With all the excitement in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Central America, a key domestic development has failed to draw the attention it deserves. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has joined the IRS in a cover-up of illegal activity.

As the Daily Caller notes, when former IRS official Lois Lerner worked at the FEC’s enforcement division, one of her colleagues was April Sands, an attorney who resigned from the FEC in April after admitting violations of the Hatch Act. In a federal government agency that is supposed to ensure free and fair elections, Sands conducted partisan political activity. As David Martosko pointed out in the Daily Mail, Sands was known as “Obama’s girl” at the FEC. When FEC inspectors attempted an investigation they found that Sands had experienced computer problems and the FEC had recycled her hard drive. So Sands’ emails were not available.

This is the same story advanced by the IRS on behalf of Lois Lerner, who spearheaded a campaign against groups who favor limited government, lower taxes, and clean elections. Lerner claimed she had done nothing wrong but took the Fifth Amendment before a House oversight committee. Lerner’s computer mysteriously crashed, and her email records conveniently disappeared. The IRS now pegs the number of mysterious computer crashes as “less than 20,” but it can’t say if the emails were somehow backed up. To that record now add the computer of April Sands, with others at the FEC doubtless to follow.

A ballpark figure for the odds that these computer crashes happened by chance, or even due to simple incompetence, is zero. If “less than 20” witnesses mysteriously disappeared a week before a trial, the victims of malfeasance would hardly expect justice to be done. For all but the willfully blind, what is going on should be abundantly clear. Federal government agencies are abusing American taxpayers on a massive scale.