The IRS says it has lost *two years* worth of Lerner emails. Seriously.

Lois Lerner
You can run, Ms. Lerner, but you cannot hide.

Unbelievable. Literally unbelievable:

he Internal Revenue Service claims to have lost two-years worth of emails between former IRS official Lois Lerner, who resigned under pressure for her role in the IRS targeting scandal, and outside agencies and groups.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.)Β announcedΒ Friday that the IRS informed the committee it lost the emails, which the committee was seeking as part of its investigation into the targeting scandal, due to a computer crash in 2011.

According to theΒ Wall Street Journal, the IRS said it went to β€œunprecedented efforts” to reconstruct Lerner’s emails, including searching emails of other officials, resulting in an additional 24,000 emails being provided to lawmakers.

But because of the crash, the IRS said it cannot produce emails between Lerner and the White House, Treasury Department, Justice Department, FEC, or other Democrat offices.

β€œThe IRS has made unprecedented efforts in connection with this effort, producing more than 750,000 pages of documents to help complete the investigations,” the agency said in a statement. β€œIn total, the IRS’s efforts to respond to Congress have involved more than 250 IRS employees working more than 120,000 hours at a direct cost of nearly $10 million.”

In a statement, Camp called the disclosureβ€”more than a year into the committee’s investigationβ€”β€œcompletely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’ response to congressional inquiries.”

Camp also called for an investigation by the Department of Justice and the IRS Inspector General.

Scott Johnson at Power Line shares an intriguing email a Department of Justice lawyer sent to him in response to the ridiculous claims that the email loss was the result of a “computer crash”:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a β€œhard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Yes, friends, I do believe we have a genuine conspiracy to hide the truth on our hands. Β In the “most open, transparent administration evah …” Β The various investigations into what happened just got a lot tougher but nevertheless need to continue to be relentless until they get to the bottom of not just the wrongdoing behind the wrongful targeting of Tea Party groups – but the cover-up as well.

Read much more here.

Comments are closed.