WASHINGTON (CN) - Giving his long-awaited defense to impeachment attempts Wednesday, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said he would not reward the exaggerations of House Republicans by stepping down.
"If I get, kind of, forced out, then it's more likely that someone will say, 'Let's do that again,'" Koskinen told reporters after a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Koskinen insisted he had not purposefully misled Congress in its investigation into the political-targeting scandal that rocked the agency in 2013.
Resigning, the commissioner said, would set the precedent that lawmakers could use false accusations to force out unwanted officials simply by threatening impeachment or censure.
All that the commissioner allowed was that he could have been quicker in alerting lawmakers about the hard-drive crash that prevented the agency from recovering certain emails from Lois Lerner, the former IRS director of exempt organizations.
"I have said that in retrospect, if I had it to do over again, in April, I would have contacted and advised Congress immediately," Koskinen told the committee. "The delay didn't change any investigation, but I can understand the aggravation it caused in some areas."
Impeachment is too harsh a punishment for so minor an oversight, the commissioner said repeatedly.
"It would create disincentives for many good people to serve, and it would slow the pace of reform and progress at the IRS," Koskinen told the committee.
Koskinen denied that an order from the top of the agency caused the destruction of some of Lerner's emails from the time of the alleged targeting.
Calling it a simple mistake, Koskinen noted that he had even sent around a reminder to preserve the documents.
Republicans have claimed the IRS unduly scrutinized political groups with conservative buzzwords in their names to flood the groups with burdensome paperwork when they sough tax-exempt status. Koskinen became commissioner after these allegations surfaced.
Wednesday's hearing was the third the House Judiciary Committee has held related to Koskinen's impeachment, though none have been formal impeachment proceedings.
At the first, Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., presented their case against Koskinen. At the second, legal experts told the committee they were unsure whether the allegations against the commissioner were impeachable.
Wednesday's hearing was scheduled after Republican leaders reached an agreement to delay a vote on impeachment proceedings last week.
While the more conservative, Tea Party wing of the Republican Party in the House has been foaming at the mouth for a chance to bring Koskinen down, Republican leadership has been reluctant to do so in a potentially close election year.
Since Koskinen was not at the IRS when the alleged targeting took place, Republicans accuse him of overseeing a cover-up and obstructing congressional investigations into the scandal. They say Koskinen knew about Lerner's missing emails in February, but waited until June 2014 to notify Congress about that.
Koskinen insists that he did not know until April that the emails were unrecoverable.
Republicans also hold up as an example of Koskinen's obstruction an incident in which agency employees erased 422 backup tapes that contained Lerner's emails, despite a congressional subpoena and a protection order.
At the hearing Wednesday morning, Republicans grilled Koskinen on the destruction of these backup tapes. The commissioner chalked the deletion up to "honest mistakes" by two workers in a West Virginia office.
