What follows is an inevitability: the Obama regime will not escape consequences for stonewalling Congressional investigators on the Lois Lerner IRS e-mails.

The breathtaking arrogance of the IRS’ claim that the hard drive on Lerner’s office computer crashed in 2011 and two years of her e-mails are irretrievably lost as a result – a claim impossible for anyone who uses e-mail to believe – won’t make the investigation of Lerner’s true role in the IRS targeting scandal go away. One senses it isn’t intended to; what it’s intended to do is delay a full accounting of the scandal until after the midterm elections.

And perhaps that effort will be successful, and it will be 2015 or even later before the full breadth of the IRS scandal, and how far up the governmental food chain it goes, will be known.

But spitting in the face of Congress by telling the obvious lie that the loss of Lerner’s hard drive means her e-mails are forever gone, and compounding that lie by making the claim that a search of White House servers reveals no e-mails to or from Lerner, and compounding that with the “disclosure” that six other IRS employees embroiled in the same scandal all had hard-drive crashes forever destroying their e-mail records as well, will ultimately bring consequences.

You don’t have to believe in karma to see these events and the brutal disdain of the government for the American people they represent as a dangerous tempting of fate. Even the liberals at CNN and MSNBC aren’t buying the excuses and seem embarrassed by them.

Here is a prediction: this scandal won’t be fully vetted by Congress, before or after the election. What is going to happen will be uncontrolled disclosure, and not just of Lerner’s e-mails from 2009 to 2011. This thing will spill out into the public in the same manner as the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks or Edward Snowden document dumps blew open federal government secrets.

There will be some disgruntled federal IT employee whose personal job dissatisfaction manifests itself in the political destruction of the Obama administration. Or there will be some anonymous (or Anonymous) computer hacker who invades servers at the IRS, or White House, or Department of Justice, or Federal Elections Commission, or some other government agency or multiples thereof, and proceeds to dump out the spoils of that invasion onto the internet.

Government arrogance toward its citizens is provocative. It invites lawlessness and comeuppance. And as we’ve seen, the federal government’s performance with respect to information technology and security is dangerously incompetent. Some entitled millennial, rogue libertarian or mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore bureaucratic lifer will take a plunge and blow the whistle, and it won’t just be material under subpoena being reported on by Breitbart and the Washington Free Beacon when that day comes.

In the meantime, the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-Louisiana), which is being spat upon by the Obama administration had better learn to respond to arrogance with ruthlessness. It’s time for that committee to begin dragooning White House officials into hearings and issuing aggressive subpoenas. And it’s time for them to start throwing the words “contempt of Congress” around as more than just a whine. Bring someone into a hearing who’s willing to tell the lie under oath that Lois Lerner’s e-mails are permanently lost, vote them in contempt and have the Sergeant at Arms stash them in the basement jail on Capitol Hill – and see what happens. How many Obama minions are willing to stew in that jail before some are willing to sing?