to produce the this the ig itervened and claimed that might reveal specific taxpayer information. Is that right . That is correct. The ig reached out to me and expressed concerns about our pending delivery of the information. So you were about to hand us documents. Thsaocumts mr. Issa just asked about, but the ig says, no. Is that right . The ig raised serious concerns. When we asked the ig, he confirmed that his effort to block your disclosure was unprecedented. We dont hear complaints from the other side. When we press them on this, he said he was still in ongoing discussions with your office, and that he would resolve this issue with you sooner, rather than later. The problem is we have not heard a single word from the ig since then. Update . Give us an has he withdrawn his objection . Are your discussions still ongoing . They are. Concern andd his indicated that he was still not convinced the information was not the information about the progressive groups . In this case, yes. Experts stilleer believe it would be appropriate to provide this information to the committee . Yes they do. I am disappointed that the ig continues to block information about aggressive groups to the committee. Representative connolly and i sent a letter to the ig yesterday asking for an explanation. Mr. Chairman, i ask that our p included in the record. Thishave said throughout investigation, our job is to ensure that all applications for taxexempt status are treated fairly whether they are conservative, progressive or in between. If we do not receive a satisfactory response from the ig by next week, i ask that you go ahead, mr. Werfel, and produce these documents. The chairman just said, he wants the documents. Lets get him the documents, even over the objection of the ig. We will follow up and let you know if we hear from him. Look forward to hearing from us. Thank you. , i aman just make a point not exactly familiar with the procedures of the committee. I would like an opportunity to respond to each of chairman ands allegations questions. A lot of them werent corrections of fact and clarification. I wish he was here for me to respond directly. At some point during the course of events, i would appreciate the opportunity to respond. May i use if you would like. You have six minutes. Thank you. Thingsfel, one of the that i remind my Committee Members is that when people come in here, it is public service, they give their best. Family, everybody is watching them on cspan. Made and theye never have an opportunity to respond. Me. Eally bothers i want you to respond if you may and try to leave me a few more minutes because i want to ask you a few more questions. First of all, the notion that we are obstructing is completely false. The opposite is true. We are involved in a thorough comrades of effort to fully comprehensive effort to cooperate with the committees that are asking questions, asking for witnesses, asking for documents. There is substantial evidence that demonstrates our full cooperation. Keep in mind, i have been in seat for nine weeks. This process is moving forward and we are Getting Better at producing this discovery on a daytoday basis. I have more than 100 employees working on the document requests that chairman issa raised concerns about. This includes 70 attorneys working full time to review documents. We are producing documents on a weekly basis. As ofittee has over today will have over 16,000 pages of documents delivered. Todayss as a whole, as of , there will be 70,000 pages delivered. What is important about the redaction process and that is what is very important to make e the public understands is that these documents are being produced to congress. We operate within legal constraints in terms of what we can deliver to who and when. We have to protect taxpayer information. There are rules and acted by this congress that certain documents can only go to tax committees. If you violate 6103, what happens . It is criminal. Jail time. Exactly. With the gentleman yield . , the very same chairman who just railed against mr. Werfel in his tenure, did he not say on june 18, in defense of the Inspector General, that in erring on the side of caution, that was the right policy . Therefore, withholding of documents was justified. , mr. Cummings, that the list of search terms submitted to mr. Werfel by the majority on this committee includes 81 items . Audit . Of the terms might that generate a lot of paper . Im going to get to that point. Let me get through some of the to make sure there is an understanding about the amount of discovery. You are losing i think you said 8000 employees. We take this very seriously. Out of chief counsels office, we have 100 lawyers working on this. There are now 70,000 pages of documents as of today that will be delivered to congress. These have relevant information that was requested by the committee. You asked for the spreadsheets, we got to them. You asked for the emails, we got to them. You asked for training materials, emails of self appearingy witnesses for interviews. All of those were delivered. We are responded to 41 matters from the committee including todays hearing. Irs officials including myself have appeared in 15 hearings since the ig report was issued. Available employees for a total of 99 interviews. Supporting 29 interviews. Supporting all of this is hours of work. The trend is that document production is increasing. This week alone, we have increases. The reason is because the last few weeks we made important changes to that process. I added more people. We are making technology enhancements. Getaps most important, to to one of chairman issas most critical concerns, what happens is when we get 82 search terms, it produces a large amount of documents, a majority of which are nonresponsive. You have to look through every document. If you produce an enormous amount of documents to look through, it takes longer and longer to find those responsive documents and give them to you. Roughly 75 of documents being pulled based on 80 search terms were not responsive. Staff time was being eaten up going through each document. What we did is try to help the process along, not by permanently saying we will not search them, but i saying if we can take the search terms and ensure that we have a higher Response Rate in this information, then we are going to get the information that this committee wants quicker. No unilateral decision has been made to alter the search terms in perpetuity. We have made an adjustment to the search terms in order to increase the number of documents you get sooner. The fact that i am able to deliver thousands of pages today is because we have made these improvements. It doesnt mean that we are not fully committed to getting all these documents. You are trying to obey the law. Is that what youre telling us . I am trying to obey the law. , the letter to chairman issa from mr. Werfel. I would like to have entered into the record. Objection so ordered. That concludes the time of the gentleman and i will recognize mr. Jordan. You have 25 seconds in addition to the five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Mr. Werfel, 81 search terms, 12 search terms, 2500 pages of redacted whatever. Monthsbeen almost three since lois lerner had a question asked where she told the world that this was going on. We have been asking ever since that happened for lois lerners emails. You guys wont give them to us. That is not redacted. We just want the correspondence from the person at the center of the storm and you guys dont give it to us. 1600 to me that is lawyers, why can you give us a question mark i dont know that that is the case. Notur staff told me we have got me most from lois lerner. I received a letter recently which attached a email from lois lerner which we produce. We are producing these emails. We want the emails from anyone at the irs, why cant we get that . We look at those two. We look at those too. In some cases, there were no e mails. This is the point. We have a particular request, give it to us. William wilkins, we are not getting his emails. That is also not true. Two things, if i could. We are producing because you made a specific request. If you want to put something at the front of the line, please put that at the front of the line. The other thing about wilkins is we have offered to interview wilkins before this committee. Your staff has not taken us up on this offer. I hope you do because this is not about obstruction. This is a this is about offering as much information as we can. I know you have questions about their wilkins. We want to get you those answers. You havent taken us up on our offer. I want to be clear. Every single email of lois lerners that we have asked for, you sent to us . No. Hundreds of her emails. Again, this is a process. No, no. It is simple. You go to her and cuter and get her emails. It is not that simple. It shouldnt take three months. You said you did send us all the didrmation and i asked you you send us every single email, and you said no. W