The Dog Ate My Homework Saga Continues
Before we get to the latest twist in the IRS email scandal, let’s recap:
The IRS was accused of targeting tax-exempt organizations that had “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names during the 2012 election. When the investigation into this scandal began, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman denied the organization was targeting conservative groups. “There’s absolutely no targeting,” he said.
When it was revealed that the IRS was indeed targeting conservative groups, the IRS then blamed it on a few low level “rogue employees” in the Cincinnati office. When these “rogue employees” in Cincinnati realized that their bosses in Washington were throwing them under the bus, it was then revealed that the targeting of conservative groups actually came from much higher up and the finger of blame was pointed at Lois Lerner who was then the director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS.
The House Ways and Means Committee began an investigation of the IRS to see who was responsible for targeting conservative groups. During the House investigation, the IRS agreed to hand over all of Lois Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2011 to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Several months later the IRS claimed that it could not produce Lois Lerner’s emails to and from the White House and other administration departments due to a supposed computer crash. So any emails between Lerner and the White House, Treasury, the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission or Democratic offices on Capitol Hill ordering, seeking or directing the IRS to target conservative organizations apparently have disappeared into digital oblivion. The IRS claimed that Lerner’s hard drive had been damaged and then destroyed according to government protocol.
Later the IRS admitted that the hard drive was only “scratched,” not irreparably damaged, as Americans have been led to believe.
All this time the IRS claimed that Lerner’s emails had not been backed up on government servers therefore they were lost forever.
Fast forward to Friday August 22, 2014. Attorneys for the IRS now admit that Lerner’s emails had been backed up, but it would be too much work to restore those backed up emails.
Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after the IRS refused to respond to four previous FOIA requests dating back to May 2013.
Judicial Watch’s president Tom Fitton told Fox News Channel’s Shannon Bream that a Justice Department attorney informed them the missing Lerner e-mails do exist.
Fitton said: “A Department of Justice attorney told a Judicial Watch attorney on Friday that it turns out the federal government backs up all computer records in case something terrible happens in Washington and there is a catastrophe....So everything we’ve been hearing about scratched hard drives, about missing e-mails of Lois Lerner, other IRS officials, other officials in the Obama administration, it’s all been a pack of malarkey.”
Fitton continued: “They could get these records but they don’t want to and they haven’t told anyone about it, frankly, until we were able to get it out of them on Friday. And there’s no such thing as Lois Lerner’s missing e-mails. It’s all been a big lie. They’ve been lying to the courts, to the American people and to congress.”
See:
It seems to me that the IRS could learn a valuable lesson from Mark Twain.
